Set amongst a wild, untouched, and radioactive landscape, this game's aesthetic use common word is similar to Walking Dead and is a little too realistic for comfort. The game requires players to build a base for survival and invite other players to work with them on their base. Free Horror Games On Steam Mcyou You. Top 5 Free Horror Game For Mac Os X Windows In Steam You The Best Free Scary Games On Pc Editorial Gamewatcher The 13 Best Horror Games On Steam For Pocket Gamer 13 Free Horror Games To Get You Ed This.
If all you want to do is shoot zombies, you can’t really do better than Killing Floor 2 ($30 on Remove product link) nowadays. With six-player co-op and a ton of unique weapons, your goal is basically to coat every single surface in the game with blood. I mean, technically your goal is just to kill every zombie that moves, but the persistent gore system is definitely a perk here. By the end of a level it’s like a meat-packing plant exploded. Kudos to Tripwire for supporting the game through its rough patches, too. What started out as a so-so sequel has turned into one of the best zombie-slaying games since.well, since the first Killing Floor.
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. But The Evil Within 2 ($60 on ) is excellent—maybe one of 2017’s best games. That’s my opinion, at least. The more open-world structure of some acts takes a bit of getting used to, but its more story-driven bits are home to jaw-dropping spectacle: people’s last moments frozen in time, unsettling architecture, supernatural hallucinations. All the pieces 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 ($20 on ) and Friday the 13 th, 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.
“Think Evolve, but for sadists,” I wrote. But Dead by Daylight is your only option now. The Friday the 13 th game got caught up in the ongoing lawsuit over the series rights, with the developers pretty much abandoning it in July and saying “no new content” would be forthcoming.
You can still buy it on Steam, but you’re better off sticking with Dead by Daylight. If you want horror where you have the heavy firepower to fight back, Dusk ($20 on ) is a hellscape worth checking out—even in Early Access. Taking inspiration from Quake and other blocky FPS games of the late ‘90s, it’s a mile-a-minute battle against the KKK and other less horrific monsters. It’s being released episodically, but two out of the three episodes are done and feel fantastic.
And if you were more into Heretic than Quake, Dusk publisher New Blood is also putting out, another horror-adjacent retro game with a focus on melee weaponry and magic. Now we're digging into Frictional's truly great scares. A Victorian-era castle may not seem like the best setting for a horror game, but with Amnesia: The Dark Descent ($20 on ) Frictional took everything it learned from its earlier games, polished it, and released one of the scariest games of all time. You play as Daniel, an archeologist who's lost his memory and has only a letter—apparently written by him—to guide his escape from the mad castle and shadowy figures that stalk him. As of 2018, Amnesia's also been updated with a new difficulty level, harder than before.
I wouldn't recommend it for new players, as true horror's found in thinking you might die and then escaping. But for veterans, it's great to have a reason to revisit the castle. And while it's more polarizing, the sequel Machine for Pigs ($20 on ) is worth checking out, as long as you curb your expectations. Resident Evil 7 ($30 on ) is a huge departure for the long-running horror series—probably the biggest reinvention since Resident Evil 4.
It gives up the third-person camera, abandons the usual Resident Evil aesthetic, and even gives up the focus on combat.for most of the game. What’s left is very clearly Frictional-inspired, more similar to Amnesia or Penumbra (or, going outside Frictional, Outlast).
There’s a lot of creeping around a house, playing cat-and-mouse with Jack Baker and his crazy family while trying to save your wife Mia. And being force-fed entrails. It’s not only the best Resident Evil in years, it’s also one of the best horror games period. Paratopic ($5.49 on ) is a horror game, I think. It’s not scary so much as bizarre, but if I had to fit it into a genre hole I’d choose horror. That disclaimer aside, I’d take 100 more Paratopics over another cobbled together jumpscare game. It’s really, really weird—a 45 minute experience where at least 10 minutes is spent just driving down a poorly-lit road and switching between the two garbled radio stations, smuggling VHS tapes across the border or something.
I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think Paratopic wants me to know. It’s an avant-garde experiment wrapped in PlayStation 1 graphics, and I love it in spite of itself. ($20 on ) and its story of a painter-gone-crazy has some hammy sections and a few too many cheesy jump scares, but its quieter moments are masterful psychological horror.
