Really scary horror games for pc

Resident Evil 3 is testament to the fact that a good horror game needs to be more than just scary, offering skilful urban level design, stunning visuals, a formidable foe — and lots and lots of zombies. Released in mid, Slender is based around long pauses followed by sudden movements that are totally unexpected. In other words: jump scares. Slender is essentially a horror movie in video game form. It's a bit cheap, but boy does it work. Your mission is simple: Don't get killed, collect the eight pieces of a book, and run.

The 'thing' pursuing you — directly inspired by the popular Slender Man meme — is a faceless, eerily lanky man in a pinstriped suit. The game relies heavily around the player having virtually no resources beyond a flashlight and the ability to jog.

Naturally, both of which are limited for obvious reasons, making escape all the more difficult. Overall, Slender is a fun, not-so-clever horror game that is guaranteed to scare you senseless nevertheless. Of the countless games to use this precious creative license over the years, developer Creative Assembly is the first to actually create a game that lives up to it.

The game takes place 15 years following the events of the Ridley Scott film, putting players into the space boots of Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda Ripley.

Taking on a first-person perspective and squaring you off with a single xenomorph hunting you across a vast space station in darkness, Isolation nails what it felt like watching the film for the first time. The vibe is so much of what makes an amazing horror game, and Isolation feels as if you're playing through the movie. Throw in the excruciatingly-clever artificial intelligence afforded to the alien, along with an absolutely gripping virtual reality experiment, and you have the trappings of a modern horror classic.

Outlast and Outlast 2, developed by Red Barrels Studio, are now must-plays in the horror genre. Both games put players in control of investigative journalists but while the first is set in an asylum for the insane, the sequel takes place in the much more open location of a dilapidated rural part of Northern Arizona.

What helps make the Outlast games, well, last is that they follow a cardinal rule of horror games: don't empower your players too much, otherwise it's no longer a horror game. Offering a refreshing break from zombies and aliens, Outlast and its sequel are fine games to play if you want a longer — and arguably scarier — break from your average gun-toting jump scare-fest.

While Left 4 Dead came first, the second version saw Valve nail the vision of its original creators, Turtle Rock Studios. Set in a world overrun by zombies, the game follows four characters in their mission to survive through several cooperative and competitive online modes, which — in conjunction with mods on PC — makes for a veritable ton of replayability.

We're pretty certain that most PC players would agree with that. The game was originally banned in Australia due to its graphic content: a de facto seal of approval, if you will. The ban has since been lifted, and so lovers of hardcore horror games are sure to rejoice in its gross, lengthy scenes of devastation and destruction worldwide.

Five Nights at Freddy's is — undoubtedly — a different kind of horror game. However, it's a surprisingly fun game to play, once you can get past the terrifying visage of an animatronic teddy bear guitarist come to life in the dead of night.

Generally, players combat these twisted, possessed figures with security cameras — what? Poltergeists don't like leaving evidence. The game is the work of Scott Cawthon, an independent developer, who released it in Since then, there have been three more direct sequels, all of which have received positive reviews.

Talk about staying power. SOMA, released in by Amnesia developer Frictional Games, is a thoughtful — and thought-provoking — game that could easily be considered an interactive film. Are you sensing a theme here at all? The game contains neither zombies nor aliens, but instead a shift between and , when humans have been wiped out by a comet and what's left of humanity must fight to survive underwater in an abandoned research facility gone rogue.

While SOMA may not be as outright scary as, say, Amnesia, it is still a fantastic game, thanks to its brooding atmosphere, surprisingly fresh subject matter for horror games and incredible audio design. Amnesia is one of the best survival horror series of all time, with the first game in the series, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, proving to be one of the most terrifying games we've ever played.

All you can do is run for your life, and at best, slam a few doors in its face to slow it down. Although the original game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, first released for PC back in - you can pick up the whole collection for current-gen consoles.

Resident Evil 2 Remake is exactly what it says on the tin: it's a remake of the classic '90s horror Resident Evil 2. 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. You are immediately spawned at your last checkpoint and it is never far from where you were busy investigating. This might be because of the focus on exploration, wanting the player to be properly immersed and not wanting death to break that immersion.

