Scary gost games

This wasn't always the case, however, as there was once a time where the idea of creating a video game that could genuinely unsettle or even frighten players seemed far-fetched.

Thanks to consistent improvements in gaming technology, though, development teams can now create scarier, more atmospheric, and more disturbingly immersive games than ever before. Today's horror games have a lot to thank the pioneers that came before them, as they took a chance on the horror genres at times when it wasn't a major player in the gaming industry, and were able to create great horror experiences despite gaming's technical limitations at the time.

Alone in the Dark was first released in on the MS-DOS and makes this as the first 3D survival horror game in the history of gaming, and arguably even the first survival horror game ever made, period. Like many games in the genre that would follow, Alone in the Dark takes place in a haunted mansion where players have a multitude of puzzles to solve , all while trying to stay safe from the monsters and ghosts that lurk within.

As well as spawning the survival horror genre, the game also kickstarted the Alone in the Dark series, receiving five sequels over the course of 23 years. Unfortunately, none of the sequels managed to reach the heights of the original, and the series appears to have now ended following 's Alone in the Dark: Illumination, which r eceived a brutal Metascore of just Clock Tower was developed by Human Entertainment and was released exclusively in Japan back in The game is a point-and-click adventure - a genre that was common in the 90s - but was better know for light-hearted, comedic adventures like Grim Fandango or The Secret of Monkey Island.

Clock Tower , though, strips away the genre's traditional comedy and replaces it with heart-pounding fear. The game puts players in control of, Jennifer Simpson, who must explore and solve puzzles in a mansion; while avoiding the ever-present danger of being captured by the game's antagonist, the terrifying Scissorman.

Avoiding the villain is easier said than done, as players have no weaponry in the game, so they only have two options when they spot Scissorman: run or hide. However, if you enjoy a story about religious extremism, Outlast 2 is for you. Just how scary is Outlast 2? Well, in my opinion, I found it actually more terrifying than the original. Rhys disagrees, but I thought it is worth noting.

If Grand Theft Auto was thought to be a violent game, it is a walk in the park in comparison to Manhunt. This is an early game from Rockstar, and remarkably, it still holds up under the test of time. Sure, the latter is about hunting one human at a time, but Manhunt is about killing many humans in the most violent and spectacular ways possible.

You get more points for how brutal or sneaky the attack is, depending on what is demanded of you on that level. That is nothing to say of the sexual aspects involved in some of the levels. Manhunt may not have jump scares or ghosts, but it does have violence and the kind of subtle psychological scares that horror games rarely bother with. The situation and your actions really make you think about what your life and that of others are really worth.

This creatively named fellow is going after other serial killers that the main character had been investigating, further cementing his supposed motivation and guilt. This game has been criticized for its linear paths which do not allow the player to put together the investigation themselves.

However, the linear path and transparent mystery are overshadowed by the close combat of Condemned. Players really feel the first-person-perspective with each kill made.

Combat is focused almost entirely on melee, getting up close and personal with every enemy you encounter. Your weapons range from a paper cutter blade to the more usual wrench. Each is as brutal as the last, offering sickening crunches and violent finishing moves for all your enemies.

That is to say nothing of the voices you will hear as you encounter certain enemies. Some will ask you to follow them, leaving behind bloody footprints and leading you into an ambush.

Others will scream, the sound sending a red light throughout the hallway, then going out just as quickly. Enemies are abundant, of course, forcing the player to guess where they are before shooting them or the light goes out. No matter how confident you are at Doom games, Doom 3 will keep you cautiously approaching any and all new rooms, especially the dark ones.

There will be plenty of jump scares and enemies coming out of corners you could have sworn you checked out beforehand. Though the game has a few gameplay problems, like the enemies you have to run from, it is not quite enough to detract from the fascinating story this game tells.

You wake up as some random dude with no idea how you got to a facility this many leagues under the ocean. Despite such a generic beginning, unfolding this mystery is how the game tells its story. The best thing about this game, are the robots. Each of them has the full consciousness of a human and believe they are human. Yet, they are ugly junkyard robots, hardly functioning in the decrepit facility they inhabit. These are not the sleek robots of the future we are used to seeing in other sci-fi media.

In this way, Soma states that it is easier to humanize a Porsche than it is a Ford Fiesta. Then it asks exactly what does personhood have to do with looks. What do you do when horror quite literally comes knocking on your door?

Save for one story, which is in the usual first-person perspective. Each story is connected and will eventually accumulate to a very suspicious knock on your door. It is difficult to describe Stories Untold without getting into spoilers, but the sections are well told and there is a certain nostalgic 80s aesthetic to it all.

The horror is not so much jump scares as it is an immersive storytelling. The visuals and actions required of the player aid help to create an atmosphere that keeps you questioning what is going on, morality, and exactly who is knocking on your door. This ending is somewhere between an out of body experience and shaking-in-your-boots horror.

There, they are met with every kind of horrible monster from the mind of Ruvik. The design of these monsters has been highly praised as each is unique and often put a twist on common horror tropes.

For example, body bags hanging from the ceiling, only this time one of them is still screaming. Or a dead body that turns into a many-limbed banshee determined to drown you in blood. Only Evil Within could marry Japanese horror with Western combat so well. The Evil Within builds atmosphere through almost detective noir style of the mystery.

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. If you're sure you won't be haunted by nightmares of horror creatures like sadistic clowns coming for you in the dark, you should definitely give our scary yet fun games a try.

While the stories of kids disappearing while they play our games are probably just urban legends, there are great scares and lots of fun to be had with our games. So don't be intimidated by some darker graphics or a little bit of gore, it's all just done for a laugh. Or at least for a few tense moments, a surprised shriek and an exhausted grunt when the game slowly winds down. Are you up for the challenge of wading through games of fear and gothic excess?

Put on your big boy pants or big girl shoes and face the challenges that the underworld has in store for you. Flash Games. Siren Head: The Hunt Continues. Slenderman Must Die: Survivors. Siren Head: Sound of Despair.

Slendrina Must Die: The Asylum. Read more.. Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator. Five Nights at Freddy's Multiplayer. Five Nights at Freddy's 1 2 3 4 5. The Visitor: Massacre at Camp Happy.