Not scary, per se, but unsettling in ways similar to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. See, every time you turn the camera, things change. Maybe the door you just came through disappears, or you enter a seemingly normal room only to realize all the furniture is on the ceiling. You can never trust your surroundings, and there’s something captivating about that.
The newest entry on the list, Visage ($25 on ) is in Early Access at the moment, and it shows. Inventory management is rough, some of the tutorial text has typos, and there are plenty of rooms gated off at the moment. But if you like slow-burn horror, Visage is shaping up to be great. You’re trapped in a house that just keeps going and going and going, a non-Euclidian space with creatures in the walls and a dearth of reliable lightbulbs. Speaking of which, Visage also adopts the “sanity” mechanic from Amnesia, Eternal Darkness, et al. Stay in the darkness too long.
Well, don’t stay in the darkness too long. That’s all I can suggest.
Little Nightmares ($20 on ) is the best Limbo-style platformer I’ve played. It borrows the standard Playdead template—you’re a small child and you do a lot of running (and sometimes jumping) to the right. Nothing new there. But these sorts of games live and die on their aesthetic. Little Nightmares blends the surreal and the grotesque in a way that’s both fascinating and just plain disgusting. Its shambling, oversized monsters aren’t necessarily scary but they are unnerving, and there’s a certain quality to them too—a light but ever-present social commentary at work. It’s captivating, and more than makes up for the simplistic mechanics.
Pathologic has been on this list since its inception, but in October of 2015 it got an update: An HD remaster of the game (complete with new translations) released on Steam. It’s not the full-fledged remake that, but rather an intermediate step called Pathologic Classic HD ($13 on ). Why’s the game so great? In short, Pathologic is like someone hired Kafka or maybe Camus (because of the plague storyline) to write The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. There’s a plague killing The Town, and you play as one of three characters trying to unravel the mysteries held within. Many people will die. It’s a cult classic, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s - about the game is pretty much required reading.
It's that time of year again when every good gamer's thoughts stray to horror titles. That's no surprise.
Video games put you directly into the thick of the action. That gives them an immediacy and a sense of ownership that books and films can only dream of. This sense of being there is an obvious springboard for traditional scares. Yet it's also a passage to things deeper and more unsettling. The thought that you, as the protagonist, might have done unspeakable things. Unspeakable things we might all do if we were pushed far enough. You'll find the best games in both categories below.
Along with some top traditional survival horror titles. What you won't find is much in the way of action gaming. It's fear, not monsters, that make a horror game. Amnesia: The Dark Descent By Frictional Games - (£14.99) Amnesia traps you in a mechanical vice. You are defenceless against the disfigured things that stalk the game. To surive you must hide in dark places until they go away.
Yet spending too long in the dark drives you insane. Until beetles start crawling across your screen and your breath stumbles out in ragged gasps.
Alone, in the dark, with headphones on I could only manage this in small doses. After fifteen minutes I'd have to turn on a lamp and text someone, just for the comfort of human contact. SOMA By Frictional Games - (£22.99) The new game from Frictional, the developer of Amnesia, trades shocks for something subtler and more insidious. SOMA tries to make you question your very humanity. It's set in an abandoned underwater station where something has gone catastrophically wrong.
There, you keep bumping into robots who believe they're people. And other robots who want to rip your head off.
As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that the former kind are actually the scarier ones. Lone Survivor: The Director's Cut By Jasper Byrne - (£10.99) With its pixel art visuals and side-scrolling gameplay you could mistake Lone Survivor for a cheerful indie adventure game or an RPG.
Lone Survivor is one of the darkest alleys in the indie gaming revolution. Most of humanity have transformed into faceless, shambling things.
Your avatar represents what could be the last person on earth. As food and other essentials dwindle, it's bleak beyond belief. Outlast By Red Barrels - (£14.99) The opening sequence of Outlast sees an investigative journalist driving to an asylum in a thunderstorm. He has a small video camera to make a 'found footage' film. It makes the game look like a roundup of every horror film cliche. And so it proves. Yet Outlast has a masterful grasp of the shock scare.
