Classic computer horror games

Horror will happen, and it will consist of so much more than the little girl at the end of the hallway. The story itself, for example, as plenty of twists and turns like any other Resident Evil game.

In combat, you have the capability of slowing downtime. This way, each shot counts and you can take your time aiming to really get everyone in the room. Not only that, but the world also distorts and explodes around every bullet and grenade, making for beautiful art Michael Bay can only dream of. Fatal Frame is pure Japanese horror in game form. If you ever managed to get through the Japanese version of The Ring , you can understand the enormous differences between what Americans think is horror, and what horror really is.

Fatal Frame has one main mechanic that has since been unmatched in other horror games, your Camera Obscura. This fancy camera allows you to attack spirits, but one snap is never enough to do the trick.

You must keep the spirit as close to the center of the frame as possible, snap a picture, and then do it again until they are freed or gone entirely. In addition, the story is hardly simple. The more you play, the more you discover just how deep and truly terrifying this house you have wandered into is. Almost every spirit you encounter is someone else who thought they were going to make it too. Only every time, you find a newspaper clipping or something that tells of their death.

Each story certainly makes it feel less and less likely that your main character is truly any different, even with your Camera Obscura. Basically the movie Cabin in the Woods , only in game form. A group of eight friends go out to a cabin in the woods for a vacation. They have not been there long before the first death occurs and all the characters must strive to survive until dawn.

The player switches between each of the teenagers, getting to know them and helping them survive in the cabin and outside. There are plenty of decisions along the way as well, some are to stay still and hide, others are to attack and hope for the best. Sometimes it works, sometimes you get killed. All of your decisions accumulate to what has been reported as hundreds of possible endings and ways to get there.

It is possible for the player to keep all the teenagers alive, but it is not easy. Though Until Dawn came out in , the graphics still hold up. This is likely because of the cinematic nature of the gameplay. Until Dawn is not a game focused on combat or technical gameplay, but rather on quick-time events, exploration, and collecting information to make future decisions that could mean life or death for the characters.

If nothing else, the monster designs should have you open-mouthed with something between terror and awe. Some monsters are just plain gross, others are grotesquely beautiful, and others still tell a sad story with the way they move and what weapons they use. Bloodborne has many layers, everything is there to be read and interpreted as mythology belonging to the world or adding to the story the player hardly knows they are in.

Bloodborne, just like its predecessor Dark Souls , is not keen on handing out details. The player is given a vague mission with even vaguer morals, yet told not to worry this is the right thing to do. The monsters were once human too, making killing them somewhere between putting them out of their misery and killing an innocent person — so many innocent people that were manipulated by circumstance and taken advantage of.

In the end, you might feel that you have escaped, but the game inserts doubt so cleverly you will never be sure. Interestingly, the mechanic of the camera will reward you with a nearly complete movie of your entire play-through. Such a tidbit shows just how much you use the camera and how skillfully the game was designed to make you use it at so many key moments. It still uses the camera mechanic, and this time, there are no weapons to use.

Your only options are to run and hide or the enemies will instantly kill you. This becomes a problem when the apparently open world game turns out to be very linear.

It wants you to run in a specific direction and hide in a specific place. If you do not manage to find that on the first or fifth try, the enemies will see you regardless of how well you think you are hiding. Furthermore, the enemy characters are less developed and well designed. However, if you enjoy a story about religious extremism, Outlast 2 is for you.

Just how scary is Outlast 2? Well, in my opinion, I found it actually more terrifying than the original. Rhys disagrees, but I thought it is worth noting. If Grand Theft Auto was thought to be a violent game, it is a walk in the park in comparison to Manhunt.

This is an early game from Rockstar, and remarkably, it still holds up under the test of time. Sure, the latter is about hunting one human at a time, but Manhunt is about killing many humans in the most violent and spectacular ways possible. You get more points for how brutal or sneaky the attack is, depending on what is demanded of you on that level.

That is nothing to say of the sexual aspects involved in some of the levels. Manhunt may not have jump scares or ghosts, but it does have violence and the kind of subtle psychological scares that horror games rarely bother with. The situation and your actions really make you think about what your life and that of others are really worth. This creatively named fellow is going after other serial killers that the main character had been investigating, further cementing his supposed motivation and guilt.

This game has been criticized for its linear paths which do not allow the player to put together the investigation themselves. However, the linear path and transparent mystery are overshadowed by the close combat of Condemned. Players really feel the first-person-perspective with each kill made. Combat is focused almost entirely on melee, getting up close and personal with every enemy you encounter.

Your weapons range from a paper cutter blade to the more usual wrench. Each is as brutal as the last, offering sickening crunches and violent finishing moves for all your enemies. That is to say nothing of the voices you will hear as you encounter certain enemies.

