The best Halloween games look a bit different depending on what your scare tolerance is. There’s plenty of jumps, frights, zombies, and bloodshed if you’re into that sort of thing, with the likes of Resident Evil and System Shock. If you’d rather have a more cerebral experience, you might want to consider the video game equivalent of telling scary stories by the fire and, depending on the game, probably going to bed with the lights on. If scares aren’t really your thing, though, you’ve got plenty of choices for games that go heavy on atmosphere and leave the creepy stuff behind. Mostly.
We’ve included picks for all those tastes and more in our roundup of the best Halloween games.
21
Resident Evil 4 remake
Resident Evil 4 might be when Capcom’s iconic horror game series shifted closer to action, but the remake adds a new layer of scares and quite a few other extras aside. Smoother action, a slightly more sensible story, no quick-time events, more horror, and an expanded role for Ashley make this much more than just a shiny new paint job.
Leon’s hellish vacation in Spain has never been better, and The Separate Ways DLC brings Ada Wong back into the picture as well, with some welcome new narrative elements and an update for Resi 4’s Mercenaries multiplayer game spinoff.
20
SOMA
Frictional Games mastered the jump scare brand of horror with Amnesia: The Dark Descent, so for its next franchise, it endeavored to scare you using totally different means: philosophy.
SOMA is broadly speaking still a survival horror game like Amnesia, but it’s not a haunted house where the scares come from popping the scary bag of polygons out from behind a corner every few minutes. It’s existential horror in a literal sense, the kind of unnerving that sits with you long after you leave the underwater research station and its crying, pleading robots.
19
Dredge
Fishing trips are fun, unless they’re at night in Dredge, when you’ll probably land a giant flesh-eating monster. Dredge is a clever combination of fishing, shipbuilding, and exploration and one of the best indie games in 2023. It’s a quirky, contemplative take on fishing simulators where you improve your boat, solve people’s problems with fish and sailing, and maybe bring a bit of closure and light to the troubled lands you visit – assuming the terrors that lie beneath don’t eat you first.
18
Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs
Did somebody say Amnesia? Honestly, we should be writing these down.
A Machine For Pigs is the classic Amnesia horror strain, distilled through the minds of The Chinese Room, a British indie studio behind seminal ‘walking sim’ Dear Esther. And as such, it discovers grim concepts and nightmarish imagery in unusual places. It’s that eccentricity, that nightmare-logic to it all, that gets under your skin. Also the pigs.
17
Phasmophobia
Ostensibly a police procedural in ghost-hunting clothing, Phasmophobia is also a pretty convincing ‘kids near a creepy house’ simulator. Oh sure, you may all be grown-ups who bundle out of the van clutching your supernatural detection kit, but once you’re all inside a vacant suburban home in the dead of night, you tend to regress back to ninth grade.
“Dennis… Oh Dennnnnisssss…” one of you says into a mic, all singsong and above-it-all, goading the spirit into showing himself. Someone’s probably making spooky noises over Discord, another shutting doors behind their mates to spook them.
And then Dennis appears.
There are no words for how scary it is when Dennis appears.
16
The House in Fata Morgana
Few games reach the narrative heights of The House in Fata Morgana. You play as a traveler who wakes up in a dilapidated mansion with only a pale maid for company. She takes you through the house’s bloody, tragic, disturbing history one room at a time. your tale and the mansion’s gradually converge. One room hosts the memory of siblings torn apart by twisted jealousy. Another tells of a man who went mad and turned into a murderous beast before eventually destroying everything he held dear.
Your tale and the mansion’s eventually converge in a spectacular ending as centuries of tragedy give way to understanding at last. Few games deserve the moniker “masterpiece,” but this is one of them.
15
Oxenfree 2
Night School’s Oxenfree 2 leaves behind the teenage heroes of the original and centers instead on two young adults adrift in the world – no direction, no purpose, just a strange job planting strange radio sensors on an even stranger island.
That’s more than enough to worry about, but when you throw in ghosts and interdimensional monsters, things really start to get hairy. Oxenfree 2 quietly has one of the best scripts of 2023, with an unexpected level of depth under the surface and thoughtful commentary on life and finding your way in it.
14
Layers of Fear (2023)
Bloober brought Layers of Fear back in 2023 as a kind of definitive edition, with both games and a few in-between chapters to tie the Rat Queen saga together. The painter’s tale follows an artist’s rapid decline into mental illness as he sacrifices everything – and maybe everyone – for his work, while the second game centers on an actor who goes to horrible lengths to embody their character.
The reboot also includes two smaller chapters – the writer’s tale and the painter’s wife, both of which stand out as the strongest in both storytelling and environment design. The original Layers is still basically a haunted house simulator, but the updated graphics sure do look exceptional.
13
Clive Barker’s Undying
Here’s one for the video game historians out there, a forgotten classic from 2001. The studio behind Clive Barker’s Undying was Dreamworks Interactive, part of Steven Spielberg’s production empire, and it fits with the developer’s ‘interactive Hollywood’ ethos to bring Hellraiser creator Clive Barker in for a new horror title.
Undying has many innovative tricks up its sleeve, including a spell that reveals the true, inevitably grotesque appearance of hero Patrick Galloway’s surroundings, transforming the environment from benign to horrifying in a flash. Set in 1920s rural Ireland and blending FPS game combat with puzzles and magical abilities, it proved an outlier on store shelves full of Quake and Unreal clones, but earned its cult status in the decades to follow.
