7 Terrifying Horror Games To Play After Silent Hill 2

Halloween is upon us, the nights are getting longer, so turn off all the lights and terrify yourself with a pile of horror games that’ll suit the mood once you’ve finished Silent Hill 2.

Read More: 6 Terrifying Horror Movies To Watch If You Loved Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2’s remake is more challenging than the original, about twice as long, and has a relentlessly oppressive atmosphere that’ll leave you with a permanent fear of mannequins. Good times. But it doesn’t last forever. When you’re done with SH2, or if you’re waiting for a sale or port on that one, here are seven hand-tested options, both past and present, that work as appetizers, follow-ups, or substitutes.

20 years ago, a university in Taiwan was rocked by the sudden disappearance of a young woman. Now, a group of students filming a horror movie on campus may have accidentally captured footage of paranormal activity in the same building. Your job is to solve the attendant mysteries while not getting turned inside out by angry ghosts.

Bridge Curse 2 is self-consciously an interactive horror movie, with a few points of irritation like never allowing you to skip a single moment of any dialogue. When it does let you play, it’s got a decent assortment of deductive puzzles, weird minigames, and stealth sequences where you have to outwit and evade some truly grotesque monsters.

It likes to spend long stretches of time without letting you do anything, but Bridge Curse 2 is a decent pick if you like some helplessness in your horror. It’s got a nasty edge to it, with some brutal death scenes, the occasional gratuitous gross-out, and a lot of terrible things happening to people who in no way deserved it.

Statistically, only about 30 percent of the players who start a video game will see it through to its end. As a result, many single-player games are front-loaded, on the assumption that a solid start is a better use of developers’ time than a strong finish. Crow Country defies that in its last half-hour, with a plot twist in its final moments that neatly turns the rest of the game on its head.

Before that point, it’s a quietly effective throwback to the ‘90s, both in its PlayStation-style graphics and the reflexive post-Scream irony of its script. As Mara Forest, an improbably young federal agent, you’re exploring an abandoned park in search of its reclusive owner when you’re attacked by strange mutants. From there, it’s a struggle to stay alive, save the handful of other people in the park, and still accomplish your stated goal.

Most of Crow Country is creepy without being scary, with a deliberate appeal towards nostalgia. (The designers went out of their way to create mock literature for it like a manual, magazine ad, and GameFan-style preview page.) It wasn’t until I reached the final area that it took that final swerve, which turned Crow Country into something dark, bleak, and quietly frightening. It’s worth the whole run just for that moment.

Fear the Spotlight is beginners’ horror, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s the video game equivalent to Goosebumps or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which delivers its impact without relying on violence, gore or gross-outs.

You play as Vivian Singh, who breaks into her high school on the week of Halloween so her best friend Amy can conduct a séance. Soon, Vivian has been seemingly pulled back in time to the school as it was in 1991, right before a devastating fire that killed two-dozen students. She has to find her way through the school, past a strange man with a theater light for a face, and rescue Amy before history repeats itself.

If you’ve got any horror or adventure-game chops, you’ll breeze straight through Fear the Spotlight. It’s a fast-moving six-hour campfire story that really comes alive in its second half. The real value to picking it up is if you’ve got a teenager or precocious kid who’s interested in playing some creepy games for Halloween. It’s a solid dose of memorable PG-13 dread.

A couple of different indie developers made “spiritual sequels” to Konami franchises this year, only to have Konami suddenly break its silence and steal their thunder. Retroware’s Iron Meat, for example, is a deliberate homage to Contra that got beaten to market by Operation Galuga.

Similarly, Hollowbody is a nominally cyberpunk take on Silent Hill in all but name, which hits many of the same beats: abandonment, decay, hopelessness, and beating monsters to death with club-like objects.

In an abandoned 22nd-century Britain, smuggler Mica Holloway is out to find her missing partner Sasha. What initially looks like a midnight run through a dead suburb turns bloody when Mica discovers the ruins are infested with bizarre plants and strange monsters.

Hollowbody ends right when it feels like it’s hitting its stride, but it’s good while it lasts. For a game produced by one person with crowdfunding, it understands the value of atmosphere better than most indie survival horror projects. I’d be interested in seeing what Headware Games could do with an actual budget. As of October 29, it’s just released a new update that’s added several locations, tweaked its balance, and thrown in a few more puzzles.

This is what you’d have gotten if you’d hired David Lynch to direct The Muppet Movie. It’s self-consciously made as a mash-up between BioShock and one of the earlier Resident Evil games, except you’re up against crazy puppets who want to hug you ‘til you die.

My Friendly Neighborhood is set in an abandoned television station that suddenly starts rebroadcasting old episodes of a children’s show. When city repairman Gordon O’Brian shows up to find out why, he’s thrown into a cuddly nightmare. When this station closed down, the old performers got locked inside, and they’ve all gone insane. They don’t mean to hurt Gordon, but they will.

This is a hard one to explain or justify, but My Friendly Neighborhood makes the most of a twisted premise. Like Fear the Spotlight, it’s creepy without being gory, as every puppet has a gift of coming out of nowhere. And like Crow Country, it saves its scariest sequence for its endgame. If you missed this one last year, this Halloween’s a solid excuse to revisit it.

If you want something that’s about as unhinged, but much darker and weirder, the developers, the Szymanskis, spun off an older project into a standalone game earlier this year called The Pony Factory. It’s a short festival of action and jump scares that’s worth an evening.

As an indie horror sicko, I am bound by union regulations to mention Signalis every time I write this kind of article. It’d be weirder if I didn’t.

Signalis just celebrated its second anniversary, but if you’re new to survival horror with the SH2 remake or haven’t paid attention to the genre for a while, it’s worth bringing it up again. It also put out a patch last year with several optional improvements to its inventory system, which addressed one of fans’ most common complaints.

Self-described as “a dream about dreaming,” Signalis is a story of cosmic space horror. As an android worker in a dystopian society, you survived a shipwreck on the distant ice planet Leng, but your co-pilot is missing. Your search for her takes you into a nearby mining colony, where the humans have fallen prey to an inexplicable disease and the other androids have gone insane.

It’s also possible that this is all a dream, and not necessarily yours; that you’re lost in some Lovecraftian nightmare realm; and/or that you’re trapped in an endless cycle of violence by an insane god. All of these can be true at once. Signalis is a dream. Old rules no longer apply.

It’s by turns oppressive, frightening, and surreal, with a visual style that’s uniquely its own. If you haven’t played it, or you bounced off it at launch due to its inventory mechanics, now is a good time to check it out.

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