Each scenario has a different environment, like a train station, hospital, house, and cornfield. Teamwork is paramount to your survival, even if you are mostly screaming at each other to get this enemy or that player revived. This game is not so much creepy or scary as it bloody and filled with faceless zombies to be shot down. The horror likely comes when a team fails to work together and has to rethink their strategies on the next play-through.
I would not blame them, some of those zombie bosses can be downright terrifying. A violent multiplayer that places eight players in a summer camp, just like from the movies.
Seven players take on the part of teenage camp counselors, tasked with either escaping or surviving the night. Escaping takes a lot of searching, however, as you have to fix a car, boat, or radio to do so. Each requires parts that are scattered about the level, randomly placed each time you start a new match. The eighth players really get all the goodies, however, as they get to play Jason Voorhees himself.
You can pick one of the eight different versions of Jason from the respective movies. Each version has different upgrades and abilities, like increased movement speed, weapon damage, and grapple strength. Since Jason is clearly the most fun to play, being over-powered and all, each player gets a randomly selected role per match. The game has been criticized for this, but it can be argued that this is rather accurate to how the movies are. This is the oldest game on this list and some consider it to be the game that popularized the survival horror genre, much the same way Wolfenstein popularized the FPS genre.
Alone In The Dark is the first to really get survival horror right, from inventory management to being nearly defenseless against monsters. Inspired by H. Lovecraft, this game shows a lot of weird and wonderful monsters from the other side hiding in the oddest of places. Like a bathtub, for example, as any monster should in a horror game. As the player, you are equipped with melee combat weapons, usually a sword or dagger.
In addition, the old controls force you to rethink combat very carefully and figure out how to properly hit your enemy without getting damaged yourself.
If you have an emulator and the patience of a saint, Alone In The Dark is worth checking for a fun history lesson in game development. You will really get to see where so many tropes in games like Resident Evil come from and how they evolved in later games. Though a great deal of the mystery is lost for this sequel, since the first one answered most of the questions, A Machine For Pigs still holds up as a good scary game.
Remarkably, the story continues with just as much interesting depth as you slowly realize the character you are playing is less and less innocent than one might usually presume.
This unreliable narrator is uncovered with journal entries and the occasional speech from the antagonist determined to make you think you are even worse than he is. The sanity meter is removed, a very unfortunate change, but that does not make the environment any less frightening. Pig-headed monsters are still attracted by your light, like a moth to a flame, but this time the only things you sacrifice is a loss of sight and not knowing if the monster saw you or not.
That said, A Machine For Pigs lacks the interesting puzzles of its predecessor. They are boring, annoying, and do nothing to immerse you in the world of Amnesia. There is no descent into madness when you are replacing fuses, and moving boxes in a crawl space. Though a rather short game, at about three hours long, Among The Sleep has both interesting gameplay elements and story. The gameplay elements include playing the part of a toddler, the act of hugging your teddy bear gives off an extra light, and much more that are plot relevant.
As a toddler, your height and the basic understanding of the world make for compelling details, like the inability to read or how you get to things out of your reach. This game might give parents a few heart tugs, like a two-year-old climbing around the kitchen and opening anything with a door.
It only gets worse, as there is so much more to Among The Sleep than a child running from a scary monster. This game is about the journey of coping with childhood trauma and doing so through more abstract experiences like dreams that can help make more sense of something a toddler might not fully understand.
Infidelity is a sin that will never stop haunting you and your dreams in Catherine. You play the part of Vincent Brooks, who is hesitant to commit to the idea of marriage to his girlfriend Katherine. Just as Brooks begins to seriously mull over the situation, the beautiful Catherine comes along. His act of cheating haunts his dreams and Catherine is never letting go either. Catherine combines supernatural and role-playing elements which might be described as a platformer but is hardly that.
The goal of the gameplay is to get to the top of the tower, but it is not about jumping or climbing. Brooks must pull out blocks and push them to the appropriate spots to get higher, all the while some horrible monster is coming after him.
