It's always fun though and varied enough that you feel like you get a bit of everything. Alan Wake isn't like most horror games. It doesn't trade in excessive gore or jump scares - in fact, it's not that scary on the whole. But its sense of place and character is second to none. That place is Bright Falls, a Twin Peaks -inspired mountain community with a terrible secret. The dulcet tones of the night DJ rambling across the airwaves - mixed with the little vignettes you can catch on TV - make this town feel alive, like a character unto itself.
Its story unfolds like a thrilling TV miniseries, right down to the episodic structure that bookends each plot twist and revelation. Alan Wake further distinguishes itself by, well, being a lot of fun to play. Maybe that sounds a bit mean, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more enjoyable horror game than Alan Wake from a pure gameplay perspective.
Developer, Remedy is as famous for action as storytelling, and that comes to bear here, as simple, fluid controls do away with the stilted awkwardness that's characteristic of this genre.
Taking on a group of enemies is challenging for all the right reasons: the encounters are well crafted, and the pistol-plus-flashlight combat combo is fun to use without making you feel invincible. Carrion might look like a bit of fun because it is, but it's also a great horror game that reverses the roles and lets you play the monster. Through its pixelly recreation of tentacles and teeth, it really captures the essence of a good creature feature as you hoover up screaming scientists, rending limb from limb and leaving nothing but parts in your wake.
It's excessively gory in a laugh-out-loud way and in between the bloody carnage, there are some decent puzzles to work out using an ever-expanding range of monster powers. A fairly straightforward alien shooter can become much more unsettling when the goal changes from you defending yourself to saving others, and the element of randomization in Mooncrash does a lot in keeping you on your toes. But basic Prey, too, has a certain spookiness to it. Apart from being a brilliant game with many secret nooks and crannies to discover, Prey, just like other Arkane games, gives you a certain freedom of approach.
Many stories you come across in its environment tell of horrifying accidents, people trying to flee, or alien encounters. There is something deeply wrong with Little Nightmare 2 , in a good way.
The sequel really doubles down on the original creepy children's story world but somehow ups the unpleasantness to impressive levels. The weirdness just creeps under your skin as you explore. From creepy juddering mannequins, to faceless, lost people - faces seemingly worn away by the TV static they'll die to stare at - there's little in this game that won't unnerve you, or leave you feeling uncomfortable thinking about it.
It can be frustrating at times - the controls never really live up to the demands and there are a few trial and error encounters to blunder through. But stick with it and you'll experience probably one of the most traumatizing games on this list. Teen slashers have been around for nearly four decades now, but aside from the abysmal Friday the 13th on NES, games haven't really been brave enough to venture into that territory.
Until now. 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.
You can craft weapons but they won't help and you can attempt to learn patterns and layouts, but the world will shift around you. Teleglitch, more than any other game on this list, uses its difficulty as a weapon to terrify. The visuals are lo-fi corruptions that still manage to communicate how awful your situation is, as every room and corridor swims with the hazy form of unimaginably horrible things.
If your reactions aren't up to scratch, you'll suffer, and if you don't learn from your mistakes, you're doomed to repeat them over and over and over and over. Hell, even if you do learn from your mistakes Teleglitch will find new ways to confuse and confound you, and new things to confront you with.
Tricky as it is, you'll make progress eventually and that's when the whole situation becomes even more agonising. You become used to treating life as a throwaway thing and then, suddenly, you're carrying just the right equipment and confidence starts to rise, and you make the biggest mistake of all.
You value your tiny doomed character and you start to think ahead. Not to a homecoming parade or even the next level, but to the next room and the one after. You start to believe that you've got a chance in hell and then the game reminds you that you are in hell and that hell doesn't do chances.
Teleglitch is like top-down Doom if Doom were about a terrified survivor of the Phobos incident rather than a rugged space marine. 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 original Dead Space threw 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.
It's ridiculous that this should be terrifying, really, since the whole premise is that you're alone in orbit around the dead alien planet you're remotely exploring with a drone. You couldn't possibly be any further from anything down there, and it's not likely there's even anything hostile anyway. You have a limited time in which to pilot your little tracked drone around the surface, gathering artifacts and recalling it to the ship so you can analyse them.
If you stay for too long, you'll contract a fatal dose of the radiation that's bathing your entire ship. It's far too eerie. The radiation makes visibility poor, and the atmosphere and wind will repeatedly convince you there is danger nearby.
You could strip out the microphone to make space, but then you're left with nothing in your ears but your own breathing, and the faint, unsettling background noises of your ship. The invisible threat of radiation has never felt more oppressive in a game. The Evil Within isn't just a third-person survival horror game - it is every third-person survival horror game. It begins in madness and swiftly moves to gothic melodrama and Hammer horror.
