The best horror games on PC
25.
Others that spring to mind are Limbo and Inside, similar side-scrolling childhood creepshows.
There’s also a lot of allusions to self.
As with Little Nightmares, monsters are very close to home.
Except, maybe there is?
Was that someone in a high vis vest running around the corner?
Old Gods Rising always keeps you unsettled.
Or, maybe it wouldn’t.
Maybe you weren’t supposed to stumble on that bank of monitors connected to cameras that are still rolling.
Play is a mix of creeping around exploring, and making timed choices in conversation or in QTEs.
These decisions stack, and can change the fate of your little gang.
They’re fullly motion captured by a really enaging group of actors.
Plus Ted Raimi is here.
And while The Quarry is leaning into tropes, it’s also not afraid to play with them.
It’s got a couple of surprises up its sleeves.
It starts with a school, but Detention will take you to other places.
Darker, stranger and, at their worst, frighteningly believable.
Observer sounded dreadful when I first heard about it - dreadful in all the wrong ways.
How lovely it is to be proven wrong.
Observer is smart science fiction first and foremost, with the horror emerging from the setting and characters.
Michael Lutz’s short Twine game has the pacing and logic of a nightmare.
No wizard, no magic, no cult, no escapist fantasy.
Fear of the known.
The Blackwell adventure game series is all about paranormal communication and is a far less stressful experience.
If you like the art style then we’re in Return Of The Obra Dinn territory.
How to stop an old god from entering our world through the lighthouse in your home town?
You know, regular horror stuff.
you could have a bath to attempt to heal.
Maybe you’ll lose your face.
There’s a lot to unpick here, and it’s a singular experience doing so.
It feels more like a survival horror game than the sequel, which has big action setpieces.
The Bioshock games aren’t quite as loud and violent, but similarly mix action, sci-fi and horror.
Big budget horror rarely works well.
Dead Space 2 went bigger.
The Sprawl was an urban environment that just happened to be located in the vicinity of Titan.
There’s no subtlety but at least 80% of what Visceral throw at the screen works.
If illustrated folk horror is what you’re after, go for Maundun.
Fancy getting chased through the dark?
You might enjoy Frictional’s back catalogue in general.
It’s a 80s folk horror set in a fictional Sardinian mining town.
And if all that isn’t enoug, Saturnalia is beautiful in an arresting, strange way.
The re-release of the first Resident Evil is essential Shinji Mikami.
The Evil Within isn’t just a third-person survival horror game - it is every third-person survival horror game.
It begins in madness and swiftly moves to gothic melodrama and Hammer horror.
Lone Survivor itself is set to get a remaster at some point this year, called Super Lone Survivor.
No game other than Hotline Miami has a soundtrack so important to its mood and overall composition.
Some scenes are gruesome but there’s a warmth to Lone Survivor.
Amnesia: Rebirth
What else should I be playing:The first Amnesia is practically required playing now.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s water monster captured the imagination of every horror fan who was paying attention.
In 2020, Frictional Games squared their horror circle with Amnesia: Rebirth.
Ring Of Pain has a ‘weird animals looking at you and also cards’ vibe.
Inscryption is a deckbuilding game where you battle against a scary shadowy figure with glowing eyes.
The cards have animals on, with different attack types and ranges.
Some cards need others to be sacrificed before you’ve got the option to play them.
The field of battle might grow obstacles that block your attacks.
you might win by pulling your teeth out.
Don’t think about that knife on the table.
Why is the stoat card talking to you?
Should you listen to it?
Or is it trying to trick you?
The door is locked.
How do you leave.Canyou leave?
He plays it and odd things start happening.
Inscryption is a lot of things, and you won’t expect any of them.
The fun really starts when you finally get out of that cabin…
11.
Another year, another new Resident Evil game on this list.
And Village also continues the tradition of doing really, really horrible things to Ethan’s hands.
For something more puzzle-y, try an Oxenfree.
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is suffused with an intense feeling of doom.
The player is warned off by Thomasina’s narration.
But the only way out of this gloomy, lovely folk horror adventure is to go through.
What you’ll remember most about The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow is the pixel art.
A traditional medium for point and click games, here it’s stretched to its limit.
It’ll stick with you - as will Thomasina’s eventual fate.
I hope folk horror continues its comeback.
Whatever else it might, it is certainly that.
Is there a dingier setting in gaming?
Don’t be fooled by the screenshots and videos into thinking this is a crafting/survival game with horror elements.
Just look at The Fridge Is Red for an example from this year!
The House Abandon alone might have been enough for developers No Code to earn a place on this list.
It’s scary, but it’s also delightfully clever.
But there’s much more than The House Abandon here.
Each has its own mode of interaction and loosely fits into its own sub-genre of horror.
SOMA, the sci-fi horror game from Frictional, is worth a look.
System Shock 2 is the only currently available sci-fi horror game comparable in quality though.
Has a game ever recreated the look and feel of a film as accurately as Alien: Isolation?
If so, I havent played it.
It is also the story of a woman who has lost her mother, searching for answers.
Isolation is an unforgiving game.
The alien will kill you, again and again and again.
For more sci-fi mind scares, check out Observer.
They are enduringly scary.
They are scary in a way that will keep you up at night weeks after you play it.
And in this context, the walls seem alive too.
They seep water and black good.
Anatomy
What else should I be playing:Everything else by Kitty Horrorshow.
Or try yet more Ice-Pick Lodge games, especially Knock-Knock which is elsewhere on this list.
It almost seems reductive to describe it as a horror game, but if not horror then what?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Pathologic advanced interactive storytelling in ways that few games ever have.
There’s also anewSystem Shock on the way, although who knows what that’ll be like?
System Shock 2 is one of thebest games ever made, whatever the chosen category might be.
There is no other RPG so tightly designed, so terrifying and yet so open to experimental play.
The cyborg midwives, as their name suggests, are the most horrifying creatures in any game.
Even monkeys have become agents of fear within the coffin-ships of Shock 2.
Oh, and there are spiders.
Of course there are spiders.
It’s the freedom that you’re given to approach those enemies that makes them truly horrifying, though.
games are often spoken of as immersive simulations, and as first-person games that transcend theshooterbracket.
And those terrible things are far more terrible than the inhabitants of a haunted house or a derelict spaceship.
Everything flows naturally from the world.
They should not exist and cannot exist.
But once they have been encountered, they will always be there, just beneath the surface.
Just behind the walls.