Nevertheless, Deadly Premonition makes it to the list with a compelling story, a unique cast of characters you will never see anywhere else, and deeply terrifying visuals that will stick with you forever.
Despite being a little on the weird side, Deadly Premonition does tell a good story and the combat is an average FPS flavor. This case turns out to be a part of a series of similar murders across America done by the Raincoat Killer. Unlike most horror crime games, Deadly Premonition also has survival elements. Not the lack of weapon type, but the feed your main character and make sure he puts on clean clothes type. It is an odd choice to be sure and does not really influence the main plot, though it is something that could be worked within a future sequel if there ever is one.
Japanese developers sure know horror and it is displayed yet again in Forbidden Siren. This game follows the events within a Japanese village called Hanuda. Isolated from the rest of the world, the village has some rather extreme religious beliefs that make living there, or even stumbling upon it, a study in survival and stealth. This is a psychic power that hijacks an enemy character so you can see through their eyes and hear what they hear. You cannot move them, however, but it is a useful tool to tell where your next objective is and how to get around the enemies.
However, what really puts this game in the history books, is the facial animation. This was done by taking images of real human faces from various angles and plastering them on the polygon game version. This actually ended with an exceptional result, easily making it a part of the motion capture development history. This psychological horror twists the story of Alice in Wonderland by focusing less on the fantastical world of Wonderland, and more on Alice herself and her struggle to overcome her trauma-induced psychosis.
The player alternately must traverse a corrupted Wonderland and a hallucination-wrought Victorian London as Alice. Wonderland is separated into sections, each of which has a different theme, and a different memory as the prize. Each step you take puts you further along the path toward discovering the truth about how your family really died and simultaneously saving Wonderland itself. In Limbo, you control a little boy as he traverses a series of sinister environments on his quest to find his sister.
The game uses an almost film-noir stylization to boost the visuals and ambiance into horror genre levels. Failure, however, results in your vicious and often gruesome death. Limbo has been esteemed more as art than an actual video game. The absence of a direct narrative allows the player to come up with their own conclusions about the boy and his unfortunate situation.
Despite its short gameplay, Limbo is well worth the money, especially since it has been made accessible on so many different consoles, even iOS, and Android systems. This game technically counts as a puzzle platformer like its predecessor, but the dystopia in which it is set is unnerving enough to earn it a spot on this list.
Inside is a platformer wherein you control a little boy who has to navigate his dystopian world. The goal of the game? Like any good game with horror elements, the goal is to survive. Inside complicates this process by making the player complete clever environmental puzzles throughout.
There are so many ways for him to die, many of them vicious, including dog-attacks or being shot by his pursuers. You eventually begin to feel the anxiety of his flight just as if you too were running for your life. Little Nightmares is a game about an insatiably hungry little girl in a yellow coat named Six. The creatures you encounter are grotesque and hardly human. The object of this game is to hide from and evade the Guests as you ascend from the lower depths of the Maw, a hotel-like vessel that caters to the whims of the Guests.
Much like Inside, Little Nightmares is a survival horror platformer. Despite being a simple platformer, Little Nightmares tells its story through the background. The devil is in the details. This game relies entirely on its soundboard and its visuals to provide its horrific elements. The animalistic sounds of the Guests and the eerie music combine with the ghastly, filthy world create the necessary suspense.
This game follows Senua as she traverses Helheim to retrieve her lover from the clutches of Hela. While none of the mythology is faithful, this game shows an incredible awareness and accurate depiction of psychosis.
Ninja Theory worked closely with neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people with similar conditions to ensure that they would provide an accurate portrayal. Stunning graphics and unparalleled use of voice acting have caused critics to applaud this game as a work of art.
Truly, this game is one you must wear headphones while playing because the voice acting is absolutely crucial to getting the full experience. The vast majority of this game exists in a subaquatic city called Rapture during the s.
