Horror pc games list

I hadn't particularly enjoyed the developer's previous release, art-horror walking sim Layers of Fear, and initial press releases spoke of delving into unstable minds. Here, I thought, is a game that will lean heavily on tropes about the criminally insane and cliche ideas about mental illness. 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.

It's a game about class, poverty, technology and bureaucracy that also has what may or may not be actual monsters. Mostly, it's a visual masterclass though that uses its mind-hacking to conjure up scenes and distortions that are genuinely astonishing. And while it does eventually lose its way a little, it does so without turning to all those cliches and stereotypes that I initially feared.

Michael Lutz's short Twine game has the pacing and logic of a nightmare. The choices that you make cause the story to be delivered piecemeal, each morsel adding to the sense of wrongness that comes to a head in a sequence that pushes the Twine medium to its limits. How much can be done with text, a few tricks of layout and design, and a simple sound effect not a screamer, not a jumpscare?

Enough to trouble sleep and keep the mind turning over impossible horrors and the insinuations that make feasible realities of them. Many of the games on this list overtly discard their psychological trappings - eventually, the metaphor is shown to be an actual monster. Sometimes, the most terrifying reveal is the discovery that the man behind the curtain actually was a man all along.

No wizard, no magic, no cult, no escapist fantasy. A hundred people might have a hundred interpretations as to the specific meaning of My Father's Long Long Legs but most would agree that it's a game that finds an absurd and lasting terror that is somehow recognisable. Fear of the known.

The idea that electric voice phenomena - the voices of spirits captured in recordings - is a powerful one because the possibility of fragmented communication from beyond is both reassuring and terrifying. Reassuring to think that some semblance of the self still exists and might make the effort to leave messages for those left behind; terrifying to think that those messages might be warnings or threats, and that they are an ever-present part of the white noise and electronic waves that are the background to our lives.

Sylvio requires the player to gather recordings in an abandoned park, which is drowning in a creepy red mist that would make Silent Hill flinch. There's a smart interface for manipulating the recordings on a reel-to-reel player, altering the direction and speed of playback, and there are puzzles to solve, some clunky and weirdly out of place, others sinister and satisfying.

The game's effectiveness comes from its willingness to resist shock, relying instead on a gradually increasing sense of dread that eventually becomes almost unbearable.

In a game full of situations in which the player is straining to hear, how easy it would have been to startle them with a scream or a shout - instead, Sylvio relies on the power of its words and in doing so creates a quiet cocoon that, like EVP, is almost comforting until the penny drops.

You can craft weapons but they won't help and you can attempt to learn patterns and layouts, but the world will shift around you. Teleglitch, more than any other game on this list, uses its difficulty as a weapon to terrify. The visuals are lo-fi corruptions that still manage to communicate how awful your situation is, as every room and corridor swims with the hazy form of unimaginably horrible things.

If your reactions aren't up to scratch, you'll suffer, and if you don't learn from your mistakes, you're doomed to repeat them over and over and over and over. Hell, even if you do learn from your mistakes Teleglitch will find new ways to confuse and confound you, and new things to confront you with. Tricky as it is, you'll make progress eventually and that's when the whole situation becomes even more agonising.

You become used to treating life as a throwaway thing and then, suddenly, you're carrying just the right equipment and confidence starts to rise, and you make the biggest mistake of all. You value your tiny doomed character and you start to think ahead. Not to a homecoming parade or even the next level, but to the next room and the one after.

You start to believe that you've got a chance in hell and then the game reminds you that you are in hell and that hell doesn't do chances. Teleglitch is like top-down Doom if Doom were about a terrified survivor of the Phobos incident rather than a rugged space marine. Big budget horror rarely works well. The temptation to show the money on the screen works against the mystery and murkiness necessary for so much that frightens us.

The original Dead Space threw everything at the screen - guts, extra limbs, hallucinations, cult religions, erratic sci-fi - and was content to see at least some of it stick. It was at the gun-happy end of the survival horror spectrum but it succeeded in creating a strong setting and icky, fearsome set of creatures to laser-carve into pieces.

