Good horror games?

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1) Dead Space - it's not that scary because most of the time you have a gun to kill it. Still, a great game to have fun.
2) Prey - scary until you level up enough not to give a fuck. Also, good story and gameplay.
3) SOMA - one of my ever favs. It's scary and has one of the best stories in video games (and maybe even cinema) I ever encounetered. However if you are into gunplay or more straightorward narrative, drop it. It's gonna be your cup of tea.
4) FEAR 1 and 2 - if you are ok with some classics
5) Alien Isolation - classical hide and seek.
6) Pathologic 2 - it's not a classical horror, it's more about fucked-upness and atmosphere. And if you don't like hard survivals, that's not for you.
 
The Fatal Frame series is a must if you like ghosts and/or Japanese horror in general. Some of the most atmospheric games I've ever played, they never fail to put me on edge.

If you like games that give you lots of choices and have consequences, you'll probably enjoy Until Dawn. I did not expect for this game to go in the direction that it did and ended up loving it. Do note that it has slasher movie tropes, but they're intentional.

If you don't mind visual novels, there's Spirit Hunter: Death Mark and its sequel NG. That said, they're not full-on VNs and do have actual gameplay similar to point-and-click adventures. The enemy designs are great, and you have to pay attention to specific details and think carefully in order to make it through boss encounters. If you fuck up, characters can and will die because of you. A third game is supposed to be coming out this year.

Lastly, if you can afford them, there are the hidden gems Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose. These are two of my all-time favorites and, despite being absurdly expensive these days, I would say they're worth looking into if you happen to find their premises intriguing. Plus, dog companions.
 
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The only good horror game I've seen in fucking years that hasn't devolved into 'look how DEEP we are' or just turning into a haunted house has been Into the Radius, but it's a VR game.

Still the first game in a LONG time that made me actually stop and take a break, because it was starting to get to me.
 
The Fair Lady said:
The Fatal Frame series is a must if you like ghosts and/or Japanese horror in general. Some of the most atmospheric games I've ever played, they never fail to put me on edge.

If you like games that give you lots of choices and have consequences, you'll probably enjoy Until Dawn. I did not expect for this game to go in the direction that it did and ended up loving it. Do note that it has slasher movie tropes, but they're intentional.

If you don't mind visual novels, there's Spirit Hunter: Death Mark and its sequel NG. That said, they're not full-on VNs and do have actual gameplay similar to point-and-click adventures. The enemy designs are great, and you have to pay attention to specific details and think carefully in order to make it through boss encounters. If you fuck up, characters can and will die because of you. A third game is supposed to be coming out this year.

Lastly, if you can afford them, there are the hidden gems Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose. These are two of my all-time favorites and, despite being absurdly expensive these days, I would say they're worth looking into if you happen to find their premises intriguing. Plus, dog companions.
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Until Dawn has such a good swerve with it's true plot coming out and you don't see it coming at all.

I wish would've gotten the Fatal Frame PS2 series in a trilogy remaster pack. Something with those low quality ghost sounds are really unnerving.
 
Clock Tower for the Super Nintendo is pretty good I'm surprised no one else said it yet in the thread. It's a point and click adventure in which your a orphan trapped in a mansion and some dude with a huge pair of scissors is trying to kill you for reasons beyond your understanding. There's no combat so whenever he shows up you have to make a run for it and try to find someplace to hide. Outside of that you spend your time traveling from room to room solving puzzles and finding items to progress. Depending on how quickly you solve the puzzles and which items you find you can get different ending I think there's like five or six of them. It's kind of similar to Haunting Ground so if you like that game this one would probably be good as well.
 
Signalis, I'm told, is fucking amazing.

Silent Hill 3 and Resident Evil's Gamecube re-release are my favorites otherwise.
 
I am a huge fan of FAITH. Rule of Rose is one of my favorite games ever, it’s terrific and has the most unique setting I think I’ve ever seen in a horror title.

Fatal Frame (all of them, even the one for the 3DS) however, are my goat. How can you not love a play mechanic in a horror game which forces you to allow the ghost to be directly on top of you for the best shot?

Loving the recommends so far and have grabbed two new games!
 
John Titor said:
Ib, Ao Oni and Witch's House are some solid free titles if you don't mind RPGmaker made games. Fatal Frame is fun but I guess ghosts are just zombies that can clip through walls.
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The latest version(6.23) of Ao oni is the best bet for anyone wanting to experience the series for the first time with the most foreign friendly puzzles out of all the official versions.

I will also point out series has jumped from from PC to Mobile with the official games. I can't recommend the mobile remake of 1.

