The 20 Best Horror Games Of The Last 20 Years

It’s kind of wild that it took so long for a studio to make a horror game based on the Alien IP. You have a monstrous killer alien that can sneak around and pick you off in the shadows and a universe filled with grimy, cramped space stations. There isn’t a more perfect setup for a survival horror game out there. Thankfully, in 2014 Creative Assembly and Sega finally gave us the super scary Alien horror game we’d been missing.

Creeping around a (nearly) empty space station, all alone, while being hunted endlessly by an unstoppable xenomorph is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done in a video game. Plus, while it has some connections to the franchise, newcomers to Alien can enjoy it without checking a wiki. And with the recent news that we’re finally getting a sequel, it’s a perfect time to play Alien: Isolation and learn just how scary one alien can be. — Zack Zwiezen

Capcom’s underrated hide-and-seek horror game is one of the harder games to play on this list. Haunting Ground is a one-and-done PlayStation 2 game from 2005 that was overshadowed by some of the company’s bigger games like Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening. While it wasn’t Capcom’s biggest hit, Haunting Ground has gained a cult following over the years and is still one of the most memorable horror games from the era. It follows Fiona Belli, a young woman who is kidnapped and trapped within a large castle. As she tries to make her escape, she finds an ally in a fierce but friendly German Shepherd named Hewie, who protects her from assailants who chase her through the castle grounds.

Throughout most of Haunting Ground, Fiona is helpless, only able to hide long enough to disorient the villains chasing her through the hallways of the castle. Hewie is her stalwart defender, and the two of them solve puzzles and fight off foes together based on Fiona’s commands, growing close as they try to escape the hell they’ve been trapped in.

Even in 2005, Haunting Ground was a little clunky to control—that only added to the tension back then, but might frustrate nearly 20 years later. However, Haunting Ground’s brand of horror remains disturbing to this day, as the threat of sexual violence is pervasive, which makes for a harrowing experience, albeit one not for everyone. This looming threat is a key piece of the dread and fear the game evokes, and if that sounds like something you’d rather not engage with, that’s valid. But Haunting Ground’s terrors still echo in my mind, and I wish it would get ported to something modern. — Kenneth Shepard

Phasmophobia was exactly what I needed in covid quarantine—a chance to prove myself after avoiding horror games my entire life. The co-op horror title from indie studio Kinetic Games takes the TV ghost hunter formula and brilliantly applies it to a game, one in which you and your squad of amateur hunters try to discover and banish a ghost from a domicile (before the specter drags you into the realm of the undead, of course). Phasmophobia isn’t going to blow you away with its graphics or gross you out with gore—this is about tension, about dragging out unease until you feel you’ll go mad, about being very careful what you say (because the game uses voice detection), lest you end up dead.

But Phasmophobia’s unique setup also makes for moments of hilarity that punctuate the fear—a teammate’s voice cutting off mid-scream as they’re killed by a vengeful spirit, or a bold hunter taunting a ghost with curses and insults. Playing alongside other people made me braver, allowing me to ease into the horror genre without soiling my shorts. It’s only gotten bigger since its debut, with regular support from the devs, so Phasmophobia is a consistently great horror game option when you’re in the mood to be spooked. — Alyssa Mercante

The original Silent Hill 2 is a genuine classic from the PS2 era and a game worth playing even in 2024. However, it’s an older game and can feel clunky at times. Plus, you might not have a PS2 or want to mess with the necessary mods to get it running on a PC. Lucky for us, we’ve got a new and great way to play Silent Hill 2 in 2024.

The newly released remake isn’t a perfect copy of the original game and won’t replace it, but it does provide a very close recreation of Silent Hill 2 while improving the game’s controls, combat, and visuals. If you’ve never played Silent Hill 2, the remake is a fantastic way to experience the creepy story of a man looking for his dead wife in a haunted town filled with monsters, fog, and broken souls. Just be warned that this new remake can get intense, so you might want to have someone play with you to help add some levity as you slowly work your way through its hellish levels. And maybe keep the lights on, too? — ZZ

Alan Wake 2 is horror on a grand scale, a fusion of police procedural, supernatural scarefest, and existential journey of the self, with all the pieces fueling each other in a virtuosic kaleidoscope of tonal shifts, showstopping musical numbers, and confrontations with the terrifying doubts and insecurities we sometimes face when we look inside ourselves in an effort to create something and send it out into the world. With this game, Remedy creative director Sam Lake and his team pull out all the stops, taking us on a breathtaking odyssey that weaves together threads from all of Lake’s work over the past 20-plus years as one of the most distinctive creators in gaming. More than a scary game, it’s a daring and exhilarating narrative masterpiece with fantastic details and wonderful surprises awaiting around every turn. — Carolyn Petit

Full disclosure: I don’t love the Zero Escape series. I feel Spike Chunsoft’s escape room death game series lacks the thematic cohesion I need from the genre and relies mostly on narrative gymnastics and plot twists rather than a centralized idea. However, the first game, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors struck a good balance, before its sequels came along made an already complicated premise more so. 999 is a much more concise experience than its follow-ups that captures the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in one place with a bunch of strangers. Nine people wake up on a sinking ship and are forced by a masked individual named Zero to take part in a series of escape rooms before the ship is lost to the great blue sea. But to what end? That’s the question that lingers as tensions rise and doubts manifest between the group. But they must still work together to move forward.