Some will ask you to follow them, leaving behind bloody footprints and leading you into an ambush. Others will scream, the sound sending a red light throughout the hallway, then going out just as quickly. Enemies are abundant, of course, forcing the player to guess where they are before shooting them or the light goes out. No matter how confident you are at Doom games, Doom 3 will keep you cautiously approaching any and all new rooms, especially the dark ones. There will be plenty of jump scares and enemies coming out of corners you could have sworn you checked out beforehand.

Though the game has a few gameplay problems, like the enemies you have to run from, it is not quite enough to detract from the fascinating story this game tells. You wake up as some random dude with no idea how you got to a facility this many leagues under the ocean.

Despite such a generic beginning, unfolding this mystery is how the game tells its story. The best thing about this game, are the robots. Each of them has the full consciousness of a human and believe they are human. Yet, they are ugly junkyard robots, hardly functioning in the decrepit facility they inhabit.

These are not the sleek robots of the future we are used to seeing in other sci-fi media. In this way, Soma states that it is easier to humanize a Porsche than it is a Ford Fiesta.

Then it asks exactly what does personhood have to do with looks. What do you do when horror quite literally comes knocking on your door? Save for one story, which is in the usual first-person perspective. Each story is connected and will eventually accumulate to a very suspicious knock on your door.

It is difficult to describe Stories Untold without getting into spoilers, but the sections are well told and there is a certain nostalgic 80s aesthetic to it all. The horror is not so much jump scares as it is an immersive storytelling. The visuals and actions required of the player aid help to create an atmosphere that keeps you questioning what is going on, morality, and exactly who is knocking on your door. This ending is somewhere between an out of body experience and shaking-in-your-boots horror.

There, they are met with every kind of horrible monster from the mind of Ruvik. The design of these monsters has been highly praised as each is unique and often put a twist on common horror tropes. For example, body bags hanging from the ceiling, only this time one of them is still screaming.

Or a dead body that turns into a many-limbed banshee determined to drown you in blood. Only Evil Within could marry Japanese horror with Western combat so well. The Evil Within builds atmosphere through almost detective noir style of the mystery.

The combat is more FPS and though it sometimes detracts from the otherwise clever ideas within the game, the first Evil Within still stands strong today.

That said, some fans still find it a bit too glitchy to be worth playing, especially when you are cornered by monsters and the save load lands you in the same spot with no way to defend yourself.

An indie game from the makers of Layers of Fear , only instead of wandering around a haunted house, Observer takes the cyberpunk route. You play the part of Daniel Lazarski, a special kind of detective that can hack into peoples memories and fears. You are to observe their last moments of death or discover their motivations. Nothing is a secret from you, nor can you keep any secrets from your superiors.

This dark cyberpunk game explores a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by war and addiction; the two vices of humanity besides sex. Each use of your fancy hacking ability has a cost, as such things always do in video games. Your ability to tell the difference between reality and the memories of your suspects becomes blurred. Soon enough, your investigation will take a back seat as you just try to survive the horrors within your mind.

Observer may suffer from the occasional break in pacing and linear path glitches, but the overall game builds an enthrallingly dark world with even darker secrets to uncover. While playing this game you are far more afraid of what you can hear than what you can see.

With such a limited field of view, Darkwood makes sure you are not looking the right direction when something breaks through the floorboards or growls quietly off to your left. Survive the night and you have to use each agonizing daylight hour to scavenge for more supplies. These supplies help you gain skills like a larger vision cone , better weapons that need constant maintenance , and reinforcements so that whatever is hiding in the night will have less of a chance to eat you.

Darkwood tells its horror through the characters you meet out in the woods, the creatures and things in the night, and the occasional reading material. The latter is never a newspaper reporting on the details of the apocalypse you are currently living, but magazines and scraps of journals. It is small elements like that, and the sound design, that make Darkwood so immersive and frightening. So you are browsing Steam, looking for a visual novel with cute anime girls, boobs, and very short skirts.

Seems like you have a fun and cute hour ahead of you. And you do, the first half of this game is not suspicious at all if you do not know what is coming already. The poems for the literature club are getting a bit weird, but all poetry is weird, right? At one point the game ends rather abruptly, it looks like the game crashed. I assure you, it has not. Try again and play the game through again, you will notice some subtle differences that will make it clear why such an apparently cute anime game is on a top 50 horror games list.

Doki Doki Literature Club is all about facades, one after the other. It is up to the player to peel away the layers and discover what is left in the end. First of all, We Happy Few is the most successful book to video game adaptation I have ever seen. Arthur Hastings, the main character of We Happy Few, is clearly unimpressed with the world around him and what it has come to, but fear pushes him to conform.

