Alone, under-equipped, outmatched—welcome to the survival horror genre. Faced with such stacked-against-you odds, what’s the best course of action to ensure your continued existence? 9 times out of 10, it’s to run away fast. Hope you’ve been training for cardio! Survival horror isn’t for the faint of heart. This genre is designed to test your mental fortitude, your physical reflexes, and your ability to regulate your emotions, especially. Think you’ll be able to drift off to sleep after experiencing the terror of these titles? Think again. The stuff that nightmares are made of, these are the 10 best survival horror games of all time.
Resident Evil 4
The GOAT. The best of the best. The dictionary definition of the survival horror genre: Resident Evil 4. Remade for a 2023 audience, this PS2 classic puts you in control of Leon S. Kennedy, a government agent with strong reflexes and an even stronger jawline. Dispatched to rural Spain to rescue the President’s daughter, Leon comes face to face with a nightmarish cult that worships ancient parasites. Killer giants, chainsaw-swinging psychos, science experiments gone wrong, the enemies Leon faces are endless in number. His supply of bullets? Far less so. You’ll have to carefully manage your equipment and prepare for every scenario—plan for tight spaces, low ammo, and more cultists than you can shake a combat knife at. With gripping gameplay and a story that unfolds like the finest of B-horror melodramas, Resident Evil 4 hits harder than an RPG in the face. Which, consequently, is a tactic you’ll use to defeat the game’s final boss.
Signalis
One of the best indie horror titles ever made, Signalis pays homage to genre classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Set years in the retrofuture, you play as Elster, a biosynthetic clone that awakens in the wreckage of a crashed spaceship. Forced to stumble her way through an abandoned mining colony, Elster has to shoot down infected foes while piecing together the details of the crash. With its dimly lit turns down claustrophobic corners, this game feels like stumbling through a cybernetic haunted house full of actors that are actually trying to kill you. As if the threats to your physical body weren’t bad enough, the damage Signalis does to your psyche is far worse. Featuring more existential dread than a NieR: Automata playthrough, it’s easy to see how this game draws inspiration from cosmic horror classics like The King in Yellow and the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Dour, dingy, and utterly dystopian, Signalis is sci-fi horror at its finest.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a genre classic, one that popularized the “run away and hide” method of dealing with video game horrors. After waking up in a creepy castle, the amnesia-ridden Daniel has one thing on his mind: leaving. Sadly for him, this fortress is haunted by sack-headed monsters that are working to prevent him from doing just that. The game’s revolutionary inclusion of a “sanity meter” was a stroke of survival horror genius. One glimpse at these evil-Squidward-looking monsters will cause your mental faculties to short out, and nightmarish in-game hallucinations will follow. As you uncover clues that help you piece together your past, you’ll need to ensure your future by running away and hiding from the horrors that hunt you. Preferably in a closet, or maybe in a shadowy corner. But be careful, too much in the dark will also erode your sanity, and when you lose that, escape will be impossible.
Silent Hill 2
Remade in 2024, Silent Hill 2 rivals Resident Evil 4 for the title of “Greatest Survival Horror Ever Made.” It’s the story of James Sunderland, a widower who returns to the titular suburb from Hell after receiving a letter from his wife—his dead wife. Able to shape itself based on his psyche, Silent Hill self-populates with monsters that represent all of James’ traumas and fears. Nightmare-nurses as physical representations of sexual frustration, pyramid-headed torturers embodying the desire for self-punishment, James’ inner demons are myriad. While the game threatens to leave marks on your physical body, it also takes a chunk out of your soul. Silent Hill 2 is one of the saddest survival horror games ever made, with a guilt-ridden atmosphere that can rust even the most unfeeling cast-iron hearts. Either with terror or grief, this game will have you sobbing.