Bloodied lunatics will jump at you from the dark which permeates the game. There are revolting scenes of disfigurement, cannibalism and assault. Cliched it may be, but it's very effective. Layers of Fear By Bloober Team SA - (£9.99) This game is still in alpha, but what's there is already impressive. The whole game takes place in a haunted house that twists and changes round you as you explore.
After just fifteen minutes of this confusion I was jumping at every flickering pixel. As you get deeper, it becomes clear that your avatar has done some very wicked things indeed. The unfinished state of the game means we're left in the dark as to exactly what. And in some ways, it's scarier left to the vagaries of the imagination.
Alien: Isolation By Creative Assembly - (£31.99) For gamers of a certain age, Alien was their seminal horror film. It took 35 years and any number of badly executed franchise titles before it got a proper video game treatment. But it was worth waiting for. As the unbeatable, extraterrestrial terror pursues you through the game, you'll see echoes of the original film everywhere. Not just in the visual and sound design, but in the classic message that often, people are worse than the monsters chasing them.
System Shock 2 By Irrational Games - (£6.99) During its tutorial, System Shock 2 looks like a typical sci-fi shooter. It maintains that pretence right up until the start of your mission aboard the spaceship Von Braun. There you'll face some of the most memorably wicked antagonists in all of gaming. All your guns, training and cyber-modules are of little avail when they're starved of ammunition and spare parts. It's survival horror of the purest variety.
Don't let the age of the game put you off. However jagged the graphics might appear, the ragged sounds of cyborg mutants stalking you in the dark isn't something that dates. By Monolith Productions, Inc. (£6.99) This is the only game on this list which is, unquestionably, an out-and-out shooter. Other games have guns, sure, but they ration bullets like their own blood.
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Gives you the usual arsenal of a small private army to port around and point at people. What earns the game its spot is the antagonist. A small, delicate ghost of a girl who lacks a face and can tear apart a whole special forces squad with a mere thought. Suddenly, you feel you can justify the fact you're carrying all those guns. Alan Wake By Remedy Entertainment - (£22.99) Alan Wake feels like a fan's attempt to squeeze the entire horror canon into a single game. From gore to ghost stories.
From Lovecraft to King. It's all here. The result is predictably unweildy. It can feel bloated and there are some uneasy shifts between action thrills and psychological chills. But with so much content and so much imagination, it's a case of throwing it all at the wall and finding an awful lot sticks nicely. Resident Evil 4 By Capcom - (£14.99) The Resident Evil franchise pretty much invented modern survival horror.
But many of the older games in the series feel slow and clumsy by current standards. Even the much-vaunted fourth outing suffers from tank controls and obscure camera angles. They're there to increase the scare in what's otherwise a standard action game (Blasphemy!
Between them and the menagerie of repulsively parasitised foes, Resident Evil 4 still supports more than its fair share of shocks. Dead Space By EA Redwood Shores - (£9.99) The premise of fighting an army of nasties built from mangled corpses is a good start for any horror game. What made Dead Space special is how you fought them. Lopping off different body parts might disable or merely enrage your foes. By the time you found out which, it was often too late. Later games in this series crossed the line into full-blooded third person shooters.
You can see the original heading in that direction. But the scarcity of resources leaves the game with one foot in classic survival horror.
Pathologic By Ice-pick Lodge - (£7.49) Developer Ice-Pick lodge isn't exactly a horror specialist. Its hallmark, however, is games of such outragous oddness that it's hard to categorise them as anything else. Pathologic sees you trapped in a town stricken with a virulent disease. Its plot is set over the course of twelve days and events unfold without you, whether the consequences ruin your game or not. The same devil may care design pertains to whether you get enough weapons to fight or even food to survive.
As the town descends into panicked madness the devil may not care, but you certainly will. Half-Life By Valve - (£6.99) Do not adjust your set. Half-Life did have a few scary moments, but it's not listed here for the original game. It's here for the mod series. The mods transform the game into a brutally difficult zombie apocalypse setting. The dark is permeates everything, seething with horrors. Ammunition is so scarce that shooting feels like giving blood forcing you up close and personal.
It's proof that old games can still be great games.