999’s escape rooms are full of brain teasers and puzzles that are satisfying to unravel, but its best moments are all the horrifying reveals that follow every unlocked door. There’s a lot of complex science fiction holding up the visual novel’s brutal violence and terrifying discoveries, but in the margins of all that, the game also elevates a human story of connection across space and time. If you want to see more like it, there are two sequels, though neither hit anywhere near as hard as 999’s final stretch. The game has been ported to several platforms, but none capture the razor-sharp tension as well as the original DS release. — KS

You can’t have a list of scary games without including at least one Resident Evil entry. Capcom’s long-running survival horror franchise has produced some truly scary classics (and some stinkers, too) so picking just one was hard. But, I think Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is the scariest entry in the franchise.

The switch to first-person not only shook up the series, which had long been third-person, but also made it feel like you were truly stuck in the horrible situation Ethan Winters finds himself in during RE7. With that switch to first-person, RE7 also returned to a slower pace and a bigger focus on creepy moments and scares over action and gunplay. The end result is a nail-bitingly tense survival horror game that reinvigorated the series and provided us with one of the best VR horror games around. (RE7 is still great on a flatscreen, too, though!) — ZZ

Little Nightmares is a solid game, but Little Nightmares 2 expands on the previous horror puzzle-platformer in clever ways, with more intricate puzzles, even more impressive visuals, and a co-op mechanic. As someone who is a pretty poor platform game player (I rush too much), making players do tricky platforming while scared is such a brilliant conceit and LN2 executes it incredibly.

The sequel introduces a new protagonist, Mono, though it also brings back the first game’s lead, Six, as the other playable character. While traveling through a forest laden with traps, Mono discovers a creepy old house filled with decaying meat, scary mannequins, and Six, who is being held hostage. From then on, Six is with you—though not all the time. Little Nightmares 2 lets you play through much of the game with an emotional support character, which helps things feel less scary as you’re not entirely alone—but when Six and Mono are separated, the fear creeps up the back of your throat like bile. — AM

Dead Space was a revelation when it landed in 2008. It had outstanding visual design, brilliantly working protagonist Isaac Clarke’s health meter into the spine of his suit (or RIG). The way you use repurposed mining tools to slice the deadly appendages off of the horrifying necromorphs who want nothing more than to slice you open set its combat apart from that in other survival horror games of the era. Yet at the same time, it smartly took some cues from games like Resident Evil 4, hitting that sweet spot of making your weapons and attacks feel satisfyingly powerful in certain contexts, while also making you feel constantly threatened. In other words, it took familiar concepts and mechanics but put just enough of a twist on them to establish itself as a true original.

However, when I think about what really made the first Dead Space so exceptional, I think that, more than anything else, it was its incredible setting. The USG Ishimura feels in many ways like a real, functional ship, a space in which people lived and worked before all hell broke loose, not just a series of linked video game environments. Though the Ishimura is a very different ship from the Nostromo of Alien, it shares a believable functionality with that space, which is essential to making the horrors lurking in its dark and derelict corridors that much more grounded and unsettling. Thankfully, the 2023 remake leaves everything that works best about Dead Space mostly untouched, so you can still experience its brilliance today, with visuals that are more up to modern standards. — CP

You’re in a dimly lit apartment hallway. A storm outside is savaging the windows and walls of the building, threatening to tear it down to the studs. The walls of the tenement seem rotten—not like they’re infested with mold, but like they bear the scars of something sinister. They’re barely containing the evil of this place. As you walk forward, you make out family pictures on the cabinet and a clock shows that it’s nearly midnight. A broadcast is playing over the radio; a man has killed his wife and kids. As you proceed down to the end of the hallway, a lamp swings and creaks overhead, a room with a dingy bulb greets you, and as you pass through it, you find yourself back at the very start of the hallway. Welcome to hell.