Dead Space
Survival horror meets sci-fi in Dead Space, a far-future nightmare that pays homage to Alien and Event Horizon. After the mining ship USG Ishimura harvests some parasitic cargo from an alien planet, the crew are transformed into undead horrors. Their only salvation? Engineer Isaac Clarke, who deserves some serious overtime pay for the amount of repairs he has to perform in this situation. Armed with only engineers’ tools, Isaac must face down the extraterrestrial threat in a total subversion of survival horror combat norms. Headshots don’t matter when it comes to the necromorphs, you have to aim for their razor-sharp limbs. Combine eviscerating gameplay with a narrative that escalates to Lovecraftian proportions, and you’ve got a thing of survival horror beauty on your hands.
Alien: Isolation
Alien: Isolation is to video games what Ridley Scott’s Alien is to movies: a horror genre classic. You play as Amanda Ripley, daughter of the famous xenomorph slayer Ellen, who is attempting to track down her mother after she went missing on the Nostromo. After hitching a ride to a space station said to contain clues to her mother’s whereabouts, Amanda discovers that the place is also home to an extraterrestrial menace. The atmosphere of the Sevastopol station is more hostile than the gas giant it orbits. Paranoid crew members, homicidal androids, and one very angry xenomorph make the place feel like a scene from Ridley Scott’s original. While humans and robots can be killed, there’s only one option available when dealing with the alien: run and hide. But be careful, the alien likes to hide too, and Sevastol is riddled with air vents for it crawl around in—a design flaw, to be sure.
Project Zomboid
An apocalyptic RPG, Project Zomboid puts less emphasis on “horror” and more on “survival.” Set in one of five zombie-ridden towns, players are tasked with holding out against the undead for as long as possible—before the game ends with their inevitable demise. You read that correctly, there’s no winning Project Zombie, only enduring until you can’t anymore. One of the most intricately designed role-playing games around, there’s no shortage of ways you can shuffle off your mortal coil. Zombie bites. Dehydration. Food poisoning. Exsanguination. Disease. Hypothermia. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Hell, the game even lets you drink Bleach (with predictably fatal results). On top of that, you have to manage boredom, stress, hunger, body temperature, and the inevitable dread that comes with contemplating your own demise.
Subnautica
Don’t let its bright colors and peaceful vibes fool you, Subnautic is survival horror at its depths. Stranded on a planet covered in a global ocean, you’ll need to tread water long enough to figure out how to escape this wet prison. The dictionary definition of thalassophobia, Subnautica‘s seas are populated by underwater horrors of gargantuan proportions. While it’s all fun and games in the shallows, things take a turn in the abyssal depths when you find yourself face to face with carnivorous leviathans of the deep. The regenerators of Resident Evil 4 are scary, sure, but NOTHING can prepare you for an encounter with a Reaper Leviathan on the ocean floor.
Outlast 2
The final boss of “run away and hide” survival horror, Outlast 2 is the story of cameraman Blake Langermann, who is separated from journalist wife after a helicopter crash in the desert. There to investigate a cult predicting Judgement Day, Blake soon realizes that The End might come sooner than he thought—his end, at least. While fleeing homicidal zealots with heart-in-mouth speed, Blake begins hallucinating the traumatic days of his Catholic school past. This breakdown between waking reality and nightmare is what gives Outlast 2 its supernatural thrill— a game that makes you believe the Apocalypse has been localized within your TV screen, and is slowly leaking out.
SOMA
The big brother of Bioshock, SOMA is a survival horror game set entirely underwater. After receiving a brain scan, car crash survivor Simon Jarrett wakes up in the undersea power station PATHOS-II with no memory of how he got there. Despite being populated by homicidal robots that believe themselves to be human, Simon learns that PATHOS-II is the safest place he could be—the Earth’s surface was devastated by a disaster of cosmic proportions. The atmosphere of the game is heavy, a derelict underwater wasteland that bears down on the player with the same pressure as the miles of salt water above. Created by the developer of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA improves on the survival/puzzle aspects of its predecessor while presenting a story that’s far more sophisticated—a digital exploration of the fragility of human consciousness.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