Where once it was a playground for plutocrats of all kinds, it is now a twisted, macabre shadow of its former glory. BioShock is a biopunk game that immerses the player in an environment that makes them question a number of moral dilemmas, including whether or not a life is precious when it has been so thoroughly perverted.
You as the player must navigate through this first-person shooter under the direction of the mysterious Atlas, who very politely sets you on a number of tasks. All the while, you must fight off horribly disfigured, once-human Splicers. Return to Rapture in this sequel to the original BioShock game.
This survival horror game tasks your character, Joel, with chaperoning a young girl, Ellie, across post-apocalyptic America in a desperate attempt to cure humanity of a fungal infection that turns those affected into rabid, zombie-like monsters.
Naughty Dog brilliantly based the strain of fungal infection in this game after the real-world Cordyceps fungus. What makes The Last of Us one of the best games across both PlayStation systems are the incredible graphics, intense gameplay, and a storyline that will have you sobbing in T-minus 20 minutes after you pick up your controller.
The character development alone is heralded as one of the finest points of the game, with you as the player watching Joel become a little more human, and Ellie turning into one of the most badass characters in-game.
Every aspect of this game puts you in survival mode, and your actions in-game quickly become less about morality, and more about what it takes to get you to the next step. While it still used a lot of the mechanics from its predecessors, Resident Evil 4 is what changed the whole Resident Evil series from the survival-horror it was at the outset to the action-packed genre we know it as today.
It took a beloved character from Resident Evil 2, made him better, and then gave him his own game. The influence of this game on the industry as a whole cannot be overstated enough.
Any 3rd person shooter within the last decade has aspects in it that were undoubtedly drawn from the success of Resident Evil 4. Kholat is an indie walking-exploration horror game based on the Dyatlov Pass incident of , wherein nine Russian college students mysteriously disappeared on Kholat Syakhal in the Ural mountains. Nobody knows to this day what happened to them or why which is where Kholat gets a foot in.
In the game, you as the player investigates path these disappeared hikers took, as well as the recovery team that later found their brutally murdered bodies. This game features an incredibly large map that you can spend hours exploring, but be warned; there is more on this mountain than just you. Entities track the tracker, and your expedition is not a deathless one. As you walk about the mountainside with little to no defense, the tension in Kholat comes from needing to avoid these harbingers of death, the eerie music, the ambient desolation of the Urals, and the well-timed voice-overs from narrator Sean Bean.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a detective-style horror game where you surprise! You as the investigating character Paul Prospero traverse the incredible open world of Red Creek Valley, WI as you come up against paranormal phenomena and clues that suggest something sinister has happened here. Things are not always as they seem, though, and this must-buy game will have you sitting at the edge of your seat with its inventive storytelling and use of ambiance to keep tensions high.
Though this game is obviously a part of the Resident Evil series, it must be listed separately simply because it is the first in the series to enter VR. It was also the first game marketed for the PSVR that anyone thought might be half decent. And boy did it blow our minds. If you thought you were scared of other Resident Evil games, Biohazard has you shaking in your boots. There is more to be scared of than deformed monsters in this game.
Lift a pot lid and you will find a swarm of cockroaches, peek around a corner and a door will creak open, a mannequin will move, or the old lady is suddenly at the top of the stairs again. In fact, it has been recommended for first players to play for no longer than half an hour at a time in VR. First, Biohazard really is terrifying. Second, VR is an intense experience and can easily overwhelm even the best of gamers.
Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Leon S. Backtracking and puzzle solving takes a backseat to harrowing battles against towering giants and chainsaw-wielding maniacs. The Fatal Frame games are not for the faint of heart. In fact, after creating the first game, the developers feared that they had scared people so much they never played it to completion.
