If we were to ask you what you think are the best horror games, your mind surely goes to Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Dead Space, Amnesia, Fatal Frame—and rightly so. But with so much horror releasing every year and solo devs or small studios getting their moment to shine, it’s no surprise if you can’t play every horror game out there.
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There’s so many horror games to choose from and you may be limited on your chosen console, so it’s highly likely you missed out on these gems when they released. Whether you’re a part of the indie horror community on YouTube and Reddit, or you leave no stone unturned when it comes to new releases, here are our recommendations of the most underrated horror games you probably haven’t heard of.
Do You Copy?
Price: Free
A legendary horror game in the indie realm, Do You Copy? is a claustrophobic and intense bite-sized horror that delivers chilling scares all from inside a fire lookout tower. Watching out for forest fires, you’re called by a lost hiker looking for directions, but no one should be walking through the park alone at night. Given a map to make sense of your surroundings and a flood light to keep a watchful eye out, Do You Copy? keeps you on the edge of your seat at all times, for the fear of the unknown is prevalent, where a feeling of uneasiness claws at you.
Do You Copy? may be short, but it has everything you need for a great horror game. Surrounded by a dense forest engulfed in darkness, you have no idea what there is to be afraid of until it’s too late.
Funeralopolis: Last Days
Price: Free
One of the most immersive and experimental indie horror games in recent years is Funeralopolis. With clear inspiration from Silent Hill, Funeralopolis has amazing worldbuilding, which is incredibly impressive for a game set inside one floor of an apartment complex. A surreal narrative that blends dreams and reality into one, there’s something growing inside your apartment. An unofficial group has formed, powered by religious ideologies, but something doesn’t feel right.
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There’s something hypnotic about Funeralopolis that makes you want more by the time the credits roll. Much like Silent Hill, the story shown could easily be adapted into other media, providing an intriguing and ominous story that’s both Lovecraftian and psychological.
Hollow Cocoon
Price: $14.99
While Capcom remade their classic horror games by perfecting their survival horror gameplay and polishing the graphics to match the current standard in modern gaming, we can revisit the idea of tank controls, stationary camera angles, and small but layered level designs by playing new retro-style horror games. These are often pixelated, keeping the same visuals and aesthetic of the first Resident Evil. But what if you took these ideas and implemented them in modern-day graphics?
Hollow Cocoon, the best Resident Evil-like game that uses classic survival horror elements with a Silent Hill narrative, set in rural Japan. The dark story of Hollow Cocoon offers puzzles that cannot be completed without backtracking. Set in one house, you have to navigate around its maze-like construction, all while a monster hunts you down. Similar to Amnesia, Hollow Cocoon‘s mysterious tale is told through note collecting. It is a great horror game that takes key components from the best horror franchises and combines them for a stealthy and challenging experience.
IT STEALS
Price: $4.99
Zeekerss, the solo developer of Lethal Company, also gave us IT STEALS—a horrifying cat and mouse game. IT STEALS is a horror game with multiple modes that all follow a Pac-Man formula of a gigantic maze that you must escape and—as always—you’re IT. Screaming and panicking are inevitable, for something is creeping up in the darkness, and there’s not enough time to strategize.
Just when you’ve got used to how the game is played, the next mode throws the rulebook out the window, where you must adapt once again if you want to stand a chance to survive. I cannot express how frightening IT STEALS truly is, making Lethal Company appear like a child’s plaything in comparison. It is creepy, claustrophobic, and isolating. There is no way you can win if you don’t pay attention and adjust to the rules, for the monsters are in charge in these realms—and they’re hungry for some fun.
Late Homework
Price: $5.99
Late Homework may be adorable on the surface, but there’s something sinister lurking underneath. Returning to the school at night to collect your assignments, the shutters lock behind you. You’re not the only one here. Much like Crow Country and Fear the Spotlight, Late Homework is a retro-style horror with a patrolling enemy, clues delivered in handwritten notes, and clever puzzles that require backtracking to figure out.
