What makes a scary game? There are many different ways that games can fry your brain. Some games put you on the wrong end of a deadly chase, where one wrong move can kill you. Others depend on maintaining a sense of dread and tension that can stick with you long after you put the game down.
Last year, we offered some spooky games for the Halloween season that would give you the chills without necessarily having to crank up your heart rate. This year, we want to do the opposite—highlight the games that make you think twice about whether you should put the controller down and maybe walk away for good. And games that you should maybe consider skipping if you have a heart condition.
These games are best played with your headphones on and lights turned down, but we won't tell anyone you played them with the lights on—if you don't tell anyone that we did too.
Editor's note: All of the games featured below are traditional "Web2" games with no crypto or blockchain elements.
Keeping up tension for 10-plus hours is really difficult, and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard struggles in the later half. But the first half of the game is a masterwork that once again restored the series to its place at the top of the horror genre of video games.
There's a moment, early on, where you stand at the top of a flight of stairs—and if you listen carefully, you can hear someone breathing. But you have no choice but to go down. The first half of this game is packed with moments like this, and playing them in VR only serves to augment the experience that much more… if you have the hardware to make it happen.
There's a sub-genre in horror that I lovingly refer to as "I'm gonna gitcha!" games. These are games where something is chasing you and you're powerless to stop it, leaving running and hiding as your only options. Outlast is one of the best at this. The game puts you in a supposedly abandoned mental hospital with little more than your wits and a night vision camera, and you quickly find out that you're not alone—and all of the scary guys in the game are gonna gitcha. See also: Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
Alan Wake, released in 2014, was about as scary as a TV adaptation of a Stephen King story. It was tense and dark, but rarely very scary. Alan Wake 2, though, is a different beast altogether. As you try to solve the mystery plaguing Bright Falls as FBI agent Saga Anderson, and try to escape the Dark Place as Alan Wake, developer Remedy offers up a much scarier, more dangerous world.
Phasmophobia asks the timeless question: What, are you chicken? Sure, you can play Phasmophobia, a game patterned after ghost-hunting shows, on your own. But it's best played as a group of 2-4 players. Use different tools and information to track and identify hostile ghosts, but if you get caught yourself, you won't make it out of the place alive. Phasmophobia manages to both be hilariously janky and utterly terrifying at the same time. See also: Lethal Company.
One of the biggest problems with survival horror games (like the aforementioned Resident Evil 7) is that they want to give you a sense of progression, letting you power up over the course of the game. But monsters are much less scary when you have a dimensional pocket with a half-dozen different weapons to fight with.
GTFO doesn't care. GTFO is a first-person cooperative tactical shooter game inspired by horror stories like the SCP Foundation database. You play as a prisoner forced to explore and complete objectives in a sprawling, maze-like facility. If you and your companions communicate and plan, then maybe you can make it out. But oftentimes, you'll be quickly overwhelmed by unspeakable horrors, and forced to start over.
September 25 marked the 23rd anniversary of the release of Silent Hill 2 for PlayStation 2. October 8 marks the release of the long-awaited remake (shown above) of the classic horror title. Reviews from critics look overwhelmingly positive, but the original game still holds up.
The original Silent Hill 2—as well as the other earlier games—put you in a foggy, empty town populated only by terrifying, mutilated, and mutated monsters. The creators used the game's real and "other" worlds to explore themes of loss, guilt, and cruelty, helped along by maybe the most iconic horror villain in all of video games: Pyramid Head. See also: Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3—the latter if only for the terrifying mirror scene late in the game.
For an action-packed take on horror, you can't go wrong with Dead Space and Resident Evil 2. Both received excellent remakes in the last few years that updated them for modern sensibilities regarding game control and navigation, and overhauled the visuals while retaining their style. Both games offer an over-the-shoulder camera, puzzle-solving, and a focus on ammo conservation. Dead Space is a science-fiction horror story akin to The Thing, while Resident Evil 2 is a quintessential zombie story.