Whatever the case may be, The Land of Pain is a purely atmospheric horror game that is sure to keep you heading towards the next clue. This game is a hard sell for those that like their FPS to do something new and be a little less linear. Despite the stock FPS and combat elements, and the occasional one-shot kill Get Even holds itself up with a fantastic story.

There are so many layers to uncover as you progress through the game that the moment you think you have a hold on what is going on, the game turns it all upside down and scatters the pieces. The story and mechanics are so much deeper than this, but it is difficult to explain without getting into spoilers.

Much like The Land of Pain, the focus is far less on traditional gameplay. The difference, however, is that The Land of Pain does not try to disguise itself as anything other than what it is. As one of the oldest games on this list, it has a lot to live up to. It does not quite stand the test of time, as by now we have seen these tropes over and over, but the mystery of 7th Guest still holds up. All the ghosts and people in the game are inserted film clips, a strategy that later popularized the FMV genre in gaming.

That mystery pales in comparison to the core of the game: who is the 7th guest? Is it someone else? And how, exactly, did the lord of the manor manage to murder so many people in one go?

There are far too many questions and too few answers until you finish the game. The puzzles of 7th Guest can be easy or very difficult, as there can be a very specific way to complete it. This is often the way of such old games. Nonetheless, the trick is to just keep trying until you get it.

You cannot give up and move on anyway, each puzzle uncovers a key part of the mystery. A scientific experiment goes wrong and opens a portal to another dimension. The Xen come pouring through, trying to escape another alien race the taking over the universe kind , but they are just as hostile to the main character.

Half-Life is critically acclaimed for its stunning graphics at the time the particle effects of your guns shells and explosions are especially well done , and revolutionary FPS elements. Refined from the likes of Doom and Wolfenstein , Half-Life making shooting smoother, enemy hitboxes more accurate, and the ability to kill multiple enemies with grenades. In addition, there are sections in Half-Life that are far more dynamic than generic corridor number For example, the motorized rail cart has you shooting enemies around every corner as the cart moves you to your destination.

No aliens or ghosts this time around, Left 4 Dead is a zombie game from that taught zombie lovers how to play co-op. This game is a must for those who enjoy zombie games and want to share that love with friends. Left 4 Dead has four scenarios, bookended like movies with posters and credits, that are more or less unrelated. Each scenario has a different environment, like a train station, hospital, house, and cornfield. Teamwork is paramount to your survival, even if you are mostly screaming at each other to get this enemy or that player revived.

This game is not so much creepy or scary as it bloody and filled with faceless zombies to be shot down. The horror likely comes when a team fails to work together and has to rethink their strategies on the next play-through. I would not blame them, some of those zombie bosses can be downright terrifying. A violent multiplayer that places eight players in a summer camp, just like from the movies.

Seven players take on the part of teenage camp counselors, tasked with either escaping or surviving the night.

Escaping takes a lot of searching, however, as you have to fix a car, boat, or radio to do so. Each requires parts that are scattered about the level, randomly placed each time you start a new match. The eighth players really get all the goodies, however, as they get to play Jason Voorhees himself. You can pick one of the eight different versions of Jason from the respective movies.

Each version has different upgrades and abilities, like increased movement speed, weapon damage, and grapple strength. Since Jason is clearly the most fun to play, being over-powered and all, each player gets a randomly selected role per match.

The game has been criticized for this, but it can be argued that this is rather accurate to how the movies are. This is the oldest game on this list and some consider it to be the game that popularized the survival horror genre, much the same way Wolfenstein popularized the FPS genre.

Alone In The Dark is the first to really get survival horror right, from inventory management to being nearly defenseless against monsters. Inspired by H. Lovecraft, this game shows a lot of weird and wonderful monsters from the other side hiding in the oddest of places.

Like a bathtub, for example, as any monster should in a horror game. As the player, you are equipped with melee combat weapons, usually a sword or dagger.

In addition, the old controls force you to rethink combat very carefully and figure out how to properly hit your enemy without getting damaged yourself. If you have an emulator and the patience of a saint, Alone In The Dark is worth checking for a fun history lesson in game development. You will really get to see where so many tropes in games like Resident Evil come from and how they evolved in later games.

