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The 25 best horror games on PCUp-to-date with the latest scary releases
Up-to-date with the latest scary releases
It may not be Halloween for a while, but there’s no reason you can’t celebrate horror as a genre all year round. In fact, it’s one of our favourite genre of games, so we’ve put together our list of the25 best horror gamesto play on PC right now. It really showcases the breadth of horror on PC right now, from visual novels to shooters to survival to weirdo demon games and text adventures, so it’s a real joy to peruse.
Top 12 Best Horror Games to Play on PC
The best horror games on PC
25. Little Nightmares 2
What else should I be playing:The original Little Nightmares is an excellent example of more of the same, and for a while it was top of this list. Others that spring to mind are Limbo and Inside, similar side-scrolling childhood creepshows.
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.
24. Old Gods Rising
What else should I be playing:This has a lot more in common with something like Draugen, or even Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (which I consider pretty horrifying) in that the horror is largely drawn from the absence of people from a place they definitely should be, but are not.
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 youwere. 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.
23. The Quarry
What else should I be playing:The Quarry is a spiritual successor to Until Dawn, the teen-monster-slasher-horror that also served to kickstart The Dark Pictures Anthology. Both Until Dawn and that latter series of games are worth playing, although your mileage will absolutely vary on the Dark Pictures.
22. Detention
Image credit:Red Candle Games
What else should I be playing:Lone Survivor, also on this list, uses a similar blend of stealth and adventure-style puzzling and exploration, while Obscure, White Day and Corpse Party all have unpleasant things happening in schools after-hours.
A good horror story can teach you a thing or two, andDetentionis 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 1960s 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.
21. Observer
What else should I be playing:You might enjoy Bloober’s Layers Of Fear games, and more recent outing The Medium. Personally, I’d go for Get Even, another game that messes with minds and memories in visually inventive fashion.
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.
20. My Father’s Long Long Legs
What else should I be playing:Cyberqueen and Horse Master are excellent and unusual Twine horror games. Traditional interactive fiction is also home to some uncanny experiences, notably the cleverly told urban legend of All Alone, the strange reality of Shade and the horrific moral maze of the intricately constructed Vespers.
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.
19. Sylvio
What else should I be playing:There is a sequel, but despite ditching some of the original’s silliest bits, it also loses some of its strangeness. The scariest ghostly games in existence belong to the Project Zero (Fatal Frame in some territories) series, but they’re not available on PC. The Blackwell adventure game series is all about paranormal communication and is a far less stressful experience.
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.
18. World Of Horror
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ysbryd Games
What else should I be playing:It’s hard to recommend anything exactly like World Of Horror, but you could look to Darkwood or Slay The Princess, or even Disco Elysium. If you like the art style then we’re in Return Of The Obra Dinn territory.
The interface is deliberately non-user friendly and old school, the art is 1bit and made in MSPaint, and the whole thing is a sort of Junji Ito roguelike experience that leaves you very unsettled. You can find strange spells that give you teeth you can use as a weapon. You can use trial and error to find the right combination of movements to use a spell. You can have a bath to try to heal. Maybe you’ll lose your face. There’s a lot to unpick here, and it’s a singular experience doing so.
17. Dead Space 2
What else should I be playing:If you want the full Dead Space experience, the first game is definitely worth playing. 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. The temptation to show the money on the screen works against the mystery and murkiness necessary for so much that frightens us. The originalDead Spacethrew 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. There’s no subtlety but at least 80% of what Visceral throw at the screen works.
16. Saturnalia
What else should I be playing:Santa Ragione’s other games aren’t really anything like this, but they’re good! 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.
15. The Evil Within
What else should I be playing:The sequel is very good, but even though it doesn’t have bossfights as irritating as those in the first game, or lows quite as low, it loses something of the erratic nature of its predecessor. The re-release of the first Resident Evil is essential Shinji Mikami.
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.
14. Lone Survivor
What else should I be playing:Lone Survivor almost demands that you turn to the Silent Hill series, but also consider the superficially similar Home and if you tire of playing a character who shuffles slowly from room to room, look into Deadlight. Lone Survivor itself is set to get a remaster at some point this year, called Super Lone Survivor.
13. Amnesia: Rebirth
Image credit:Frictional
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. It’s wider in scope, containing not only capsule versions of the haunted house experience to be found in The Dark Descent, but claustrophobic tunnels and sweeping alien landscapes - and, in a surprise for the series, bright sunshine as well.
