7 – Outlast,
- Horror gaming really is at its best when your first reaction to seeing a creepy enemy isn’t to load it full of bullets or cuts and instead to run away and hide and that’s pretty much Outlast’s MO.
- The main inspiration for Outlast is pretty clearly the found footage genre, but don’t let its inspiration let you think that the game is full of monsters and a story that you’ve already seen as it has a lot of interesting aspects that are mostly unique to itself.
- The asylum is often very dark and the only way the main character can see what’s going on is by using the night vision mode on his camera, which runs out of batteries much faster than is realistic, but if you can suspend your disbelief, it’s an interesting mechanic that adds a lot to the game.
6 – Amnesia: The Dark Descent,
- Amnesia is another game where you can’t hurt your enemies, instead you’re forced to run and hide from what may or may not be your imagination, as the protagonist loses sanity when he’s in the dark for too long.
- Unlike Outlast, the main gameplay isn’t to run away from your enemies and is instead to solve adventure-game-esque puzzles, making you interact with your environment creatively.
- The only real problem with Amnesia is that the pacing can feel jolty when you’ve just finished running for your life only to be forced to think your way through a puzzle for the next thirty minutes with little to no danger of seeing any enemies.
5 – Fatal Frame II: The Crimson Butterfly,
- The Fatal Frame, or Project Zero, series is uniquely Japanese, with ghosts that wouldn’t look out of place in the Ring, and the main weapon against the ghosts being a camera.
- Even though including combat tends to lessen the impact of the horror this game makes fighting back something you’d really rather not do unless absolutely necessary.
- There’s also a bunch of puzzles to solve and the story is told in a subtle way that really suits the atmosphere, if you haven’t tried this series before you owe it to yourself to give The Crimson Butterfly a try.
4 – Resident Evil Remake or Resident Evil 4,
- How could I make a list of spooky games to play on Halloween without including Resident Evil? Sure the latest games in the series have about as much horror in them as an episode of Goosebumps, but Remake and 4 are both still amazing games.
- Choosing between Remake and 4 is really a choice in what you like least: if you hate playing a game with awkward controls then you should go for 4, whereas if the two words ‘escort mission’ make you grit your teeth then you should go for remake.
- But really, even if you’re not a fan of clunky controls you should still give remake a go, as the bad controls are there on purpose to make stressful and creepy stimuli have an extra impact on how you play.
3 – Alien: Isolation,
- If you’re anything like me then after you play a game for a while, you’ll have every enemy’s attack and patrol patterns burnt into your memory and the absence of this is one of the reasons why Alien: Isolation is so good.
- The Alien doesn’t have many prescripted bits in this game, instead it follows a well-crafted dynamic AI system that keeps the game fresh and genuinely horrifying from beginning to end.
- Not only that, but Isolation also has VR support, making the game at least ten times scarier than normal, if you want an incredibly scary experience, Alien: Isolation with an oculus simply can’t be beat.
2 – Silent Hill 2,
- The most important and most effective way a game can make you uncomfortable, creeped out and edgy is to have good atmospheric design and Silent Hill 2 is the king of atmosphere, despite its old age, no game has trumped Silent Hill 2 on atmospheric design.
- But that’s not all that makes this game so good, the story is amazing, the combat is wonky in all the right ways and the creative enemies and puzzles make it an experience that every gamer should go through.
- The only real downside is that the voice acting really is cringeworthy, but if you can look past this flaw it’s a masterpiece of horror and gaming in general.
1 – Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
- New experiences aren’t easy to come by in gaming, where homogenisation, remakes, remasters and sequels are the bread and butter of the industry and if you’re sick of this as much as I am you need to play Sanity’s Requiem.
- This game has the best sanity system in gaming’s history, designed not to mess with the main character like most of them, but instead to mess with the player in a very self-aware fashion.
- The plot is intriguing and the environments are varied, with the player traveling into the past, controlling different characters in different time periods, if you haven’t played this game you should definitely give it a try; it’s an incredibly memorable experience.
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