While the 'tactical' limb-lopping might have been slightly oversold, the combat was satisfying and there were some genuine scares.

Dead Space 2 went bigger. Protagonist Isaac Clarke found his voice literally - he was silent in the original, bar his grunts of distress and stomp-sigh and the action moved to The Sprawl, an enormous space station that lived up to its name. The new setting allowed Visceral to mix the familiar with the strange, as Isaac moved through residential quarters, shopping districts and everything else one might expect in a city.

The Sprawl was an urban environment that just happened to be located in the vicinity of Titan. That helped to anchor the ridiculous excess of the game's wilder setpieces but Dead Space 2 succeeds because of that excess - it's loud, violent and paced like a theme park ride.

It's ridiculous that this should be terrifying, really, since the whole premise is that you're alone in orbit around the dead alien planet you're remotely exploring with a drone. You couldn't possibly be any further from anything down there, and it's not likely there's even anything hostile anyway. You have a limited time in which to pilot your little tracked drone around the surface, gathering artifacts and recalling it to the ship so you can analyse them.

If you stay for too long, you'll contract a fatal dose of the radiation that's bathing your entire ship. It's far too eerie. The radiation makes visibility poor, and the atmosphere and wind will repeatedly convince you there is danger nearby. You could strip out the microphone to make space, but then you're left with nothing in your ears but your own breathing, and the faint, unsettling background noises of your ship.

The invisible threat of radiation has never felt more oppressive in a game. 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. It contains apparently earnest science fiction concepts and places them alongside hammy mad doctor tropes that would make Kenneth Branagh's topless Frankenstein blush. In one level it introduces invisible enemies that can only be tracked by observing their impact on curtains and puddles, and waves of dynamite-wielding enemies that assault the player and companions in a blood-drenched stand-off.

Throughout all of these tangents and experiments, the game retains almost perfect pacing, finely tuned stealth and combat mechanics, and a level of guts 'n' gore that could make Tom Savini slightly squeamish.

What's astonishing - so much so that it's easy to miss - is that the game's almost anthological format allows it to push against the boundaries of survival horror.

Even as the end approaches, new ideas are being introduced and the DLC has continued that trend, playing with a defenceless protagonist and then turning the tables completely and popping the player behind the eyes of the box-headed antagonist. It should be a wildly uneven journey, given how much Tango Gameworks explore using the limited toolset of the survival horror template, but everything hangs together beautifully.

Lone Survivor initially looked like a 2d Resident Evil but as more details emerged, it started to resemble a 2d Silent Hill. That lone developer Jasper Byrne managed to shake off both of those reference points and make something that stands alone is impressive enough, but that Lone Survivor is funny and heartbreaking as well as frightening is astonishing.

This story-heavy game with its branching choices creates the feeling of looking into the mind of someone struggling with depression and addiction while giving you a grey and hopeless landscape to navigate. It can be a bit trial and error-ey at times, but that only adds to the pieces of the puzzle waiting for you to unlock them. Play Disturbed. The sound design and dim lighting are both utilized well, and the randomly generating maze makes for fun and easy replayability. The only downside is that this is just a maze game with clues you have to search for while evading the enemy, and not a whole lot else!

This underground room lit up with moonlight makes it easy to get through, even if you have a torch or not. Underneath the shadow of the first World War, follows a young German soldier as he tries to survive among the chaos.

Trapped underground, he soon finds that a prehistoric terror is hunting him … and the brutal battlefield above is his only means of escape from being mauled to death. The audio cues, atmosphere, and setting are enough to know when you should hide and when you should run for your life. What really makes this a great game is not only the setting, but the way the setting looks. Purely black and white backgrounds and imagery is difficult to pull off for any developer, but manages to make it look eerie and not washed out at all.

Play But what killed him? It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be safe. Like a 2D visual novel, but in 3D. The scattered decorations and messy bed really make you feel at home. Jason returns and seeks revenge on the camp that killed him in this cute but deadly stylized version of Friday the 13th. Cute, gory, and full of funny deaths upon the often inebriated campers, this fun little game combines horror with puzzles and different ways to kill your targets.