Though it cracks a little under the weight of wrapping up the complex, history-spanning story of the Amnesia games, Rebirth is Frictional showing off everything they’ve learned in the last decade. Locations in Rebirth have many layers, and with this Frictional prove they can scare you whenever, however, and with whatever they want. Though there’s no water monster this time, the same effect of an ever-present threat, unseen but potentially everywhere, is achieved with monsters that tunnel through the walls. It’s also a story about body horror and a threat coming from within, as much as it’s about the monsters without, and as such you can never really relax even in the moments that you’re supposedly safe.
12. Inscryption
What else should I be playing:Look to the other Mullins joints Hex and Pony Island for games that don’t do what you expect. Ring Of Pain has a ‘weird animals looking at you and also cards’ vibe.
Inscryption is a puzzle game, where you can get up from the card table and walk around a strange cabin, examining things on the walls. Lockboxes. Strange books. A clock. The door is locked. How do you leave.Canyou leave?
Inscryption is a meta-story, where, framing the deck-building card-battle game is the story of a YouTuber who follows some clues and finds that game buried in the woods. 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. Resident Evil Village
What else should I be playing:Village is a pretty direct follow up to Resident Evil 7, with its horrible dinners. The Evil Within and the re-release of Resident Evil 1 are essential showcases of Shinji Mikami’s talents as a game director, and both hew closer to horror traditions, but Resident Evil 4 is perhaps his finest hour.
Another year, another new Resident Evil game on this list. Resident Evil Village (sort of Resi 8, in number if not name) follows on from protagonist Ethan’s antics with the infinitely horrible Baker family in Resi 7. A year on, and Ethan finds himself up against the denizens of that village, which is full of werewolves, yes, but conveniently also has some big baddies each in their own grim house.
It depends what kind of horror you want, of course, but while the favourite child Resi 4 does have some inspired creepy sections, especially those Regenerators, the latest has one of the most frightening creatures ever to grace the series. That monster is separate, too, from Lady Dimitrescu, who become a pop-culture phenomenon (owing mostly to being very tall, among other things) in a way few characters in any medium manage. And Village also continues the tradition of doing really, really horrible things to Ethan’s hands. Though the other tradition established in 7 - that of the game ceasing to be a tense survival horror and becoming more of an action-shooter in the last quarter or so - Village really does have some of the best level and enemy design you’ll meet in a Resi game.
10. The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow
What else should I be playing:For folk horror flavour look to Mundaun or Draugen. For something more puzzle-y, try an Oxenfree.
9. Condemned: Criminal Origins
What else should I be playing:Hotline Miami and its sequel take place in a brighter setting but also feature desperately violent melee combat.
Condemned is a game about the hunt for a serial killer that very swiftly becomes a game about beating people to death with a plank. Whether we’re supposed to laugh at how rapidly the investigator becomes a murderer, knee-deep in the corpses of unfortunates, isn’t entirely clear. The entire game is pitched oh-so seriously, never seeming to acknowledge the campy potential of its ludicrous ‘everyone-is-now-an-angry-murderer’ plot. There’s something about dead birds and shards of metal, but Condemned is best enjoyed as the best horror-melee game in existence. Whatever else it might, it is certainly that.
8. Darkwood
What else should I be playing:The developers' list of influences are a good place to start. Project Zomboid has the least in common with Darkwood, tonally, but it’s a great way to explore the survival mechanics in more detail.
Boasting some of the best lighting in a top-down 2D game you’re ever likely to see, Darkwood makes the shadowy corners of a room, or the spaces between trees, absolutely terrifying. Things skitter into view, go bump in the night and then latch onto your face or leg, and chew right down to the bone.
7. Stories Untold
What else should I be playing:Anthology horror is due to have its day in the sun on PC. Just look at The Fridge Is Red for an example from this year! No Code also made Observation, a not-quite-horrorsci-fi gamethat carries over many of the themes and design sensibilities of Stories Untold.
The House Abandon alone might have been enough for developers No Code to earn a place on this list. Originally released for free, it’s a superb spin on parser-based interactive fiction, putting the player in the shoes of somebody playing a game which is maybe about somebody playing the same game. It plays with perception, expectation and interaction in ways that made us smile as much as they made us shudder. It’s scary, but it’s also delightfully clever.
But there’s much more than The House Abandon here. One of No Code’s founders, Jon McKellan, previously worked on Alien: Isolation and some of that game’s DNA has carried across with him. It’s the love of old-fashioned interfaces that make up so much of Alien’s retro-future that you’ll see in the other tales that make up Stories Untold. Each has its own mode of interaction and loosely fits into its own sub-genre of horror. Consistently surprising, genuinely unnerving, and wholly unique, this marks No Code out as one of the most exciting young studios in the world.