While it seems deceptively sparse, Hideo Kojima’s P.T houses a whole range of nightmares within its precious few walls. Along the way, it also redefined horror games, even though it was ultimately a teaser for a game that’d regrettably never come to be. Though Konami would deprive the world of Silent Hills—a joint collaboration between Kojima and the filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro— before it could ever come to fruition, we were left with P.T, which has gone on to become a legend around these parts. Unceremoniously dropped in the middle of E3, the teaser, which wasn’t initially revealed as either a Silent Hill or Kojima game, puzzled players for weeks. Successive loops through its haunted halls revealed many mysteries, ghastly sounds, and repeated run-ins with Lisa, a monstrous ghoul that has influenced many horror game creatures since 2014. And that’s really the thing about P.T: everyone was so stoked on its haunting first-person presentation, production values, and themes that its eventual cancellation left a void that’d be filled by games and creators who took it upon themselves to take up the mantle. It’s almost assuredly the single-most defining horror game of the 2010s, even if it can be finished in about a half hour.

Following Silent Hills’ cancellation, P.T was removed from the PlayStation Store, magnifying the value of systems that still had the teaser by tenfold. It was already a hit, but the move turned P.T into the stuff of legends. And you now have it to thank for countless of the best horror games that have come out since, like Resident Evil 7, which took a similar tact to P.T by releasing a horrifying slow burn of a demo and reimagining the series as a first-person survival horror experience. Thank you, P.T, I’m so sorry we never got to see what could’ve been. — Moises Tavares

You might think a first-person melee-focused Xbox 360 launch game couldn’t be a very scary horror game, but you’d be wrong. Condemned: Criminal Origins puts you in the shoes of an FBI agent who is investigating a murder spree and ends up getting wrapped up in the action and framed for killing someone. What follows is a tense adventure as the agent tries to find the real killer while fighting numerous people using various melee items. The combat in Condemned is messy, heavy, slow, and dangerous. And because you can only carry one weapon at a time, you sometimes have to work with whatever you have during ambushes.

It’s a shame that beyond one (also good) sequel, Condemned has been left to rot in a ditch by Sega. This could have been the start of a popular survival horror series with sequels and spin-offs, but instead, it’s mostly been forgotten and is hard to play in 2024. Your best bet is to play it on PC using fan mods and tweaks to make it run. A tragic fate for a fantastic horror game. — ZZ

Until Dawn is the definitive recommendation that I make to anyone looking for a horror game, because it’s as close to classic campy horror as you can get. There are horny teenagers, a cabin in the woods that’s on top of a snowy mountain, and a jock, cheerleader, goody-goody, and every other archetype imaginable. To make things even better, there’s a nearby asylum that was abandoned, a creepy groundskeeper, and the uneasy feeling of something in the woods watching our delightful cast of rowdy teens. It’s got it all and then some.

Until Dawn plays like a cinematic adventure game (think Heavy Rain or even Telltale’s catalog) where different chapters drop you into the perspectives of the star-studded cast, including Hayden Panettiere (Heroes), Brett Dalton (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D), and Jordan Fisher (Hadestown) as they try to separately make it through the night. As the title suggests, the characters need to survive the schlocky writing and terrors of the mountain till morning, and true to the games I mentioned earlier, the story can go in just about any direction, including countless ones that end in the main cast getting ripped to shreds by the harsh environment, the game’s central threat, or even each other! It’s a single-player game, but Until Dawn really thrives in group settings where everyone treats it like one big interactive horror movie. Have some drinks, make some snacks, and decide on the fate of these poor bastards in one of the best party games and horror games of the last generation. — MT

Black Tabby Games’ Slay the Princess remains one of the best games of 2023, and it’s about to get an updated Pristine Cut on October 24. The visual novel begins with a simple premise: You’re walking to a cabin in the woods and a narrator tells you a princess awaits in the dungeon below. She will destroy the world if she is able to escape, so it’s up to you to slay her. But that’s a lot to ask of someone and expect them to just go along with it. So what do you do? Are you just going to grab a knife and kill her without a second thought? Could you ask her questions about her alleged plans to destroy the world? What if you just turned around and walked into the woods instead? You can make all these choices, but one way or another, blood will be spilled.

Then, the night loops. You’re walking through the forest again, being told the same spiel again. But some things are different. The furniture on the cabin’s first floor has shifted, but you’re assured that the princess you’re meant to slay is still downstairs. Strangely, however, she never appears the same way twice. She contorts into new monstrous forms, each time inflicting a new horror on you as you repeat the same loop over and over. At the end of all the carnage and horror there is meaning, but you must slay your way through multiple loops before you can find the rhyme or reason, and each route is masterfully written, drawn, and voiced to deliver a memorable, terrifying nightmare. — KS

I’ve written about this before, but when I was much younger I played Doom 3 and it scared me more than any game had before. The darkness, the sense of dread that filled each level, and the amount of gore it tossed at me left 13-year-old Zack shaking after each session. It wasn’t until 2019 that I finally beat it. And yeah, I admit it: Going back to Doom 3 after all those years, id’s spooky shooter isn’t quite the screamfest I remembered.