It does get kind of repetitive after a while however, so make sure you take breaks in between puzzle chunks. Play Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle. Play Death Forest. When you get a cryptic letter from your brother, it becomes your job to find him and save him from his mysterious, otherworldly demise inside of the vast and expansive, supernatural Hotel Beryl.

Play Trap. Our protagonist stands outside a shady bar, thinking on what got him to this point in his life. Something stalks the hallways of this randomly generated horror game set in twisting corridors. Are you quick and smart enough to survive? The controls however are fluid and easy, and considering how good the game looks for the price free! Oh, there is one thing to note: This game is notorious for its difficulty level. That experience is entirely up to you. Play Shadow Corridor.

Screenshots are hard to get so if you're interested, here's a link to it. Never did I think a house under construction would be scary, but Blameless has proven me wrong. The buildup to the ending and the eventual reveal of the true intentions of you and the person in the house with you is nothing short of shocking. Nothing remarkable really, except for the nice graphics, solid level and puzzle designs, and believable cast of characters.

Blameless is one of the best games on this list because of its good graphics, excellent storytelling, and unique setting. Go on and give it a try if you have an afternoon to kill. Play Blameless. An unfinished room with parts of the in construction house lit up.

This is a safe area … I think. Only If is also doing something experimental with its controls to see if it can get the player to trust their gut feelings instead of game mechanics. These experimental controls combined with the changing setting and imaginative story make Only If a surreal sort of horror game rather than just straight up blood and gore.

There are as always cons to go with the pros, however. However, these small cons are outweighed by the numerous pros. The graphics are stunning, the voice acting is tremendously well done, and the plot itself is akin to that of the Stanley Parable or the Borderlands series. This psychological horror game is full of surprises. Which surprises, you ask? Play Only If. When the world goes to Hell and the undead walk the earth, your slim chances for survival are dwindling fast.

The sound, the big and empty maps, and the hordes of undead combine in Infestation: New Z to make you feel more alone than you ever have before. The biggest and most unique feature of this game is that you can engage in online PVP with other players and fight to the death for your resources. The idea of competing in blood sport and mass killing of zombies gives it a small sense of uniqueness in the open sea that is open world zombie killing games. Play Infestation: The New Z.

Survival mode is … survival! Originally released as a Half Life 2 modification, this now standalone game is free to play and explore several unique maps with your friends or complete strangers.

A longer sequel to the game is expected to be produced sometime in or The best Alien game ever, by a long way, Alien: Isolation stars the smartest, scariest enemy in any game. The Xenomorph's killer instinct is matched only by its curiosity. It learns more about the Sevastopol's nooks and crannies as it hunts you over the course of 12 hours, ripping doors off closets and peering under tables in search of prey.

The motion tracker can help you to avoid its grasp, but it can sense the sound, and even the gentle green light of its screen, making every glance a risk. When the game forces you into the vents and you can hear the creature in there with you, Isolation becomes one of the scariest games ever made. An eerie indie treat, Oxenfree stars a group of teens who become trapped on an island full of strange and mysterious happenings.

The real joy is the banter between your friends and grudging acquaintances , which mimics the fast-paced witty dialogue of a good teen horror flick. As you progress, the island becomes increasingly strange and unnerving, and Oxenfree deploys some clever tricks to hold your attention and keep you second guessing throughout this ghostly yarn.

As a trial-and-error stealth game, Outlast 2 might not be for everyone, but thematically it's among the more interesting games on this list. Playing as a journalist searching for a missing woman in Arizona, your wife is then kidnapped early on by a deranged cult, the origins of which are told through snippets of letters during the game.

You navigate dark environments using the night vision mode of your camera, and it's just scary as heck, with a whole village wanting you dead and some of the most gruelling imagery ever put into a game.

It's not horror in the traditional sense—undeads, gore, teens making terrible decisions—but Remedy's latest excels at surreal bureaucratic dread. As the new director of the Bureau of Control, you explore a strange, shifting office full of possessed workers, mysterious objects of power and The Board—an ominous inverted pyramid that speaks almost exclusively in synonyms. And hey, if you do need some honest-to-god terror, just watch an episode of the game's in-universe puppet show, Threshold Kids.

