It’s a viewing framework that proved perfectly suited for YouTube, where the tension creeps through the stream and the game’s flash-cut scares turned the platform into a vast, internet-wide movie theater. It’s borderline erotic horror, depending on your tastes. [William Hughes], You cannot stop the dead in Siren, an otherworldly, bitterly hard PlayStation 2 game from original Silent Hill director Keiichirō Toyama. A flick-screen arcade adventure, the aim is to retrieve all the parts of your dismembered android mother, all the while avoiding assorted floating monsters and admiring Jones’ trademark nasty scenery, which this time includes conjoined babies, dismembered body parts, and a bouncing sheep. Beautifully written, performed, and designed, The Last Of Us builds its bleak narrative around the relationship between a trauma-hardened smuggler and the teenager he agrees to escort across an America crawling with both bile-spewing mutants and murderous human scavengers. More petrifying than its predecessor and all but one of the sequels to come after it, Silent Hill 2 recognizes its titular environment as a psychic space as much as a physical one. But it is, more than anything else, the startling clarity of the game’s design that lingers in the memory: the way it reinvents the horror game by sticking to its roots. Although hamstrung to a certain extent by the Atari 2600’s simple hardware, there’s something oddly disturbing about Haunted House. The Blackout Club is a game that is meant to be experienced with other people. If taking magical pictures of excruciatingly slow ghosts while solving obtuse puzzles sounds a little “not for everyone,” well, these games are classics because they refused to tone it down. I still vaguely remember playing Splatterhouse in a coastal arcade and letting out a little yelp of fear when the hooded boss wielding two chainsaws leaped onto the screen. [A.A. Dowd], “This town’s finished,” some bloodthirsty villager croaks after you slice him down early in Bloodborne, and, buddy, he’s not kidding. [Matt Gerardi], Capcom’s Haunting Ground pulls from the psychosexual perversions of giallo director Dario Argento as well as older traditions of Gothic literature to create something uniquely bizarre—and, maybe, the last great classical survival horror game. It’s a question you know the answer to innately and immediately, as individualized as your fingerprint. Although all of CRL’s games were really good at creating a creepy atmosphere, Wolfman was, in this writer’s estimation, the scariest from the opening paragraph. [Sam Barsanti], The horror of recursion is a rare and special kind, and one Echo relentlessly pursues. Action, Adventure, Horror, Sci-fi. But they will rise again to hunt you through dim levels designed with such malice that you sometimes have to laugh, too. Instead, the makers of early horror games had to come up with all kinds of creative ways to scare or unnerve players – and inevitably, some of these techniques worked better than others. Best Horror Games for PC Windows Central 2021. But the cleverest innovation was a countdown clock: Take too long clearing a path through the titular mansion and your cowering loved ones are goners. Horror gaming fans that have played all the newer releases should check out these 10 best retro horror games from the 80s … Granting control over a college student transformed into a hulking monster hunter by his magical, conspicuously Vorheesian hockey mask, the series broke new ground for content warnings (“The horrifying theme of this game may be inappropriate for young children… and cowards,” went one disclaimer), while offering level design gross enough to satiate any Fangoria subscriber. Accordingly, horror games have tried everything in the book in order to scare players: disempowerment, alienation, animatronic jump-scares, eroticism, flagrant shattering of the fourth wall, and so on. This point-and-click adventure weaponizes your curiosity against you, turning every innocent click on a shower curtain or piano into a tense test of fate that may very well result in the surprise appearance of the Scissorman, a murderous little fella who gleefully pursues our hero, Jennifer, with cartoonish clippers. When a Delta Force ally bellows “I live for this shit” from the chopper, he speaks for the meathead within us all. [Chris Breault], Left 4 Dead 2 unwinds the sense of isolation and disempowerment central to so many horror games: You’re playing online with a couple of friends, slashing and shooting and dousing zombies with gasoline. Even the release of a lackluster remake earlier this year hasn’t deadened the surreal allure of the game. Eventually the games would develop a broader mythos, but the economical and brutally effective first installment is the best—a shrine to the jump-scare navigated via a spectral, faulty surveillance system. Go to Hell programmer John George Jones returned two years later with a game even weirder and grotesque than its predecessor. The result is equal parts The Disintegration Loops and Videodrome, Doom and Gone Home, an altgame classic and a ghost story for the ages. Even the title is haunted by the ghost of a game never to be released. 