12
Dark Pictures Anthology
With the release of House of Ashes, the Dark Pictures Anthology now has three episodes, each a self-contained tale with many a grim twist and dark discovery. You might spend minutes at a time without needing to input a single command, but such is the storytelling in Man of Medan, Little Hope and House of Ashes that you’re happy to just let it be interactive TV.
11
Strange Horticulture
Strange Horticulture is an indie game that does things a bit differently. You’re the new proprietor of an old plant shop in a creepy little village with a problem. People are dying gruesome deaths, and it looks like a sinister cult is behind the murders, because of course they are.
You can get to the bottom of the crimes – and solve everyone else’s equally dark and sinister problems – with your expert knowledge of plants. Most of your work comes in the form of accurately identifying and labeling them so you know just what to use in any situation when the time comes. Depending on the choices you make and who you help, the outcome might not be to your liking, though.
10
System Shock 2
The USS Von Braun. A ghost ship, careening through space, where you happen to wake from cryosleep. It doesn’t take long to suss that things went south here – the messages written in blood and corpses swaying from nooses make it abundantly clear that the mission to respond to a distress beacon on Tau Ceti V didn’t go well.
Rogue AIs, multiple approaches, expert storytelling, and an unforgettable atmosphere color your time with System Shock 2, an immersive sim that’s worth playing any time of the year – not just around Halloween.
9
Alien Isolation
So you want to feel scared. Alright.
Transport yourself onto a space vessel that feels assembled from oily, analog 1970s parts, take a few steps around, realize there’s a xenomorph on board with you, and let that simple, terrifying setup do the rest.
Alien Isolation is a relentless, vicious terrorizing of the player. It would feel too much, too exhausting, if the environments weren’t so fascinatingly real, as though you’re finally seeing what lay behind the cameras in 1977. There are precious few story beats, little dialogue, and more crouching stock-still under a table than even the most cautious Dishonored player’s ‘Ghost’ run. But ask anyone about Alien Isolation and they’ll agree, with a thousand-yard stare: It’s as good as horror gaming gets.
8
Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight might not have the jump scares and claustrophobia of a Resident Evil, but its eerie, moody atmosphere and the general theme of decay and death make it a perfect game for scary season anyway. You play as a bug knight venturing into the ruined kingdom of Hallownest to confront the horrors there and uncover the mystery behind the realm’s fall. Brilliant visual direction, challenging enemies, and a clever sense of progression make this one of the most memorable Metroidvania games around.
7
Metroid Dread
Speaking of Metroidvanias, the long-awaited end of Sams Aran’s 2D journey is dripping with the eponymous feeling. The E.M.M.I. robots that kill Samus on sight might not stalk her throughout planet ZDR, but a feeling of unease permeates the planet.
The inhuman monsters and the blood-soaked ground at its core, the eerie renditions of Samus’ old foes, and the growing sense that Samus’ past is catching up with her combine to make a distinctly unsettling atmosphere. It helps that the action and world design are top-notch as well.
6
Cult of the Lamb
If you’re after something a bit lighter, give Cult of the Lamb a try. You, a furry lamb with a big debt to a hellish god, start a cult solely to offer your devoted, hardworking followers to. As a sacrifice. You’re raising them to die.
Cult of the Lamb mashes city building together with roguelite action as you(r servants) build a home base and expand it to meet all their (your) needs, using materials you (mostly them) find in the wild. It’s a rare example where quirky humor and solid mechanics meet comfortably in the middle and a fun, non-terrifying alternative if you’re not keen on horror.
5
Higurashi: When They Cry
If you like your horror with a dash of time travel and a generous helping of deranged storytelling, then Higurashi: When They Cry might be worth a try – or at least its first, free chapter to see if you like it. The story unfolds in a quiet rural Japanese town on the eve of their annual summer festival. When dusk falls and the cicadas sing, people start dying. Horribly. Sometimes you kill them. Sometimes your friend does. And sometimes, your friend kills you and everyone else.
There’s only one route and one ending to this twisted story, but it’s an unforgettable summer nonetheless.
4
Bloodborne
What’s more Halloween than running through a terrifying gothic city crawling with horrors who all want to kill you? Not much, but that’s not even the main reason you should give Bloodborne a try. Its exceptional world and level design, grimly beautiful art direction, and crunchy, challenging combat make it one of Elden Ring maker FromSoftware’s best efforts.
3
The Mortuary Assistant
The Mortuary Assistant is a unique take on the roguelite formula and not quite what the name suggests. You do embalm bodies at a mortuary, as an assistant. However, you’re also trying to save your soul from a demon and uncovering the town’s darkest secrets that aren’t quite buried with the dead yet. Every successful run uncovers a new story fragment for you to piece together – and a deadly new threat to survive – so no two graveyard shifts at the mortuary will be the same.
2
Scarlet Hollow
Scarlet Hollow borrows a little bit from dozens of horror genres and turns them into one of the best narrative games in the past decade. You return home to North Carolina and a coal town whose mines shut down only to find haunted houses, evil creatures stealing livestock, and untold more horrors filling the silence.
You have one week to find out what’s going on, assuming you don’t die first. Mysteries, murder, mayhem, and family trauma abound in Scarlet Hollow, though as the visual novel is still in early access, you won’t get to see the last three chapters just yet.
1
Luigi's Mansion 3
The less super of the Super Mario Bros. once again finds himself alone and in the dark in Luigi’s Mansion 3. This time, the green-hat bro. is trapped in a haunted hotel, scrambling to free Mario and Peach from the clutches of a sinister proprietress bent on dragging everyone into the afterlife. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is the spinoff series at its finest, with top-drawer design, puzzles, and visual direction, and best of all if you like your scares on the gentle side, there’s hardly anything frightful here.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
