These days, fantastic horror games are not hard to come by.
The survival horror genre in particular has made massive strides in the industry, with
developers pumping out some of the most impressive and compelling titles to ever grace our consoles
over the last decade and a half.
Whether you play horror games because you love them, or you play them because you adore
a good scare, these games on our list today are all worth giving a go, and are full of
frights.
These are our picks for the top 10 scariest horror games of all time.
20 S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl Shadow of Chernobyl is a first person shooter
survival horror that’s set in an alternate reality.
A second nuclear disaster has happened at the famous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion
Zone, causing strange other worldly mutations.
You assume the role of the Stalker, who has amnesia, who comes across five different breeds
of mutants in the Zone.
There are bloodsuckers.
There are Snorks, who almost look human and wear gas masks.
There are poltergeists, an extremely mutated human who is missing all of its body below
its hips and seem invisible.
There are Pseudogiants, a giant mutated ball of several humans combined, and lastly, controllers,
who have psychic esque powers that disorient you in short bursts.
In addition to the mutants that you’ll come across, there’s a whole lot of supernatural
aspects at play.
It also scores big points for atmosphere; not only is the sound design and music really
on point, but the lighting in the game even offers up it’s own scares, with the way
your flashlight moves sometimes casting shadows that will have you double taking, fearing
that there’s more lurking nearby than there is in actuality.
9 Resident Evil 4 There’s a lot of fantastic Resident Evil
games to choose from that could’ve landed a spot on this list, but Resident Evil 4 tends
to take the cake when it comes to being the scariest of the bunch.
It’s considered to be one of the best survival horror games out there to boot, pioneering
the over the shoulder third person perspective in that genre.
You play as Leon S Kennedy, former Raccoon City Police officer six years after the events
of Resident Evil 2, on a mission to rescue the US President’s daughter Ashley Graham.
Despite how annoying many players found Ashley to be, the game itself features some of the
most terrifying foes in the franchise to date, combined with revolutionary combat mechanics
that have made their way into other games in the series, and in the genre, since.
8 Slender: The Arrival Slender may not be a popular choice on this
list compared to some other titles, but this relatively indie game still manages to bring
the fright factor home.
Slender is of course about Slender Man; the urban legend that has now made its way from
creepy pasta online to a full blown pop culture sensation, even scoring a poorly made film
that studios thought would pull in the big bucks at the box office.
Despite the recent questionability about the character’s representation, Slender the
game is definitely one adaptation of the myth that is worth while.
It’s an expanded title from the game Slender The Eight Pages.
Like others on this list, it’s a survival horror, where you’re armed with only a flashlight
as you hunt down answers concerning your missing best friend, which unravels a greater mystery
concerning missing children, which are of course connected to the Slender Man.
Regardless of whether the story entices you, the gameplay itself is what lands this title
on our list.
You explore abandoned areas, each with different objectives, often being hunted down by Slender
himself.
There’s a level in a mine that’s particularly terrifying, where you’re chased down by
a young child in a hoodie, as well as Slender.
And huge chunks of the game build tension; one of the final chapters takes you inside
the recording of a friend investigating a farm, which requires you to solve a few puzzles,
but manages to create SO MUCH TENSION in the process, that when you do finally get pursued
by one of the missing children now deformed, you’ll be on the edge of your seat practically
pooping yourself.
7 Silent Hill 2 Silent Hill 2 is often seen as one of the
best horror games of all time, and definitely the best released game the franchise has ever
had to offer.
It’s disturbing, unsettling, and places players in a world that manages to get under
their skin in real life.
You play as James Sunderland, who enters the town of Silent Hill after receiving a letter
from his deceased wife, saying she’s waiting for him there.
The game employs psychological tactics as well, all of which mess with the player as
you progress in the narrative.
In addition to that, many players see the encounter with Pyramid Head as being one of
the scariest moments to ever occur in video game history, and the conclusion of the game
itself is one that has lingered with many players for years.
6 Penumbra The Black Plague The Black Plague is the second title in the
Penumbra series, which follows a character named Phillip through an underground research
base.
It’s an exploration game where flight is mightier than fight, and leaves you avoiding
enemies, using stealth tactics and solving puzzles.
You start the game by waking up in a locked room, escaping through an air vent and discovering
that inside this facility, there are infected zombie like creatures.
You’ve been infected too, but instead of joining the hive mind, you slowly slip into
insanity as another one of the infected takes over, taunting you with sarcastic and crude
dialogue throughout the game.
The Black Plauge is the spiritually successor to our number one on this list, too, but more
on that later.
5 Alien Isolation Alien Isolation plays on the elements that
made the first few Aliens films so fantastic; you’re on a deserted space station, playing
as Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, tracking down a lost flight recorder, all while trapped
inside this space station with none other than a Xenomorph.
Inspired heavily by the first alien film, the game isn’t an action packed one; instead,
it requires you to not get killed by the Xenomorph, not be the killer yourself since you are unarmed,
creating exponentially more tension that way.
