Best Horror Games

The horror here is guilt, and the monsters are just what it looks like from the inside. It is the one game on this list that gets worse the more you think about it, in the best sense, where Resident Evil 4 gets less scary the better you play. Tank controls and clumsy combat are the tax you pay to reach that.

The best action game ever built on a horror chassis, which is exactly the complaint against it. Once you learn to crowd-control Ganados the fear drains away, and Silent Hill 2 never offers that escape hatch. Its case rests on the village siege, still the genre's finest opening stretch.

It took combat away and made a decade of horror games copy the decision, Outlast and SOMA included, but the water lurker is its peak and nothing in the back half ever matches that first flooded hallway.

Pure pursuit horror: no weapons, a camcorder with dying batteries, an asylum that wants you dead. The chases hit harder than anything in Amnesia. The trick never changes, though, and by the sewer section you have seen everything it knows how to do.

The Ishimura is the best haunted house in games, sold through sound design and an engineer who feels breakable. Its problem is the one Resident Evil 4 has: hand a player this much firepower and dread turns into target practice by the final act. Dismembering Necromorphs stays satisfying long after it stops being scary.

An unkillable alien that learns your habits, stalking you across a campaign that outlasts its ideas. At its best it is scarier than Outlast; at its worst you are crouched behind the same desk for minutes, wondering whether the game is broken or just cruel.

The sanity meter that lied to you: fake crashes, fake volume changes, a fake deleted save file. Nothing else here, not even P.T., attacks the player rather than the character. The combat and level design underneath the trick are merely decent, which is why it is remembered as a stunt more than a game.

You fight ghosts by photographing them at the last possible second, which forces you to stare at exactly the thing you want to flee. No horror mechanic has ever been crueler or smarter. Stiff movement and stingy saves make it a hard sell to anyone raised on Outlast's sprint.

Cameras, doors, draining power, and animatronics that only move when you are not watching. As jump-scare architecture it earned its empire honestly. There is barely a game underneath the panic, though, and unlike Amnesia or P.T. it cannot frighten the same player twice.

A looping hallway, technically a demo for a Silent Hill successor that never got made, and still the scariest playable thing ever shipped. The handicap is obvious: you cannot buy it, it barely qualifies as a game, and its reputation has outgrown what is actually in the corridor, a problem Silent Hill 2 has never had.

Ghost hunting with friends, and the ghost genuinely listens, so saying its name into your microphone is a real risk. It made co-op horror work, which is also its ceiling: a lobby full of laughing friends will never be as scared as one player alone in Amnesia's dark.

The course correction that dragged Resident Evil back to horror by shrinking it to one family and one rotting house. The Baker dinner table is as unnerving as anything here, and the VHS tape segments borrow Outlast's camcorder trick outright. It runs out of ideas once you leave the plantation, and the ship stretch near the end is a slog.

Frictional following Amnesia with a question instead of a monster: if you can be copied, which copy is you. That dread outlasts every jump scare on this list. The actual creature encounters are its weakest part, and the studio all but admitted it by patching in a mode that defangs them.

Shinji Mikami trying to remake Resident Evil 4 as an actual nightmare, all barbed wire, brain surgery and burning villages. The ambition is real and so are the flaws: choking letterbox bars at launch, mean ammo tuning, and a story nobody can retell, so it loses to its own inspiration.