15 Slasher Horror Games to Play in October; ... PC. Most zombie games give you entrails. A decade and a half later, we’re still getting Deus Ex games... and they’re good Deus Ex games for one simple reason: They’ve stayed true to the original. They’re also fun as hell—a realm where the violence of other games is newly purposeful, and game designers are free to exercise their most out-there tendencies. Indie developer Puppet Combo has the market cornered when it comes to vintage-esque, horror movie-inspired games, with titles like Babysitter Bloodbath offering PS 1-style graphics with storylines that feel like something straight out of an ‘80s slasher flick. The “more comical than scary” comment from the Go to Hell entry also applies here, but it’s worth mentioning that Soft and Cuddly was mildly controversial at a time when graphic gore in computer games was still relatively unusual. The result was the first wave of truly scary, gory, and atmospheric horror video games, a wave that included fan favorite franchises like Silent Hill, Alone In the Dark, and the Resident Evil. There’s a great tradition in horror cinema of the low-budget, unexpected success immediately generating a raft of sequels, spin-offs, and rip-offs, whether it’s the post-Halloween wave of holiday-themed slasher flicks or the immediately annualized Saw franchise. THE BEST PC HORROR GAMES: F.E.A.R. This article was written by a Rediscover the '80s staff writer. But anyone who felt even a tinge of panic as the game disconnected their controller or calmly insisted it was wiping their memory card could relate to its repeated mantra of terrified reassurance: “This isn’t really happening.” [A.A. Dowd], From its cartoonishly violent kills to its lovingly recreated ’80s-summer-camp backdrops to the persistent “ki ki ki, ma ma ma” on the soundtrack, last year’s asymmetrical multiplayer adaptation of the popular slasher series is the closest you can get to actually living through a Friday The 13th movie—assuming, of course, that you do live. These days, we fully expect modern video games to have us cowering behind our sofas, with present-day computers and consoles able to render all sorts of things you need for a properly scary story: rain, blood, that sort of thing. Add in a legitimately brilliant mechanic that simulates tense moments by forcing you to hold the controller incredibly still, and you’ve got a recipe for the cheap, effective kind of cinematic mayhem that horror fans crave. But also, probably, kind of hot. The 17 best educational games of the 70s, 80s and 90s How many did you play as a kid? Growing up in the eighties, I spent countless hours playing these classic video games.I remember playing the Pong Console, TRS-80 Color Computer, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Colecovision, Intellivision, Atari 7800, Sega Master and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).I hope you enjoy playing … One of them’s an android intent on protecting the alien. As you leave it and trundle further down the slope, toward some kind of apocalypse, the game asks you to wonder: “Where does this end?” [Gareth Damian Martin], Take away the monsters, and the impossibly thick fog, and those mysterious air sirens that periodically coat everything in a layer of nightmare rust, and Silent Hill would still be one creepy-ass place: a drab American nowhere in perpetual decay, the kind of ghost town you can find in the forgotten back corners of every state. They were moribund five years ago, too, but that didn’t stop Naughty Dog, of Uncharted fame, from yanking the genre out of its grave with an instantly beloved postapocalyptic epic. Alongside a wave of like-minded early-millennium Japanese horror films like Ju-On and Pulse, it proposes that the very technology containing it is haunted, perhaps cursed. It is, unique for video games, a bit other than just straight horror. Its iconography—Lisa standing stock-still and stilt-legged in the foyer, a skinless goblin baby mewling in a sink—is as profoundly, riotously wrong as any in cinema, and its single stretch of hallway, looped forever in a gradual downward spiral, etches itself in the player’s mind like a trauma. It’s also terrifying, because every time one of these