There’s also a handful of malfunctioning andriods scattered throughout the station’s
rooms as well that add another eerie element to the title.
Overall, it’s title really speaks volumes for the game as a whole; you feel entirely
isolated, and hunted.
4 Dead Space It Xenomorphs aren’t your thing, how about
Necromorphs?
Dead Space is also set in, you guessed it, outer space!
It’s another survival horror game that puts you in the shoes of protagonist Isaac Clarke
in the year 2508, a ship systems engineer who is forced to fight his way through the
mining starship he works on in search of his girlfriend and safety.
The crew have all been butchered, and then their corpses reanimated, turning them into
Necromorphs; a new take on the zombie genre that is appalling, terrifying, and forces
you to use a mechanism called ‘strategic dismemberment’ in order to fight them off
and kill them for good.
It’s a gruesome deep space adventure that will haunt your dreams, from its startling
atmosphere to its vicious means of fighting off your foes; there ain’t no effective
head shots here, people, which made many people have to approach this shooter in a different
way than other titles with similar themes and premises.
3 Outlast While some may argue that Outlast 2 is a better
game, there’s something about the first title in the series that left us feeling absolutely
mortified by its end.
And by that something, we mean everything up until the reveal of what exactly Wallrider
was.
Decent level, but definitely not as scary as the underground caverns under the asylum
that you need to navigate to get there, let alone THE WHOLE DAMN ASYLUM you work your
way through during the rest of the game!
So, when Outlast starts off, you’re a journalist, armed with only a camcorder and its night
vision feature, heading to the game’s asylum to investigate some mysterious happenings.
You get there, and immediately, it’s scary as hell.
You have to break into the building, only to discover that something has gone horribly
wrong; all of the security guards are dead.
Your first real mission in the game is to start up a generator; a moment that is perhaps
one of the scariest, as you find yourself navigating around in flooded basement, searching
for levers that you need to turn on, all while avoiding getting your head smashed in by one
of the freed asylum patients who, of course, wants nothing more than to satiate his thirst
for blood.
You’ve gotta run, you’ve gotta hide, and you’ve gotta hope that these mental patients
don’t find you.
The rest of the game sees you employing similar tactics, with you being utterly defenseless,
and needing to constantly find batteries in order to make your camera run; that night
vision becomes oh so precious.
There’s also some particularly gruesome moments that are hard to watch.
But overall, it’s not so much the story in Outlast that makes it great, but rather,
the mechanics of the game itself, and the pace in which the game flows, scaring the
likes of even the most seasoned horror gamers out there.
2 PT PT is often considered the best horror game
of all time, despite the fact that it never actually got made.
So, for context, if you’ve never heard of it before, PT stands for playable trailer.
It was a teaser game released on the playstation store, a first person psychological horror
game developed by Kojima Productions and directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro.
It was meant to be a teaser for the game Silent Hills, the next installment in the Silent
Hill franchise that was eventually cancelled.
After the cancellation, the game was removed from the playstation store and removed the
option for players to reinstall it, which caused a lot of controversy (and made some
PS4s go for quite the expensive price tag online if they had the game installed on the
system).
Anywho, despite only being a trailer, it was critically acclaimed for its visuals, its
ability to create extreme tension and it’s puzzles.
Essentially, you awaken in a haunted house, exploring the same L shaped corridor as it
continues to loop, with supernatural occurrences throughout.
In order to progress, you need to solve cryptic puzzles and other terrifying events.
There’s no means of defending yourself either, like in previous Silent Hill games.
It’s claustrophobic and repetitive environment not only invoked fear, but a deep curiosity
about what would happen next, and put the player in a state of vulnerability that not
many other horror games have managed to achieve in the past.
Despite it’s short life span, the trailer has had a massive impact, largely influencing
other horror games that have come out in recent years.
There’s actually a remake of it that recently surfaced called Unreal PT, available for PC,
that players can even try out in VR. 1 Amnesia The Dark Descent
Amnesia The Dark Descent is one of those titles that manages to scare the crap out of you
before anything scary has actually happened.
It follows the story of a man named Daniel, who has amnesia, and wakes up in the Brennenburg
Castle in 1839 with the knowledge of only three things; that his name is Daniel, where
he lives, and that something is hunting him.
The Dark Descent has a very intriguing mechanic; the more time you spend hiding in the dark
while avoiding the utterly horrific monsters in the game, the more your sanity level drops,
which alters your perception, and can cause you to see and hear things that aren’t actually
there.
This aspect of the game exists right from the get go, establishing a really uncanny
feeling for players as they begin their journey through the castle.
It’s part psychological thriller, part survival horror, that once again puts you in a position
of needing to rely on flight over fight, with players often having to barricade themselves
into rooms in order to avoid the monsters chasing you throughout the gothic building’s
corridors.
There we have it friends!
Which of these titles scared you the most?
And which other ones do you think should’ve gotten a spot on our list?
Give us a shout in those comments below and let us know your thoughts!
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