Best horror games pc

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
IMSCARED. IMSCARED: A Pixelated Nightmare is the only game on this list that breaks through replace.me boundaries and carries the scares into the real world. Browse · Judas · Video Horror Society · Rhiannon – Curse of the Four Branches · Sunshine Manor · My Lovely Wife · BioShock Remastered · BioShock Infinite: Complete. Best horror games · The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes · The Medium · Until Dawn · Little Nightmares · Little Nightmares 2 · The Evil Within.
 
 

The 15 Best Horror Games of all time [December ] | VG – Twinfinite

It takes familiar domestic areas that should be comforting and turns them on their head by making them repulsive and unsafe for Six to travel through. Little Nightmares also got a sequel with an all-new protagonist which, while a great game in its own right, couldn’t replicate the tension of the first one.

The Evil Within series comes from Shinji Mikami, the mind behind Resident Evil — and if that doesn’t give you enough of a reason reason to pick it up, its nightmarish world liklely will. This is a third-person survival horror that’ll pull you into a nightmarish world populated by grotesque and frightening enemies, the type of game Mikami has become famous for and has spent much of his career with, mixed with dashes of psychological horror — protagonist Sebastian Castellanos never quite knows what’s real and what’s a horror cooked up by his own mind.

In some ways, it’s regular horror fare: a town shrouded in darkness, a creepy facility, and a character looking for their loved one. However, the way The Evil Within 2 won many fans with its Resident Evil-esque blend of horror, action and helplessness fuelled by a lack of resources. Dead By Daylight stands out in this list for being a horror multiplayer experience: in this game, a single player takes on the role of a savage serial killer, while four others flee for their lives.

It’s a thrilling twist on usual PvP combat, with a host of original characters each with their own advantages in play as either a Survivor or Killer. There are plenty of tricks and strategies to execute in each map, with a character progression system that should keep you coming back. Not only is Dead By Daylight one of our favorite horror games, but it’s also one of the best crossplay games right now. Dead Space, published by EA and developed by Visceral Games, is perpetually among the best horror games for many players.

The story, first set on an abandoned space vessel duh , takes terrifying twists and turns — most of which involve zombified aliens waiting around said turns. Following the formula established by Ridley Scott’s classic ‘Alien’ certainly helped — besides, the first Alien game to pull it off didn’t release for another few years.

All in all, Dead Space was one of the pioneering horror games of the modern , reannaissance of horror games. Its success comes down to some simple tenants: a compelling story, believable visuals and proper pacing. And while we recommend the first game for the purest horror experience, you’re bound to get a kick out of its two mainline sequels, too. The game focuses on exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving, as most horror games do.

What Cry of Fear excels in, and what makes it stand out from the crowd, are the environments, realism, disturbing designs, and mechanics. Light, for example is cast from a cell phone that also displays text messages that give story tidbits, as well as horrifying warnings or messages. The plot is easy enough to grasp. In Cry of Fear, you play as a year-old named Simon who is hit by a car.

After waking up, he finds himself in his city, which is now devoid of most normal people and stalked by monsters. You will swap between the more normal version of the world and a nightmare version, dealing with extremely limited resources and being led astray by messages trying to return home. The game is broken up into seven chapters, adding up to about an eight-hour experience in total, but with four possible endings.

In fact, the dated look of it might even make it scarier now than it was then. Genre Adventure. Developer The Creative Assembly. Release October 07, Alien: Isolation – E3 Trailer Official. Amnesia: The Dark Descent Trailer. Genre Puzzle, Adventure, Indie. Developer Frictional Games. Publisher Frictional Games. Release September 08, Amnesia: The Dark Descent – Trailer.

Platforms PC Microsoft Windows. Genre Adventure, Indie. Release February 03, Phasmophobia Trailer. Genre Puzzle, Tactical, Indie. Developer Kinetic Games. Publisher Kinetic Games. Since , the duo has released over 15 micro horror games on Steam priced at just a couple of dollars. While these games might only be a few hours long, they pack a horrifying punch.

