Like any video game genre in 2022, survival horror’s definition is pretty fluid. We think the best survival horror games all have a few key things in common, though.
They all make you feel intensely, uncomfortably vulnerable. That means as scary as your favorite shooter might be, your ability to eviscerate enemies with a brief burst of LMB precludes it from this genre. You’re brittle.
You’re also often totally under-prepared and ill-equipped. Managing the scant items around you and turning them into survival tools is a big part of the genre, from Resi’s famous herbs to the Macgyvered armory of Alien: Isolation.
There has to be something specific and unique about its sense of place and the events that unfold there, too. Resident Evil 2 gets a bye on such a generic premise as ‘zombies take over a city’ for popularizing and defining the entire genre, but subsequent games have all had to work harder, looking under every part of our psyche for some new combination of place and situation we didn’t know we were scared of.
Here are ten of the best titles at doing exactly that. Here’s six handgun bullets, a broken flashlight and a camera. Go at them.