There’s nothing particularly special about Late Homework that makes it a standalone product compared to classic or new retro-style horrors, but Late Homework is an awesome little game to try out if you’re a fan of Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Fatal Frame.
Midnight Scenes: A Safe Place
Price: $5.99
Heavily inspired by The Twilight Zone, Octavi Navarro’s Midnight Scenes is a series of short horror point-and-click stories. Often handling themes of love, loss, friendship, and mental health disorders, Midnight Scenes offers fantastic horror games that provide an immersive atmosphere, great characters, and script-writing, with unpredictable jump scares. Each game is set in a minimal setting, often confining you to one or two rooms as the nightmare unfolds around you.
You may have heard of The Nanny or The Highway, both being amazing bite-sized games, but our recommendation goes to A Safe Place for the feeling of being trapped you get throughout the 60-90 run time. Prey to your nightmares and too fearful to go outside, Phil must battle his isolation as the monsters that haunt him start seeping into the real world.
TELEFORUM
Price: Free
If Video Drome was a horror game, it’d be TELEFORUM. An incredibly short horror game, there’s an immediate uneasiness that’s hiding inside TELEFORUM. There isn’t much content, and yet the entire game feels like you’re not supposed to watch or play it. The story follows a journalist duo, looking to make it big by finding a mysterious tape that’s led to the death of anyone who’s watched it. The lighting in this game, alongside the visuals looking incredibly realistic, makes TELEFORUM feel like an actual cursed game you’ve accidentally stumbled upon.
There are small details and changes throughout the game that can make you question the reality you’re looking at. An analog horror with references to Poltergeist, The Ring, and Video Drome, TELEFORUM has creepy imagery that may stay with you long after you eject the tape.
The Voidness
Price: $11.99
The Voidness demonstrates the power of our imagination and how it can manifest scarier imagery than what’s actually being shown on screen. Taking the usual exploration walking sim formula and adding a mechanic that immediately puts you on edge, The Voidness is a highly unique horror game for its lidar feature alone. With a scanner in hand as your only means to make sense of your surroundings, the darkness envelopes you, heightening your senses.
Structures are shown as tiny collections of pixels, designated into color groups. Anything in red is a threat that’s stumbling across the darkness, hunting anything that moves. Hiding from the horror won’t do much when your mic is open, enhancing that gnawing feeling of isolation. Gloom spreads within the space station where your crew went missing. Find out what happened to them by venturing into the void, and hope you’ll come out the other side in one piece.
The Well
Price: $1.99
Another short free-to-play horror is The Well, giving Lovecraftian vibes throughout. A simpler art design and direction than other entries, The Well‘s terror is delivered through pixelated, unidentifiable imagery and dialogue. Its simplicity means you can only focus on your sole objective: reach the bottom of the well. But the well is endless, and the further you get, the more otherworldly it seems.
Resembling something Junji Ito would craft a short story on, The Well isn’t a shockingly terrifying game, but it does carry an uneasiness that’s suffocating as you sink further and further into the contents of the well. Is there an end in sight, or is your hope to see the bottom just a futile dream?
We Never Left
Price: Free
An underrated subgenre is the create your own adventure horror game. These are often portrayed as a game within a game, as you write your instructions based on the text you read on the computer screen. But We Never Left takes this a step further by blending the adventure and your in-game version of reality, bringing the horror straight to your doorstep. Investigating what happened to an old acquaintance of yours, We Never Left takes the mystery and calmness of games like Gone Home and flips it on its head, as a creeping feeling of danger tugs at you to take notice and act before it’s too late.
Trespassing is the least of your concerns, however, for the idea of you investigating your friend’s disappearance was premeditated. He wants you to be here. As you dive into the game he created, you begin to unravel what happened to him, and how his horror game is missing one final component—you.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros.