But still, Doom 3 is a very atmospheric survival horror shooter that doesn’t turn into an all-out action fest until the later parts of its runtime. If you’re looking for a scary game that lets you fight back, Doom 3 is a perfect choice. — ZZ

Signalis is what I wish more modern horror were like. It feels lately like the genre’s chasing trends or ghosts, rarely allowing itself to ever be transgressive and bold. Signalis, which unmistakably looks and feels vintage, feels like the best kind of trick. Here’s a game that seems to be peddling one thing—in this case, PS1 nostalgia and classic spooks—and then twists and winds into something entirely different, radical, and endlessly more thoughtful than mindless pastiche.

If the fixed-ish camera angles and fuzzy CRT-like aesthetics draw you in, please stick around for the ride Signalis promises. It’s deeper, and a billion times more fucked than you might initially think, and its also just kind of the best survival horror game in a long while! If you’re looking for something that feels like the genuine article, this is it. There are environmental puzzles, riddles aplenty, and the inventory management in Signalis sometimes feels even more demanding than the games that originated and popularized the mechanic! It may be light on actual scares, but Signalis more than makes up for that in a billion other ways. I hate to say it, but it might just be a modern classic. — MT

It’s easy to forget now, after years of knock-offs, imposters, jokes, and parodies, that the original Slender: The Eight Pages was a really scary game. Released in 2012 and developed by one guy, this free horror game asked players to simply explore a dark forest and collect eight pages. The problem? Slenderman, a creepy thin monster created by the internet, is hunting you at all times, and if you look at him too long, you die.

While it’s a crude and wonky game made in Unity by one guy, Slender is still a very scary experience. In fact, the crude quality and rough feel only make it even scarier. It truly feels like some organic thing that just showed up one day out of the void, partially finished and waiting to make you scream. Even though the game got a bigger sequel and fan-developed spin-offs, the original is still the best one to load up on a chilly October night if you want some genuine scares. — ZZ

God, what a terrifying and devastating game. A domestic horror story about a family shattered by manipulation and tragedy, Red Candle’s Devotion pulls you in with the incredible precision and atmospheric richness of its details, and then scares the hell out of you. Devotion is about so many things—cultural pressures to maintain an appearance of marital bliss even as things turn rotten, the dangers of misguided faith and belief, the ways in which women are expected to sacrifice so much and men are expected to be infallible protectors—but most of all it’s about one specific family and its own very specific grief. That grief manifests in unforgettably terrifying ways over the course of this surreal nightmare, and in the end, Devotion left me as moved and heartbroken as it did scared. Horror games don’t always have to have incredible stories and profound meanings, of course, but when you encounter one that fuses amazing scares to a tale as agonizingly human and beautifully told as this one, you’ve really got something special. — CP

Hand-drawn and set in the Swiss Alps, Mundaun is a walking sim with obtuse puzzles but incredible horror vibes. Its grim, desaturated mountainsides are suffused with dread, its world shifting and transforming in unexpected and unsettling ways. The story revolves around a young man named Curdin who gets sucked into a morbid investigation surrounding the mysterious death of his grandfather. Things unravel from there at carefully paced turns that veer from subtle to menacing. The occasionally clumsy journey is more than made up for by the clever and satisfying conclusions at which it arrives. — EG

Playdead’s previous game, Limbo, was already a bit of a walk through a horrific park. A kid wanders alone through menacing woods, can be slaughtered by things like buzzsaws and huge spiders, and due to its monochrome aesthetic, it never really feels particularly inviting. Inside naturally ratchets things up, and as a result, it is one of those games you only really play once. Every second of Inside is still seared into my memory, and I revisit and turn over its terrifying and prescient visions in my mind all the time.

I don’t want to give away Inside. If you’ve made it this far without playing the game, I think you should just pick it up yourself and see what it has in store. It’s one of those once-a-generation kind of experiences. But you won’t regret it, and it’s one you can easily see through to the end within a single evening. Every next set piece is unlike the one before it, and its ending is an all-time moment in games, period. And just like me, Inside will worm its way into your head and haunt you for years to come like only the best horror ever manages. — MT

Amnesia: The Bunker departs from Frictional Games’ established monster-stalking formula with excellent results. It follows a French soldier during World War I into battlefield tunnels that are home to a monster that can only be repelled by light. Generators keep the tunnels lit but run on scarce fuel; a crank flashlight is your last resort for navigating the environment when all other resources have been exhausted. The sandbox is as haunting as it is clever, with its best horror moments resulting from gameplay system collisions rather than scripted reveals or jumpscares. The tension-filled spaces and incredible audio design do most of the heavy lifting. It’s a refreshing twist on immersive sims in pursuit of an amazing survival horror experience. — EG