While it does expand on 6.23 with new side stories after you beat the main story. It has no English translation( It does have menu related stuff translated, but you wont understand a lick of the story.), It's full of ads, and also has a lootbox system where you can watch ads to get ingame currency to open a lootbox of sorts to get skins(called masks) for the oni.

On a positive note, this is a mask for the oni.

Screenshot_1.png


So if you wanted to feel the horror of the average twitter user chasing you, it be right up your ally.
 
Siren for the PS2 is one of my favorite horror games, though it's very stealth-oriented (especially if you are playing it for the first time) and it might be too frustrating to play because some of the puzzles are obscure (the guide that came with the game contained hints for these) and figuring out where to go and what to do involves a fair amount of trial and error.

The story is very weird and more disturbing than most games that feature a fucked up cult. The Shibito might resemble dumb zombies at first, but they're more clever than they seem. There were several times when I thought I had escaped and found a safe hiding place only for one of them to open the door and strangle me to death. Also, they're pretty creepy when you sightjack them because you can hear them laughing and sobbing because they've basically gone mad.

I recommend at least giving it a try. The difficulty curve is atypical so certain missions on the first day are some of the hardest in the game while others near the end are pretty easy. A lot of people get stuck on Reiko Takato's first mission, for instance, because Harumi is a pain in the ass to protect.
 
John Titor said:
Ib, Ao Oni and Witch's House are some solid free titles if you don't mind RPGmaker made games. Fatal Frame is fun but I guess ghosts are just zombies that can clip through walls.
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Ib and Crooked Man are two of my favorite games of all time, so I'm definitely open to RPG Maker stuff.

Crooked man also had a sequel called The Sandman (no relation to Neil Gaiman's comic), though that one halfway thru becomes more like a fantasy adventure than a horror game. In general though, the creator of those games makes some solid stuff even if not everything they make is golden.

Not sure I agree that "ghosts are just zombies with noclip."

The reason I find zombies boring is twofold.

First, by nature Zombies are just boring monsters. They shamble around (sometimes run if the storyteller wants to be clever) and want to kill/eat you out of an almost robotic impulse.

Secondly, basically every zombie storyline is exactly the same. People arrive to find the world has collapsed, they all go survivalist, someone mentions that headshots are the only thing that work, at some point it all becomes about Not-the-T-Virus. Romero's trilogy worked only because he had a message, and Resident Evil worked because it was basically a sort of silly comic book in video game form (up until it went darker and edgier). But I can't see zombies having a lot of potential otherwise.

To compare to ghosts... well, just right off the bat, any story with ghosts by design has a spiritual element since they have to imply an afterlife, whereas zombies by nature are more reductionist and probably more reflective of the Twitter Age--just put the right chemicals in us and we all become slavering monsters (one of the few exceptions is Bub from the third Living Dead movie, and that woman in the first Siren game who despite being infected still saved that kid).

While Ghosts CAN be used as just generic kill-you monsters, they're not limited to that role by design. Like I mentioned when I talked about the original Alone in the Dark (page one of this topic, near the bottom) a lot of what it does implies a sort of intelligence, which is immediately more interesting than some beastie that just chases you and goes "rawr."

It kinda makes you wonder why there's not more games where you can, say, attempt to talk to and reason with the ghosts.
 
So I think I wanna do more capsule reviews of horror games I have played.

Gonna include some that have been recommended.

Fatal Frame 1 and 2 - I've played the PS2 versions of these two games, and I do see why they're highly recommended--the camera mechanic gives a nice spin on almost a "shooter" feel and even once the scares wear off, you still fall into this instinct of "oh a spook! Must get pictures for the Daily Bugle!" I also like how you can pick up on stuff just from what the monsters moan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a ghost that moans "where is my baby!"? I liked the first game slightly more than the second, although a huge part of why was when I got halfway into the second game and realized it was retreading plot points. This became a thing that prevented me from playing future Fatal Frame games as I read up (and watched the Nitro Rad reviews) and it turns out that the entire series is married to a recurring concept. SPOILER: Basically every Fatal Frame ends up revealing that a ritual went wrong in the past, you've got some sort of connection to it and because of that its your job to fix it. This was an interesting revelation the first time, but I really wish they had done something different for the sequels.

Siren - I've played the original PS2 Siren. For me, this game started out almost perfect. Stealth and horror is just so natural I'm shocked very few other people ever attempt Metal Gear Solid by way of Silent Hill. Also I seem to have more of a grasp of this game than some reviewers do--I see so many people talking about they get Shibi-piled if they ever turn on the flashlight and have trouble knocking down Shibito, but I dunno... I never had trouble with it. Not even that one with the rifle. Not even the bee.