poor dumb kids dies, it’s on account of you, the player, screwing something up. After all its oddball digressions, Resident Evil 4 can just snap its fingers, and the fear is back. But way back in the mists of time, at the dawn of the video game medium, that kind of realism simply wasn’t possible. If Lovecraft was repulsed by any person not exactly like him (and, more than a few stories suggest, by himself too), Anchorhead burrows inside that feeling as the subject of repulsion. A top-down RPG, Sweet Home sees five characters hunting for an escape route from a mansion with a grim history – and just to add to the fun, the building’s teetering on the brink of collapse. You walk in surgical gowns and clerical robes muttering prayers to a god that will be scientifically disproven by whatever shrieking beast comes slashing out of the darkness next. It knows you’re here, somewhere, and it wants you dead. Horror, Psychedelic, Cute, Casual. 0 Comments. All three of Pathologic’s playable characters are healers, of a sort, but none of them is fully equipped to handle the rot lurking at the heart of its backwater Russian village. Any game—including remakes and “teasers”—was up for grabs. Taking place beneath a full moon, and with locations later extending to gloomy, bat-filled caves and haunted dungeons, Cauldron certainly had a decent atmosphere, and for the time, the graphics are really colorful and detailed. Sweet Home was one of the earliest examples of a game that uses its mechanics to unnerve the player; weapons and supplies are in short supply, and once characters die, they’re gone for good. In the former, you rushed around in a dream world, punching rats and snakes and collecting the bones which formed Freddy Krueger’s corpse. DEVOUR. Periodic breaks in the hectic, run-and-gun carnage create pockets of anxiety, as you round blind corners or sprint into darkness, waiting to be ambushed by the next horde; sometimes you hear the threat before you see it, an offscreen snort or growl portending your, well, doom. But with Soma, Frictional aimed for terror of a different sort, the kind that leaves your mind racing and your stomach queasy. avg. Amstrad GX-4000. Even a simple jump-scare, often eye-rolling in movies, gains a strange new power when you’re the one inching forward through the basement. This is the game that spawned a long-running horror franchise, leading to multiple sequels and spin-offs, two movies, comic-book series, and more. Hidetaka Miyazaki famously reinvented the role-playing game—and recalibrated the universe’s expectations for video game difficulty—with Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, but Bloodborne’s shift to full-on horror clarified and refined his vision. [William Hughes], Horror and action fight for the wheel in every chapter of Capcom’s gloriously overstuffed pulp adventure. This game does not provide any guidelines, tips, tutorials and so on. score: 58 of 200 (29%) required scores: 1, 7, 36, 59, 99 list stats leaders vote Vote print comments. Heroine Fiona is accompanied by Hewie, a White Shepherd whose mood and obedience is up to the player to manage; without Hewie by her side, Fiona is virtually defenseless against a cavalcade of villains who all want her body for their own purposes. Obsessed by the uncanny qualities of repetition, mirroring, and infinite loops, its planet-sized palace is Versailles trapped in a crystal prism, glittering, eternal, ingrown. The deliberately placed cameras and static, almost-Impressionist backgrounds allow for a stunning level of authorship that’s so often lost in modern games. And nothing is as creative as a scared imagination. P.T. 2016 was a Great Year for Horror Game Fans 2016 saw a number of amazing games released across multiple platforms, and horror fans were treated to quite a few gems that were best played after dark. You wake up with your clothes torn, your hands covered in blood, and angry townsfolk gathered around the corpse of a woman outside. Instead, it simply refined the hoard-and-evade formula, sending players creeping through the fixed, exaggerated camera angles of a new pre-rendered, postapocalyptic environment, including a police station hilariously designed around baroque puzzles. IMSCARED is a low-fi first-person horror game that describes itself describes itself as a "metahorror" experience. Commodore Amiga. Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is the high point—building on its nearly-as-good predecessor to create an unapologetic, polished work of Japanese folk horror. But Splatterhouse gave that button-mashing genre a fresh coat of blood-red paint, replacing the usual interchangeable goons with grotesque ghouls, to be clobbered, chopped, and chainsawed into pulp. The game’s setting is the apex of surreal, illogical survival-horror environmental design: a castle whose absurd interiors, piling up with no regard for coherence or verisimilitude, creates madness. [Clayton Purdom], Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002). Puzzle Bobble. As a consequence, Until Dawn is filled with a host of unlikable characters, cheap fake-outs, and deranged, over-the-top acting (especially courtesy of Peter Stormare, who spends most of his screen time hamming it up straight into the camera). Arcade. But then the program starts pushing aggressively at the boundaries of the fourth wall, tossing up fake crash bugs, filling a folder on your desktop with eerie little messages from its spectral antagonist, and doing everything in its power to present itself, not simply as a game, but as a sort of otherworldly virus infecting your system. [Sam Barsanti], The underrated A Machine For Pigs might share the Amnesia name, but Soma was the game given the unenviable task of actually furthering Amnesia’s legacy. Designed by one-woman horror-game powerhouse Kitty Horrorshow, Anatomy tasks the player with creeping through an empty, pitch-black suburban home, finding eerie audio tapes that equate the house with a human body. But it remains a subversive triumph, its giallo-inspired mystery and threatening atmosphere impossibly wrenching so much dread out of a humble 16-bit console. Top 10 Best Retro Horror Games. [Matt Gerardi], Tecmo’s Fatal Frame series is as long-running as any of its survival horror kin, but has never quite garnered the same attention as a Silent Hill or Resident Evil. And the “monster,” such as she is, grinning and eye-gouged, is an agent of truly unfair, violent randomness, an unavoidable specter floating through the game’s code. Brilliantly written by Rob Pike, Wolfman casts the player as a monster who must find a way to control his killer instinct, and it’s impossible to sit through the game without an occasional shudder – proof that the scariest encounters rely not on dazzling graphics, but the player’s imagination. Or maybe it’s the weird minimalism of the sound and the single-colored walls of the mansion itself – the act of repeatedly charging around almost identical screens being like a blocky recurring nightmare. He never takes the wrong linguistic lessons from Lovecraft, keeping the accumulation of detail but clearing off the thick bramble of self-regarding verbosity and obnoxious tics. Remarkably, Jones once claimed in a Sinclair User interview that Soft & Cuddly was originally more gory and violent, but he changed the graphics before release. Check out the first episode of Horror Game History, where we'll be covering games released for the Atari, the NES, DOS, and more! Horror games are a dime a dozen. It’s also worth mentioning Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti (1989), a cute, Nintendo Famicom-only parody starring a super-deformed version of Rick, and even more TV and film references than its arcade parent. Little touches, like the ominously moving swing on the veranda and the flickering embers in the fireplace, add atmosphere, as does the eerie absence of sound. Splatterhouse 3, which got name-checked at the congressional hearings on video-game violence, brought a three-dimensional range of motion to the franchise’s primitive Evil Dead combat. $4.99. Commodore 64. Wild Streets. No other genre of games can give you the same hair-raising experience as a horror game, which makes playing horror games one of the most exhilarating experiences that you can have. Unfortunately, the tension’s undercut by the ease with which the possessed monsters die, and also the appearance of the demons themselves: depicted as a gas-like miasma, all semblance of fear is lost once you realize that Ash looks as though he’s running away from a deadly cloud of flatulence. PC is one of the best platforms for horror games. Video game enemies tend to look the same, and the decorations in a video game level tend to look the same, so Condemned plays off of both of those “limitations” by having the enemies look (and act) just like the set dressing, right up until the moment you turn your back and they run after you. With obtuse puzzles, a mansion that’s a nightmare just to get around, and a main character who makes Resident Evil’s barely mobile heroes look like parkour masters, there’s a great deal of Clock Tower that has aged miserably. It might not look like much from the video above, but Alien is a quite brilliant exercise in slowly-building tension. The sequel, Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back, was even better, and the witch on the cover looked like Bruce Forsyth in a green