The 7 Best Scary RPGs To Play During Halloween

We all saw this coming. The 2004 vampire RPG basically has the market cornered on horror RPGs even two decades after its release. But there’s good reason for that! Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines drops you into an incredibly realized world of vampire politics that you get to involve yourself in and change through a slew of wonderful combat and dialogue systems. It’s a great RPG but it’s also deeply rooted in the compelling vampire world it’s set in, so you really can’t do better than this.

While The Witcher 3 is already a gritty and dark fairytale RPG full of monsters, its Blood and Wine expansion might be an even better pick for Halloween. Sure, the brown and gray color palette gets a Technicolor update, but that’s just to make all the blood look even more vibrant. Blood and Wine is a vampire story that builds on the solid systems and characters of the base game. You don’t even have to play The Witcher 3 first, as you can start Blood and Wine right from the menu.

The best parts of Pathologic 2 only show themselves once you die. The horror RPG is all about managing your resources to stay alive. You need to eat, drink, rest, and heal constantly, on top of managing your reputation across the game’s many towns. But once you do die, a weird meta encounter informs you that the world has gotten worse and so have you. What was already a strange and dangerous world becomes exponentially so through debuffs like less health or more unconventional things such as losing the ability to hug characters. The more you die, the more things change, and there is always a little bit of a pull on your curiosity to find out how bad things can really get.

Square Enix’s cult classic answer to Resident Evil will always deserve more attention than it gets. As you’d expect from the makers of Final Fantasy, Parasite Eve added RPG elements to the survival horror genre to great success. You play as Aya Brea, a rookie NYPD cop who, over the course of a lonely week in late December, works to save the city from a mitochondrial outbreak that threatens to destroy the world. It’s pulpy, it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s worth playing if only for seeing the jaw-dropping opening cinematic.

For my money, no game has done gothic horror better than Bloodborne. The city of Yharnam, with its constant sense of dread that bears down on you as you explore its cobblestone streets and gothic structures, has one of the most imposing atmospheres in any game ever. Sure, there’s still the tough-as-nails combat and constant retreading of territory we know from the Souls games—this is still FromSoftware—but rather than dark fantasy, Bloodborne evokes true horror. That happens both in the grotesque monster designs you encounter during its difficult fights but also in its story of cosmic dread and humanity’s overambition.

Cosmic horror will—for better and worse—always be synonymous with H.P. Lovecraft. One of the author’s most famous creations, Cthulhu, has even spawned a fantastic tabletop RPG, on which the video game Call of Cthulhu is based. That video game is a great translation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror thanks to its emphasis on sanity. As you progress, you’ll slowly lose your mind, but before you do that you’ll be out to work as a detective. Call of Cthulhu lets you choose your background, which then opens up different dialogue options during investigations. This makes each playthrough feel unique, and cultivates the sense that perhaps you aren’t getting the full picture.

The secret to horror roguelike Darkest Dungeon’s success is stressing you the fuck out. Each member of your party, with whom you attempt to navigate the titular dungeons, has a stress level. If they get too stressed they will literally have a heart attack. This will stress you out and that’s great! The system makes you keenly aware of the risk vs reward of every action. If your party members explore without light, don’t eat proper food, or witness deaths, they’ll become increasinglystressed. But what if you can just make it through? It might be worth it! That’s the eternal conundrum of every run of Darkest Dungeon.