Though a great deal of the mystery is lost for this sequel, since the first one answered most of the questions, A Machine For Pigs still holds up as a good scary game. Remarkably, the story continues with just as much interesting depth as you slowly realize the character you are playing is less and less innocent than one might usually presume. This unreliable narrator is uncovered with journal entries and the occasional speech from the antagonist determined to make you think you are even worse than he is.

The sanity meter is removed, a very unfortunate change, but that does not make the environment any less frightening. Pig-headed monsters are still attracted by your light, like a moth to a flame, but this time the only things you sacrifice is a loss of sight and not knowing if the monster saw you or not.

That said, A Machine For Pigs lacks the interesting puzzles of its predecessor. They are boring, annoying, and do nothing to immerse you in the world of Amnesia. There is no descent into madness when you are replacing fuses, and moving boxes in a crawl space. Though a rather short game, at about three hours long, Among The Sleep has both interesting gameplay elements and story.

The gameplay elements include playing the part of a toddler, the act of hugging your teddy bear gives off an extra light, and much more that are plot relevant. As a toddler, your height and the basic understanding of the world make for compelling details, like the inability to read or how you get to things out of your reach.

This game might give parents a few heart tugs, like a two-year-old climbing around the kitchen and opening anything with a door. It only gets worse, as there is so much more to Among The Sleep than a child running from a scary monster. This game is about the journey of coping with childhood trauma and doing so through more abstract experiences like dreams that can help make more sense of something a toddler might not fully understand. Infidelity is a sin that will never stop haunting you and your dreams in Catherine.

You play the part of Vincent Brooks, who is hesitant to commit to the idea of marriage to his girlfriend Katherine. Just as Brooks begins to seriously mull over the situation, the beautiful Catherine comes along. His act of cheating haunts his dreams and Catherine is never letting go either. Catherine combines supernatural and role-playing elements which might be described as a platformer but is hardly that. The goal of the gameplay is to get to the top of the tower, but it is not about jumping or climbing.

Brooks must pull out blocks and push them to the appropriate spots to get higher, all the while some horrible monster is coming after him. Nevertheless, Deadly Premonition makes it to the list with a compelling story, a unique cast of characters you will never see anywhere else, and deeply terrifying visuals that will stick with you forever.

Despite being a little on the weird side, Deadly Premonition does tell a good story and the combat is an average FPS flavor. This case turns out to be a part of a series of similar murders across America done by the Raincoat Killer.

Unlike most horror crime games, Deadly Premonition also has survival elements. Not the lack of weapon type, but the feed your main character and make sure he puts on clean clothes type. It is an odd choice to be sure and does not really influence the main plot, though it is something that could be worked within a future sequel if there ever is one.

Japanese developers sure know horror and it is displayed yet again in Forbidden Siren. This game follows the events within a Japanese village called Hanuda. Isolated from the rest of the world, the village has some rather extreme religious beliefs that make living there, or even stumbling upon it, a study in survival and stealth.

This is a psychic power that hijacks an enemy character so you can see through their eyes and hear what they hear. You cannot move them, however, but it is a useful tool to tell where your next objective is and how to get around the enemies.

However, what really puts this game in the history books, is the facial animation. This was done by taking images of real human faces from various angles and plastering them on the polygon game version.

This actually ended with an exceptional result, easily making it a part of the motion capture development history. Get ready to turn the lights down low and your volume up high When an outbreak of dangerous and violent monsters happens in a secret laboratory, you must escape from the chaos or die trying. Five different factions to play as, including the monsters themselves, makes for unique gameplay each time.

The SCP foundation, a fictional science driven organization, is the focal point of this free horror game. What does the SCP Foundation do? Your guess is as good as mine. Mostly, they manage deadly but specific monsters and bizarre items.

Playing as any one of these factions gives you different goals, and trying to trick your friends when you really want to just use them as bait adds to the addicting and fun gameplay. Smile for the camera! You too, SCP This particular monster will kill you if you are in the same room as it, and you blink. Play One Late Night.

Your farm is falling into disrepair. A darkness has taken over the animals, the people, and even your crops. There is no hope left in the world. Only the promise of a quiet, sombre death. This visual novel style horror game is packed with a deep, metaphoric storyline and stunning hand drawn graphics.