One of the most well-known is The Convenience Store, where players take on the role of night-shift convenience store employee. As players go about their night, restocking items and checking inventory, creepy happenings such as strange customers, unexplained noises, and other horrifying encounters begin to intensify as the night goes on.

Via Patreon and itch-io, over 20 games in the past decade, all of which offer no shortage of intense and unforgiving moments. Set in the s, you play as Dwayne Anderson, a resident of a large home that is being tormented by the supernatural as he tries to find a way out of the house and learn more about what is causing all the paranormal activity in his home.

And there you have it! Those are our picks for the top horror PC games. Disagree with the ranking? Think another entry should have been on the list? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to vote in the poll below!

You can also check out our list of the best horror movies of all time for more scares. Read more: Where are all the Lovecraftian games? Release date: Developer: Skydance Steam opens in new tab. Clicking on a zombie’s head to kill them in a game like Left 4 Dead can be plenty of fun, but The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners really rams home the brutality of the act.

Its simulation of undead skulls and the difficulty of piercing them with knives, cleavers, axes, sawblades, or even a katana will make you think twice about wading into the hordes.

There’s a crafting system for when those weapons break, and it wouldn’t be The Walking Dead without moral choices and living folks who can be just as dangerous as the dead ones.

But it’s really all about the physics-based impalement and decapitation, and wiggling a knife to get it back out of a walker’s head. Read more: The best VR games. Release date: Developer: Con Artist Kongregate opens in new tab. The Last Stand was a straightforward Flash game about standing behind barricades as the undead approached from screen left and learning when to switch to the chainsaw as they neared.

Survive until dawn, and it ended. The Last Stand 2 added something to do in daylight hours: searching for survivors who will join you at the barricade, as well as more weapons and traps. Watching a bear trap snag the legs of one of those fast zombies so you can lazily headshot them is a good time.

Any spare hours can be spent repairing the barricade. But the real reason to search is to find supplies so you can travel to the next town. In 40 days the entire country’s going to be quarantined and if you don’t make it out by then, you never will. It’s as simple, low-budget, and effective as the best movies about the living dead. Read more: The Internet Archive’s new Flash library is a nostalgic goldmine. Horror games owe a significant debt to Lovecraft, and not just because he’s long dead and his work is out of copyright.

Plenty of games have included little references to his brand of cosmic horror, but text adventure Anchorhead is more deeply inspired by Lovecraft than most, drawing from several of his novels and stories to tell the tale of a married couple who have inherited an old mansion in a creepy New England town. The sedate exploration of the game’s opening segments eventually gives way to tense, turn-limited puzzles as you struggle to stop an ancient, possibly world-ending ritual from being completed.

No pressure then. The original, free version of Anchorhead can still be played online opens in new tab , but there’s also an expanded and revised version with illustrations for sale on Steam opens in new tab and itch.

Read more: text adventure classic Anchorhead is an uncanny addition to ‘s lineup. Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors. Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games opens in new tab.

Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from to , and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame. UK Edition. PC Gamer Newsletter Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors. Jody Macgregor. See comments. Be prepared for jump scares aplenty!

The most notable change is its larger scale, challenging you to explore its terrifying semi-open-world environments fraught with danger at every turn. You can absolutely see the lineage of System Shock in those games, except none of them were anywhere near as frightening. System Shock 2 is an old-school gaming experience that will test your mettle with very little handholding, deep RPG mechanics, and survival horror elements that make every combat encounter tense.

The first-person, stealth-heavy gameplay experience marked a big change from the third-person blueprint laid out by Resident Evil, and it fast became adopted by dozens of Outlast clones thereafter.

In many ways, Silent Hill 2 follows a similar design philosophy to the original Resident Evil trilogy, with its third-person perspective, puzzle-heavy gameplay, and use of lighting and SFX to create a tense ambiance. But here the psychological horror elements are at the forefront, rather than pure monster-slaying action.