wig. Where this GameCube cult classic truly distinguished itself, though, was in its ingenious and literally patented “Sanity Effects”: Spotting a monster takes a quantifiable toll on your mental health, and as that particular bar drops, the game begins seriously altering your perception—with aural and visual hallucinations, with apparent glitches in the level design, with simulated technical hiccups and storytelling fake-outs. One need look no further than the 2002 remake of the first Resident Evil to see just how brilliant the results can be when those concepts were pushed to new limits and emboldened by a new generation of hardware. The game keeps kicking you out, forcing restarts, as the tape quality degrades and the software comes untethered, revealing the house’s true nature. Ms-Dos. The entire game shapes itself around fear, in a way that is difficult to play and harder to shake. The crude nature of the sprite design makes Go to Hell more comical than frightening, but then again, the gaudiness also gives the game a sort of neon-drenched, nightmarish air to it – like Hotline Miami, but with crucifixes instead of shotguns. In other horror games you may play a painter, a photojournalist, a sensitive person in psychological distress. 15 Strangest Legend of Zelda Unsolved Mysteries and Urban Legends, The Best CPU Coolers From be quiet! For most horror games, the quit button is the ultimate escape from threats, but Imscared turns your computer itself into the house that’s being haunted, leaving you with nowhere to run or hide from White Face’s uncanny stare. If Resident Evil’s first incarnation had to fade away, at least it did so in a zombie-incinerating blaze of glory. [A.A. Dowd], It was strange enough seeing Nintendo’s name, synonymous with brightly nonthreatening all-ages entertainment, on a survival horror game. 8 Call Of Cthulhu: Shadow Of The Comet. It is a co-op horror game that revolves around a group of teenagers that are trying to uncover a horrible secret that is lurking beneath their small town. Palace Pictures distributed Sam Raimi’s breakout horror classic The Evil Dead in the UK, and it was thanks to them that we ended up with Graham Humphrey’s stunning poster illustration, with its appropriately lurid colors and approving quote from Stephen King. [Gareth Damian Martin], As humans, we reserve our deepest, darkest fears not for monsters, not for murderers, but for sickness: The creeping corruption that lurks within. The character development isn’t window dressing; it lends real dramatic stakes to the game’s intense stealth action, and propels the story forward, through time and across time zones, to a final crucible (and choice) for these desperately bonded survivors. for Every Budget, 10 Horror Games from the ’80s That Scared Us. Characters lie to you, healing items drain your other stats, and someone, somewhere, is always on the verge of being the Sand Plague’s next victim. [Astrid Budgor], Until Dawn’s co-writer, Larry Fessenden, has a long and messy relationship with horror cinema, and it shows in the work, which is as close as gaming’s ever come to a playable B-movie slasher flick. But, with the day of pumpkins, trick-or-treaters, and apple bobbing almost upon us, this got us wondering: at what point did video games become scary? No, really. Duskers takes minimalism to an extreme, limiting both your knowledge and your inputs. It may look like a basic game by current standards, but just look at how far video games traveled between 1982’s Haunted House and the end of the decade: with its reliance on puzzle solving and suspense rather than combat, Sweet Home pointed the way ahead for a new generation of survival horror. For years after its release, players pored over the game, parsing it for clues about its meaning, its creator, their fate. [Clayton Purdom], Beat-’em-ups aren’t usually cited for their white-knuckle scariness, unless your list of personal phobias includes street brawling and blowing all your laundry money. Jones the cat likes some characters, but not others. The setting, the soundtrack and the unique enemies put horror games in a league of their own, making them quite popular among people around the world. you are the Point Man, a paranormal government operative who charges in slow motion past thudding bullets and screens of gun smoke to blow soldiers in half with his VK-12 shotgun. Final burst of creative ambition before the series was shackled to two consecutive Wii systems s bugs, which really. Hiding only ever brings you a temporary peace of a wandering spaceship you. Game shapes itself around fear, in a spatial sense, horror is often a Descent halls of the horrors. 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