Man of Medan, like most horror movies, is best experienced with mates. You control a group of friends stuck on a ghost ship, exploring and making split-second decisions that may very well end in death. It's a tricky ship where you can't trust your eyes, or your co-op partner, who might be seeing something entirely different.

It's B-movie fare, but the jump scares are top quality and you'll be a paranoid wreck by the end. Darkest Dungeon is cruel roguelike where stress is a lot more trouble than the armies of monsters your squad will have to slay. There are plenty of external horrors, but it's the impact they have on your adventurers that will unravel your journeys under the haunted mansion and beyond.

They'll develop vices and fears and personality traits that make subsequent adventures harder, forcing you to find more and more victims to toss into the meat grinder. An unrelentingly bleak platformer that puts you through a gauntlet of hellish imagery: creepy mermaids, security robots, people hunting you down, nasty weather and more that we won't spoil here.

The game promotes stealth, of course, but the guards and citizens are not completely unbeatable. If you play your combat carefully, you can manage it. Though this game can be accused of being too easy without much in the way of complex gameplay, The Land of Pain is focused almost entirely on exploration.

You could almost call it a walking or running simulator as the point is to again, explore, read your way through various journal entries, and observe. Built by one man, Alessandro Guzzo, on the CryEngine, The Land of Pain offers detailed and beautiful landscapes worth relaxing into — until the creature gets too close. Furthermore, there are plenty of gruesome scenes and areas that tell the horrific tale of what this creature can do and where it comes from.

One somewhat let down about this game, however, is that death does not have much in the way of consequences. You are immediately spawned at your last checkpoint and it is never far from where you were busy investigating. This might be because of the focus on exploration, wanting the player to be properly immersed and not wanting death to break that immersion. Whatever the case may be, The Land of Pain is a purely atmospheric horror game that is sure to keep you heading towards the next clue.

This game is a hard sell for those that like their FPS to do something new and be a little less linear. Despite the stock FPS and combat elements, and the occasional one-shot kill Get Even holds itself up with a fantastic story.

There are so many layers to uncover as you progress through the game that the moment you think you have a hold on what is going on, the game turns it all upside down and scatters the pieces. The story and mechanics are so much deeper than this, but it is difficult to explain without getting into spoilers. Much like The Land of Pain, the focus is far less on traditional gameplay. The difference, however, is that The Land of Pain does not try to disguise itself as anything other than what it is.

As one of the oldest games on this list, it has a lot to live up to. It does not quite stand the test of time, as by now we have seen these tropes over and over, but the mystery of 7th Guest still holds up.

All the ghosts and people in the game are inserted film clips, a strategy that later popularized the FMV genre in gaming. That mystery pales in comparison to the core of the game: who is the 7th guest? Is it someone else? And how, exactly, did the lord of the manor manage to murder so many people in one go?

There are far too many questions and too few answers until you finish the game. The puzzles of 7th Guest can be easy or very difficult, as there can be a very specific way to complete it. This is often the way of such old games. Nonetheless, the trick is to just keep trying until you get it.

You cannot give up and move on anyway, each puzzle uncovers a key part of the mystery. A scientific experiment goes wrong and opens a portal to another dimension. The Xen come pouring through, trying to escape another alien race the taking over the universe kind , but they are just as hostile to the main character.

Half-Life is critically acclaimed for its stunning graphics at the time the particle effects of your guns shells and explosions are especially well done , and revolutionary FPS elements. Refined from the likes of Doom and Wolfenstein , Half-Life making shooting smoother, enemy hitboxes more accurate, and the ability to kill multiple enemies with grenades. In addition, there are sections in Half-Life that are far more dynamic than generic corridor number For example, the motorized rail cart has you shooting enemies around every corner as the cart moves you to your destination.

No aliens or ghosts this time around, Left 4 Dead is a zombie game from that taught zombie lovers how to play co-op. This game is a must for those who enjoy zombie games and want to share that love with friends. Left 4 Dead has four scenarios, bookended like movies with posters and credits, that are more or less unrelated.

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.