20 terrifying PC horror games to play with the lights off | PCWorld

Our list of the best horror games for is bang up to date, with some of the best more recent titles to put the frighteners on you, as well as some old classics and some hidden gems. There are lots of different horror moods, and this list has something for everyone: action, gore, puzzles, survival, and extremely creepy walking sims.

You might hate jump scares, but there are still some jump-scare free games on this list for you. Our approach is quite flexible, allowing for any game that we think is frightening, and while some of the games here are ones you might not have heard of, they’re all ones that you can buy right now if they take your fancy.

No need to bid for second-hand copies on ebay, which is a relief. We’ll keep updating the list with our favourite new horror games, and if you think we’re missing something then let us know in the comments. Little Nightmares 2 is a fantastic follow up to the first Little Nightmares, as well as being a prequel no spoilers!

It’s taken a while, and some replaying, to acknowledge that actually it’s probably better than the original – more polished, a more confident atmosphere, and better developed baddies. In Little Nightmares 2 you play as Mono, a boy with a paper bag on his head, and nightmares about a tall man and television screens inside that head. You’re also joined by Six, the protagonist of Little Nightmares, though at this stage she’s a bit less confident, and you have to work together to survive this grim, rainy world.

In the first game the hazards are uncanny grownups, but here there are enemies that are more straightforwardly authority figures like a Teacher with a long, snaking neck , or school bullies, or just unsettling metaphor – gangs of faceless, TV-addicted adults forming mobs.

There’s also a lot of allusions to self. As with Little Nightmares, monsters are very close to home. I can’t believe I didn’t add Old Gods Rising to this list ages ago, since it’s a fabulously unsettling game that stuck both in the mind and the craw, and is one of a tiny handful of Lovecraftian games that doesn’t become achingly unsubtle.

You play as a historical consultant for the latest film by a maverick director, who is filming on location at Ashgate University. When you turn up Ashgate is completely empty, the remains of filming equipment are scattered aroud, but there’s nobody to be seen. Except, maybe there is? Was that someone in a high vis vest running around the corner? Old Gods Rising always keeps you unsettled. You’re never sure if you’re the subject of one big prank, or if something actually terrible is happening.

After all, it would surely be a big ask for a fairly indie film production to build huge weird temples hidden around the university, wouldn’t it? Or, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe you weren’t supposed to stumble on that bank of monitors connected to cameras that are still rolling.

Or maybe you were. Old Gods Rising a really great example of what I believe people call environmental story telling, and it deserved way more attention than it got on release. In terms of games that you can play in a group, as if you’re sitting around scarfing popcorn and red laces and watching an actual horror film, it’d surely be hard to beat The Quarry. It’s a specific field, but a surprisingly wide one, and The Quarry is the most recent entry.

Play switches between a group of teens, each with their own hang ups and relationship woes, who have spent the summer as camp counsellors at Hackett’s Quarry. Having survived that, they must now survive an entire night in the surrounded creepy woods being chased by monsters.

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. Hey Ted! The confidence of the performances from all the actors involved make it a real wrench if they die, but some of the deaths are so absolutely over-the-top gore-fest style that they’ll make you laugh out loud and accept them out of respect for the design. 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. A good horror story can teach you a thing or two, and Detention is not only a very good horror game, it’s also a game set in a time and place I knew very little about before playing.

The player characters are students in a school, and become trapped there after-hours – but there’s more to worry about than the ghosts and ghouls stalking the corridors. Detention takes place in s Taiwan during the period of martial law known as the White Terror and lands in the fine tradition of horror fiction that draws on anxieties and atrocities tied to specific historical, political and social realities. It’s essentially a point and click game, though the side-on perspective and control scheme suggests there might be more in the way of combat or stealth.

There is some sneaking, as apparitions stalk the corridors and rooms, but most of your time is spent exploring and figuring out which item goes where so that you can make your way through the plot. 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. 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.