It contains apparently earnest science fiction concepts and places them alongside hammy mad doctor tropes that would make Kenneth Branagh's topless Frankenstein blush. In one level it introduces invisible enemies that can only be tracked by observing their impact on curtains and puddles, and waves of dynamite-wielding enemies that assault the player and companions in a blood-drenched stand-off. 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. Lone Survivor initially looked like a 2d Resident Evil but as more details emerged, it started to resemble a 2d Silent Hill. That lone developer Jasper Byrne managed to shake off both of those reference points and make something that stands alone is impressive enough, but that Lone Survivor is funny and heartbreaking as well as frightening is astonishing.
No game other than Hotline Miami has a soundtrack so important to its mood and overall composition. Whether it's the improbable jazz filtering through a rotting and apparently uninhabited apartment building or the click of fingers in a Lynchian dream lodge, Lone Survivor's horror takes place in a welcoming sea of synths. The plot demands to be unpicked and although there is a fairly strict structure, replays reveal fresh ideas and the player often has control of the pacing.
Some scenes are gruesome but there's a warmth to Lone Survivor. Not everything is lost, even when there seems to be nobody left alive, and despite the monsters, gore and corpses, the eventual horror is touched by sorrow rather than disgust. Amnesia: The Dark Descent's water monster captured the imagination of every horror fan who was paying attention.
In , 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.
The Ghost Of You is an interactive horror story in which you play as a woman called Libretto. She's recently bereaved, and has been, to coin a phrase, through some shit. The prologue has her invited to a concert by a close friend who she's not seen for a long while - Libretto has pushed everyone away in her grief, and even going to the concert hall is a bit of an ordeal for her. It turns out more than one reunion is on the cards, as she suddenly runs into her ex-girlfriend, whose heart is clearly as broken as her own.
It's foreshadowed, so not a total surprise, but the horror in The Ghost Of You descends with shocking violence. The people at the concert go through absolute hell, and it's down to you to guide Libretto through the night and try to escape without losing the people you love. It quite soon becomes a sort of multiple choice adventure game, in which you pick a path through the building, decide what to say or do with any survivors, and how to avoid or escape danger.
Though gruesome, it never feels exploitative or pornographic - even an optional vein of slightly warped eroticism depending on some of your interactions is an interesting and thought out subplot.
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.
Ice-Pick Lodge's Kickstarted game about the horrors of waking nights wasn't particularly well-received by critics, but what do they know? Structurally, it's a game that feels like escaping from a box to find oneself inside a slightly larger box — a puzzling Lament Configuration of a game — and that isn't the most rewarding experience.
However, all things move toward an end and Knock-knock is no exception. It's a game that seems to take place in the moments between sleeping and waking, and it's never clear which state you're moving from and which state you're moving toward. Sounds are exaggerated or muffled, seemingly at random, and every object and space is heavy with meaning. Or at least heavy with potential meaning. In this house, at this time, turning the hands of a clock accelerates the night, pushing the world toward the relief of a new day.
Avoiding the worst apparitions — be they motes in the eye or the brain — is essential, but a frightful encounter will only elongate the night rather than ending it, violently or otherwise. Back when Left 4 Dead 2 was part of a daily diet, it lent itself to all kinds of invented survival scenarios, games within games that sometimes required mods but more often simply required other players willing to experiment with odd, self-imposed rules.
Even now, it's still one of the best co-op games you can play today. One of the beautiful things about both Left 4 Dead games is how clearly the developers have indulged their love of horror films. The first Evil Within was a mess of a game. Oh sure, it had brilliant ideas, but the execution was just dismal at times—clunky movement, a tedious and poorly paced opening, and a save system that caused more than one person I know to quit after a few hours.
All the ideas that made the first game worth the grind are back, and paired with a game that actually plays well this time. Once upon a time this slide was a battle between Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th , two horror games with a similar conceit: Asymmetric multiplayer, where four survivors have to band together and hold out while another player, the powerful monster, tries to kill them off. But Dead by Daylight is your only option now.
Rest in peace, and all. One alien. And it worked. Though a bit overlong and at times needlessly difficult, Alien: Isolation is the strongest big-budget horror experience in years. This game is just plain tense— almost unbearably so if you play it with a VR headset.
A Victorian-era castle may not seem like the best setting for a horror game, but with Amnesia: The Dark Descent Frictional took everything it learned from its earlier games, polished it, and released one of the scariest games of all time. Asylums are easy fodder for horror.
And if you already played and enjoyed the base Outlast game, be sure to check out the Whistleblower DLC released last year. Outlast 2? Not so much. You wake up on a strange spaceship, surrounded by bodies, and it only gets worse from there.
Styled after the classic isometric horror game Sanitarium and paying obvious homage to Alien , Event Horizon , I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and other bits of beloved genre fiction, Stasis is easily one of the best horror games in recent years—not necessarily because of overt scares, but because it tells a compelling story and has a way of getting under your skin.
If System Shock 2 is the best space-based survival horror game of all time—and it is— Dead Space is a close second.
Dead Space is essentially the horror game Doom 3 so desperately tried to be. Scared by… a text adventure?
0コメント