You would not want to be a Downer, now would you? The world is as immersive as it is frightening without hardly saying a word. Thirdly, the survival gameplay of We Happy Few lets you find more than one solution to problems, be it through stealth or brutally whacking your way through both guards and citizens willy-nilly. The game promotes stealth, of course, but the guards and citizens are not completely unbeatable. If you play your combat carefully, you can manage it.

Though this game can be accused of being too easy without much in the way of complex gameplay, The Land of Pain is focused almost entirely on exploration. You could almost call it a walking or running simulator as the point is to again, explore, read your way through various journal entries, and observe. Built by one man, Alessandro Guzzo, on the CryEngine, The Land of Pain offers detailed and beautiful landscapes worth relaxing into — until the creature gets too close.

Furthermore, there are plenty of gruesome scenes and areas that tell the horrific tale of what this creature can do and where it comes from. One somewhat let down about this game, however, is that death does not have much in the way of consequences. With the return of the Jurassic Park series in recent years, it feels like now is the right time for a new Dino Crisis release or re-release.

Silent Hill is the only true contender to Resident Evil 's survivor horror crown. Despite the similarities of the viewpoint and horror themes, the games are actually very different.

Silent Hill focuses much more on psychological terror, shrouded heavily in darkness and mystery. The in-game fog lends the game an uneasy feeling of the unknown and is a great example of using the limitations of gaming hardware to your advantage. As a result, exploring the creepy abandoned locations while fighting off hideously deformed monsters is a petrifying experience. Considering the genuine love for 's P.

System Shock 2 , created by the mastermind behind the Bioshock series, is a futuristic first-person shooter where an alien virus has infected the crew of a starship and you must stop the virus from spreading. Along the way, you'll encounter violent infected crew members, an alien hive mind and a murderous artificial intelligence. It's frightening, psychologically trying and full of spooky locations. Psionic abilities such as invisibility and teleportation add depth to the gameplay, whilst weapons must be maintained and repaired over time which adds another layer of tension to the experience.

System Shock 2 was a unique experience for the time, and even today it's a real shock to the system sorry. American McGhee's Alice is a macabre psychological horror puzzle-platformer.

There's a brutal back story where a young Alice witnesses the death of her parents in a horrific fire. Wonderland becomes a crumbling shadow of its former self, corrupted by Alice's failing mental health, and the aim of the game is to restore the world to its former glory.

A long-awaited sequel, released in , didn't quite live up to expectations so a remake of Alice on modern hardware would be a nightmare worth revisiting.

Based on the popular Japanese novel of the same name and acting as a sequel to that story, Parasite Eve is a survival horror role-playing game. You play as Aya, a rookie NYPD cop, who must stop a rogue mutant from killing people by spontaneous combustion. The game features an experience system, customisable equipment and a semi-real-time combat system.

Whilst combat takes place in real-time, you must wait a set period of time between attacks, during which you can dodge and avoid enemy advances. It's a nerve-wracking game, especially when you don't know who to trust. The graphics are quite dated now, but imagine the transformations of the "Things" and the weather and lighting effects modern hardware could achieve. Dark Seed is a point and click adventure game where you play as an advertising executive who ends up with an alien embryo buried in his brain.

As the game progresses, you travel to a parallel universe and if you fail to unravel the game's mystery, the Dark Seed will burst leading to the destruction of all humanity. It's an intriguing story but the most notable aspect of Dark Seed is the use of H.

Geiger's stunning artwork. Point and click adventure games have seen a bit of a revival in recent times with faithful remakes of classics like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion , but for a game with such spectacular artwork, this would look great with some contemporary spit and polish.

One of the newest games on this list, but still over a decade old, Dead Space is a horrifying third-person experience set on a doomed spaceship in the year The crew has been infected by an alien virus, turning them into terrifying mutated monsters.

Typically , a shot to the head won't do and the creatures must be dismembered limb by limb before they will finally die. This leads to some particularly fraught and tense battles and a focus on the use of cutting tools and melee weapons.

A remake on modern hardware could up the atmosphere and impress with more realistic mutations and dismemberment. Deadly Premonition is a surreal survival horror game where you play as an FBI agent investigating the murder of a young woman. The game has garnered a cult following due to its bad but often hilarious dialogue, its Twin Peaks vibes and its unpredictable central character.

It's a very polarising game: the story is weird, confusing and self-aware, the graphics are somewhat scruffy and the controls are counter-intuitive, but whether you love it or hate it, Deadly Premonition is an undeniably memorable experience. The game was treated to a bit of a spit and polish with the Director's Cut in , but a full remake is what Deadly Premonition truly deserves.

Freelance pop culture writer. Self-confessed nerd. Founder, owner and editor at The Head Scratcher. Share Share Tweet Email.