They succeeded. In Crimson Butterfly, twin sisters are drawn to a village, soon becoming trapped inside with tortured souls. With a camera as your weapon, you must stare at the spirits to ensure you hit the shutter at the right moment, constantly throwing yourself into danger. The indie scene became a bastion for horror during the lull of scary triple-A titles last generation.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of the main games to thank or blame for the resurgence in creepy, atmospheric games. Players awake in a castle in the s, their memory wiped due to the titular malady. Amnesia begins a slow, steady burn toward the first frightening monster reveal — a tortured beast that cannot be killed directly.
The focus on flight over fight only amplifies the omnipresent sense of dread. Not being able to battle the abominations stalking you might be infuriating in other games, but Frictional handles it with unsettling elegance. Movies like Alien and Event Horizon established just how scary outer space can be, and Dead Space followed suit with an interactive variation on the theme.
Isaac Clarke is no space marine or superhero. Instead, he has to make do with his skills as a ship engineer with a simple cutting laser when the starship he boards turns out to be infested with reanimated horrors called necromorphs. Lonely, dark corridors and scary sound design carry players the rest of the way through this trip into terror, and make Dead Space the definitive outer space-horror experience.
Silent Hill set a new bar for horror when the first entry released in , but the game that remains the most memorable and terrifying for the Game Informer staff is the second iteration. James Sunderland is lured to Silent Hill when he receives a letter from his deceased wife. The tension is suffocating as you explore the eerily silent, fog-filled town, which is so whisper quiet you can hear your own footsteps. Other horror games came before it, but the traumatic events of the original Resident Evil put the genre on the map for years to come.
The brave S. Unforgettable scares like bloodthirsty canines smashing through windows spawned a legion of masochistic fans and dozens of copycat developers. Join Sign In. Post Tweet Email. Follow Us. Share Facebook Post. Twitter Tweet. Email Email. Comment Comment. Instead, you play as Henry Townshend as he tries to escape his apartment while stumbling into supernatural worlds. With the action in the eponymous room taking place in first-person and less obscure puzzles to tackle, Silent Hill 4 was a significant departure to a less demanding experience, though the scares from the first three games were certainly still present.
It might be down to it treading a fine line between the bizarre and innovative thanks to the Sight-Jack System, which allows you to see from the perspective of your attackers.
Those attackers take the form of deranged villagers who have become the victims of a curse with you playing as a cast of hapless TV crew members. You unfurl the mystery as time goes on, as well as learn how to get to grips with the slightly odd controls. Resident Evil Village would have been a big hit because of its suitably big vampire lady, regardless of whether the game was any good or not. Luckily, Capcom provided the meat to go with the thirst.
Coming across like a mixture of the fourth and seventh Resident Evil games, Village picks up the baton left by VII and sprinkles some more action on top. From our Resident Evil Village review :. A slightly more accessible game than its predecessor, it tasks you with taking photographs of ghosts, which should be enough to sell you all on its own.
While the passage of time has dulled the effectiveness of some of its scares, Fatal Frame II still constantly fosters a sense of unease and an almost unwillingness to look through the camera to see which nightmares await you next. Not quite so much an out-an-out horror with scares a minute, The Suffering favours action by tasking you with killing some of the most deformed and unforgettable creatures ever depicted in a video game. You play as Torque: a criminal locked up in Abbot State Penitentiary when all manner of supernatural madness is unleashed.
With a healthy supply of weaponry and Torque able to call upon his inner demons for a more powerful form, The Suffering is more of a body horror and one that still holds up well to this day. You may have to track down an old PS2 or Xbox copy as this brilliant series has sadly not had the remaster treatment.
The definition of a cult classic, The Thing is one of the most beloved movie adaptations for a reason: it picks up exactly where John Carpenter left off with you encountering the Things and all the paranoia that they bring among your squadmates.
The Thing should really be looked back on as a majorly innovative and pioneering horror game. You play as Heather Mason, the daughter of the protagonist from the first game, as she becomes embroiled in the machinations of a cult. Silent Hill 3 leans into its aesthetic more than its prequels with a constant monochrome sheen to the game, giving it a gritty style that somehow makes it that bit more gruesome.
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