This story-heavy game with its branching choices creates the feeling of looking into the mind of someone struggling with depression and addiction while giving you a grey and hopeless landscape to navigate.

It can be a bit trial and error-ey at times, but that only adds to the pieces of the puzzle waiting for you to unlock them. Play Disturbed. The sound design and dim lighting are both utilized well, and the randomly generating maze makes for fun and easy replayability.

The only downside is that this is just a maze game with clues you have to search for while evading the enemy, and not a whole lot else! This underground room lit up with moonlight makes it easy to get through, even if you have a torch or not. Underneath the shadow of the first World War, follows a young German soldier as he tries to survive among the chaos. Trapped underground, he soon finds that a prehistoric terror is hunting him … and the brutal battlefield above is his only means of escape from being mauled to death.

The audio cues, atmosphere, and setting are enough to know when you should hide and when you should run for your life. What really makes this a great game is not only the setting, but the way the setting looks. Purely black and white backgrounds and imagery is difficult to pull off for any developer, but manages to make it look eerie and not washed out at all. Play But what killed him? It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be safe. Like a 2D visual novel, but in 3D. The scattered decorations and messy bed really make you feel at home.

Jason returns and seeks revenge on the camp that killed him in this cute but deadly stylized version of Friday the 13th. Cute, gory, and full of funny deaths upon the often inebriated campers, this fun little game combines horror with puzzles and different ways to kill your targets.

It does get kind of repetitive after a while however, so make sure you take breaks in between puzzle chunks. Play Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle. Play Death Forest. When you get a cryptic letter from your brother, it becomes your job to find him and save him from his mysterious, otherworldly demise inside of the vast and expansive, supernatural Hotel Beryl. Play Trap. Our protagonist stands outside a shady bar, thinking on what got him to this point in his life. Something stalks the hallways of this randomly generated horror game set in twisting corridors.

Are you quick and smart enough to survive? The controls however are fluid and easy, and considering how good the game looks for the price free! Oh, there is one thing to note: This game is notorious for its difficulty level. That experience is entirely up to you.

Play Shadow Corridor. Screenshots are hard to get so if you're interested, here's a link to it. Never did I think a house under construction would be scary, but Blameless has proven me wrong.

The buildup to the ending and the eventual reveal of the true intentions of you and the person in the house with you is nothing short of shocking. Nothing remarkable really, except for the nice graphics, solid level and puzzle designs, and believable cast of characters. Blameless is one of the best games on this list because of its good graphics, excellent storytelling, and unique setting.

Go on and give it a try if you have an afternoon to kill. Play Blameless. An unfinished room with parts of the in construction house lit up. This is a safe area … I think. Only If is also doing something experimental with its controls to see if it can get the player to trust their gut feelings instead of game mechanics.

These experimental controls combined with the changing setting and imaginative story make Only If a surreal sort of horror game rather than just straight up blood and gore.

There are as always cons to go with the pros, however. However, these small cons are outweighed by the numerous pros. The graphics are stunning, the voice acting is tremendously well done, and the plot itself is akin to that of the Stanley Parable or the Borderlands series. This psychological horror game is full of surprises. Which surprises, you ask? Play Only If. When the world goes to Hell and the undead walk the earth, your slim chances for survival are dwindling fast. The sound, the big and empty maps, and the hordes of undead combine in Infestation: New Z to make you feel more alone than you ever have before.

The biggest and most unique feature of this game is that you can engage in online PVP with other players and fight to the death for your resources.

The idea of competing in blood sport and mass killing of zombies gives it a small sense of uniqueness in the open sea that is open world zombie killing games.

Play Infestation: The New Z. Survival mode is … survival! Originally released as a Half Life 2 modification, this now standalone game is free to play and explore several unique maps with your friends or complete strangers. A longer sequel to the game is expected to be produced sometime in or When your friends dare you to spend the night in a house thought to be haunted by malevolent spirits, you agree.

However, when the door locks itself behind you, you have only one objective: Escape with your life. In part one your objective is to seek out a Jack-in-the-Box to make its music stop ringing through the otherwise empty house. This is a lot more difficult than it seems, because of the way that the house is set up and the way that audio cues work. In the die section, you … try not to die.