There is only one thing that severely hampers Siren to me, and that's how the progression is locked. Getting the candles in the school was especially a pain, as you can get the candles, but then end up dying, which resets you to a checkpoint.... without the candles, which then prevents you from doing an objective in another stage. Basically if you die you restart the whole level. And to get the true ending, you have to take all possible paths and find every collectable note. It's not hard, its just tedious, especially since your progress is undone if things go even slightly wrong.

Side note, but I love it when games hide their web address behind a fake made-up alphabet.

Ib - If you have not played Ib, you have not lived. Okay, that's kind of an exaggeration. Ib is an RPG Maker (I think its technically Wolf RPG Engine but who cares) game where you're a little girl who finds herself transported to some sort of macabre world based on the paintings of a dead artist. To be honest, it's not that scary... but Ib, Garry and Mary are just so likable that you end up not caring about certain other things. One of those cases where its strengths allow you to overlook the minimal downsides. Being free helps.

The 7th Guest - Yeah I had to throw in a classic PC game too, though you might wanna play this one thru ScummVM or a console port as even on period-correct hardware this game had the glitches. 7th Guest is a lot of fun but its horror is more aesthetic-only than anything. The main deal with this game is this mansion has a bunch of rooms that each have a specific puzzle for you to solve--and I'm not talking inventory objects or Myst-style environmental awareness, these tend to be more like the kind of brainteasers you might get in a toy or an activity book... and for some reason solving them opens more of the mansion. I never did beat this one (and no, the microscope puzzle isn't where I stopped--I actually beat that one) so I dunno if its ever explained, but I enjoyed what was there.
 
Song of Horror is a bit like an updated RE1, but without the boulder punching, weapons or zombies. Instead it has a selection of ordinary characters with bad teeth and dodgy accents. It's in episodes where you play multiple characters who will be replaced by another character if yours is subsumed by "the darkness"
You do have to hide from "the darkness"and complete a QTE to survive, these are at random points. What it doesn't do - which i can't stand - is make you hide in a cupboard for 10 minutes at a time.
It has a lot of faults - some of the puzzles are ridiculous and I cheated to progress - but I'm forgiving of these sort of things if the overall game is enjoyable. I got about 50 hours scary fun out of it.
 
Now this is a very very very very bias opinion but Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth might be okay to look into if you like more atmosphere to your FPS horror games.
Now mind you this comes with a lot of caveats, those being the game starts pretty damn good, then falls very very flat towards the middle, and is okay ish by the end, the game is a technical nightmare to get working, like Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, you need a unofficial patch.

Also you can't use the steam version because the unoffical patch doesn't work for it. So you will have to get the gog version and then patch that.

Again very Bias towards rough around the edges, but has heart put into it games like this.

If trying to get the game running turns ya off May I recommend the let's play Iron Chitlin did of it That is if you don't mind youtube funny men talking over the video making shitty jokes like all LPers tend to do.
 
Sanitarium - point and click adventure game, you can call it a short story anthology with very elaborate framing story. You crash your car and wake up in a strange asylum. From there you must figure out who you were, what you did before the crash and what happened with your brakes through allegorical visions and hallucinations (or self-contained short horror mini-adventures).
Pathologic 2 - not really a horror but very oppressive in both the setting and gameplay. Your father summons you to your home town, when you arrive he's already gone and an outbreak of a plague begins. As a surgeon \ shaman it's your job to figure out what caused the plague and how to stop it. Or embrace it.
The Cat Lady - Silent Hill-inspired point and click. You kill yourself but something on the other side sends you back with a rather gruesome mission.
Downfall - more polished sequel to The Cat Lady. You are fucked up in the head, your wife is fucked up in the head, your marriage is fucked so you both go to a hotel hoping to fix it and the hotel is fucked up in the head and haunted and it captures your wife.
Gabriel Knight (or a remake) - detective horror point and click. You are a womanizer writer voiced by Tim Curry and you are writing a book about an ongoing voodoo murders investigations while having strange dreams.
Phantasmagoria - very campy and gorey FMV horror point and click. You buy an old mansion and while exploring it you release something very bad.
Lone Survivor - another Silent Hill-inspired game. You must escape a city ravaged by a plague while being hunted by monsters.
Fear & Hunger 2 - jRPG that is a dark horror version of Majora's Mask.
 
Illuminati Order Official said:
The Cat Lady - Silent Hill-inspired point and click. You kill yourself but something on the other side sends you back with a rather gruesome mission.
Downfall - more polished sequel to The Cat Lady. You are fucked up in the head, your wife is fucked up in the head, your marriage is fucked so you both go to a hotel hoping to fix it and the hotel is fucked up in the head and haunted and it captures your wife.
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Glad someone mentioned these, The Cat Lady in particular is one of the more unique horror games I've really enjoyed.
 
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