6. Alien: Isolation
What else should I be playing:Stories Untold shares a developer and some design elements - namely a love of vintage computers and machinery. 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 haven’t played it. Creative Assembly’s FPS horror masterpiece isn’t just a generous portion of stealth and scares, it’s a superbly detailed trip into the world that Ridley Scott and his team brought to the screen three and a half decades ago. Everything from the creature itself to the individual posters and pieces of machinery that fill the Sevastopol has been crafted to fit with the design principles that made the Nostromo such a fascinating and enduring location.
Isolation is an unforgiving game. Unfair even. The alien will kill you, again and again and again. That’s the nature of the beast, though, and would the game feel like an authentic Alien experience if every encounter didn’t come with the risk of a swift demise?
5. SOMA
Image credit:Frictional Games
What else should I be playing:Frictional are famous for the Amnesia series, which is well worth playing. For more sci-fi mind scares, check out Observer.
Soma (styled as SOMA) was the difficult second album for Frictional after the hype of Amnesia, and it turned out to be another enduringly fabulous horror game. Though it’s also asci-fi game, using futuristic tech, and an AI with a very rigid interpretation of what it might mean for humanity to ‘survive’, to explore the idea of self, the conclusions it comes to and the ideas that it makes you examine are frightening. They are enduringly scary. They are scary in a way that will keep you up at night weeks after you play it.
4. Anatomy
The less said the better when it comes to Kitty Horrowshow’s masterpiece, which uses elements of found footage and lo-fi visuals to create the only piece of horror fiction that has ever made me want to leave my own home and sleep in a hotel for the night.
It’s short, though it has only just begun after the first playthrough, and I challenge anyone to play it in the dark, wearing headphones, alone. There are no sudden frights but if you’re amenable to its particular sense of dread, Anatomy will actually steal sleep from you.
3. Pathologic
What else should I be playing:Pathologic 2 is real and now out, and though it smooths out some of the problems with Path 1, doesn’t quite outstrip the original. Or try yet more Ice-Pick Lodge games, especially Knock-Knock which is elsewhere on this list.
Pathologic is unique. It almost seems reductive to describe it as a horror game, but if not horror then what? Set in a diseased town whose districts and major buildings are named after parts of a human body or biological functions and extractions, Pathologic doesn’t place the player character at the centre of things. You can move toward the centre of things, in an attempt to keep yourself alive or to discover the city’s secrets, but the game never panders to you.
The story of the city’s death takes place over twelve days and can be experienced from three different perspectives. Brilliantly constructed, the setting and story are among the most literate and intelligent in gaming, and that they can be experienced piecemeal is testament to Ice-Pick Lodge’s ability to exercise the unique qualities of the medium. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Pathologic advanced interactive storytelling in ways that few games ever have. Or at least it would have done if anyone had been paying attention, or had been able to emulate its finer qualities.
2. System Shock 2
What else should I be playing:The BioShock games borrow half of the name but drop most of the horror and roleplaying conventions. Looking Glass’s Terra Nova is a different sort of game made with a similar level of care and class. There’s also anewSystem Shock on the way, although who knows what that’ll be like?
That sense of dread and doom makes Irrational’s masterpiece one of the greatest horror games and, as a sci-fi horror RPG, it is unique. Shock 2 is a first-person survival horror game, but it’s the use of RPG mechanics such as inventory management and character development that allow it to retain its power on repeated visits. 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. That the game gives you so much agency allows you to feel like the agent of your own destruction, and that you are never railroaded makes it easier to believe that the things that lurk in the dark have as much freedom as you do.
1. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat
Let’s be clear - Call Of Pripyat could sit in the top spot on many lists, but this is as much its rightful home as any other. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are often spoken of as immersive simulations, and as first-person games that transcend theshooterbracket. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are about exploration, encouraging you to dig deeper until, like the dwarves of Moria, you unleash terrible things. And those terrible things are far more terrible than the inhabitants of a haunted house or a derelict spaceship.
At their most harrowing, the creatures of Pripyat are the final barrier that stands between you and an understanding of the world. There are anomalies that fuse bone and boil blood, and those can be accepted and circumvented with a little ingenuity. There are blistered buildings and the skeletons of a society, and those too can be accommodated into our understanding with a shudder and a sidelong glance. But the things that lurk in the darkest, most claustrophobic corridors and tunnels of the Zone do not allow the mind to linger upon them. They are horrors in the truest sense - entities that behave in a repugnant fashion and that are simply unacceptable. 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.
