The best horror games on PC
What are the best horror games on PC? Horror games tend to turn traditional action concepts on their heads and force you to run and hide from your enemies. Scary games leave you feeling vulnerable rather than empowered, and more than most, they are the gaming experiences that haunt you long after you play.
Of course, there is a lot more to horror games than jump scares and gore, too. So while we have included a few obvious picks like Outlast and Amnesia, you can also expect to find games that use different tactics to raise your heartbeat and get your palms sweating. Don’t worry about this list getting out of date, either: we hop back into our lists regularly to add new scary games.
Remember, as Roosevelt once said, “we have nothing to fear but that bit in FEAR where you’re going up a ladder and Alma suddenly pops out and you are all like argh!” Here are the best horror games on PC you can play right now… if you dare.
The best horror games are:
Phasmophobia
Phasmophobia has climbed rapidly in popularity since its Early Access release, outselling the likes of Balder’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. Phasmophobia has grown beyond a cult following and is showing no signs of slowing down, so what makes it so good?
Although Phasmophobia is primarily a horror game, you could look at it as a co-op detective game as you and up to three other investigators explore a haunted location in an effort to deduce what type of ghost is spooking out the premises before reporting back. It requires teamwork, your best detective hat, and steady nerves to navigate the dark, tight corridors and eerily quiet rooms.
Using equipment, such as ouija boards, a spirit box, a crucifix, and smudge sticks – you and your team need to investigate the haunting and complete tasks such as taking a picture of dirty water, or asking the ghost questions. Be careful, though, all your prying will likely upset the ghost, and you don’t want to be around when it starts hunting.
Metro Exodus
Metro Exodus is a number of games packed into one inviting post-apocalyptic slice of Russia: it’s a story-focused family drama as much as it is a Wolfenstein-esque, heavy metal-scored FPS. However, there are plenty of spine-tingling horror game sequences creeping en route to the climactic Metro Exodus ending.
4A Games’ irradiated outing allows you to choose whether you want Artyom’s adventure to be a guns-blazing assault or a stealthy affair shrouded in darkness thanks to the game’s day/night mechanic. But, if you choose to sleep through the daylight hours to creep up on your opponents in pitch darkness then expect a much scarier experience. Human enemies might be on the back foot, but the chill of a howling Watchmen or the charge of a Humanimal is excruciatingly unsettling.
Yet, as we pointed out in our Metro Exodus PC review, this is a game that is at its most terrifying when it changes the rules. Early stages of the game teach you to extinguish light and master the shadows. Then, in the spider-infested bunkers beneath the Caspian Sea, it becomes your weapon. Your arachnid foes are fatally vulnerable to light, so they skulk about in any dimly-lit crevice they can find. As their disgusting, hairy legs scrabble madly against the walls, it becomes apparent that, in Metro Exodus, you can never let your guard down.
Resident Evil Village
It never gets any easier for Resident Evil Village’s main protagonist, Ethan Winters. We first meet Ethan in Resident Evil 7, when his long lost wife mysteriously makes contact, and he sets out to find her, leading him to a creepy bayou cabin and a nasty run-in with the unsavoury residents, the Baker family. Luckily, Chris Redfield swoops in to save Ethan, and his life regains some normality, if not for long. Ethan’s world is once again turned upside down in Resident Evil 8. This time he’s stuck in an isolated village inhabited by monsters and feral villagers. Resident Evil Village may be remembered for its alluring antagonist, the tall lady, but this first-person survival game soon lets loose the scares.
Resident Evil has a long, storied history of good and bad games, with Resident Evil 6 being a low point in the series. This game is up in the higher echelons, as seen in our Resident Evil Village review. It’s a tense adventure where you need to have your wits about you to survive hordes of werewolf-like creatures, undead thralls, and other horrifying monsters. Even the tall lady has long, sharp claws capable of slicing limbs off. If you can’t stomach body horror and dismemberment, this may not be the right Resident Evil game for you.
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It also has perhaps the scariest moment in the series to date; we certainly won’t spoil it for you here. We suggest that when you enter that house, you should play with the lights on, unless you are feeling a little braver than usual.
The Evil Within 2
The best horror games keep you up at night. By that metric, The Evil Within 2 screams itself to the top. You will certainly struggle to get to sleep after you have seen a pile of severed bodies skitter across the floor and assemble themselves into the form of a pale, fleshy mass of limbs with several faces – all of them laughing – and a buzzsaw in place of a right arm.
The Evil Within 2 is packed with skin-crawling set-pieces like this, each one as inventive as the last. But Tango Gameworks’ impeccable sequel is much more than a list of the best moments in horror games. Slaying bosses and exploring spooky mansions are separated by open-world sections where you never know what is waiting for you: some much-needed shotgun shells or a devious spectre that will continue to haunt you for the remainder of your playthrough.
Underneath the whip-smart enemy and level design, The Evil Within 2 stays true to its survival horror roots, always pitting you against one more crazed enemy than you have bullets for. If that’s still not enough to convince you then take a look at our The Evil Within 2 review.
Alien: Isolation
The best horror games make you feel utterly powerless, and in Alien: Isolation it is your wits, your knack for crawling under desks and into lockers, and a variety of distractions that will save you from the hulking, Gigerian horror. A deadly creature who can appear at any moment, unscripted, and without warning: what more could you ask for from a horror game antagonist?
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Like your horror games unflinchingly violent and heart-grippingly tense? Monolith’s Condemned: Criminal Origins is an accomplished and effortless first-person frightener worth seeking out despite its decade-old graphics.
Here is a homeless-person-fighting simulator in which you play the role of nocturnal crime scene investigator and human punching bag Ethan Thomas. Most remarkable for its lack of guns, Condemned: Criminal Origins is proper flashlight horror, with terrifying, unwashed men leaping out at you from around corners and out of shadows. Coming out of a brawl alive means carefully timing your punches and patiently blocking your opponent’s attacks, and in encounters with multiple enemies your best option is often to run away.
It’s unconventional as police games go, but the horror games genre could do with a little more Condemned: Criminal Origins in their bloodstream.
Darkwood
Sound does not get enough credit in horror games, and if you ever need a reminder of how powerful a simple scratching noise or a distant knock can be, seek out one of the best indie games to delve into the horror genre, Darkwood. This is a top-down horror game about a mysterious man cooking mushrooms in a house right in the middle of a plague-infested forest.
When it is light outside you are free to roam the festering woods, fighting off rabid dogs, collecting resources, and trying to figure out who you are and how you ended up here. By night, however, your only option is to get back to your house and wait for the horrors of the night to pass you by. You can load up your generator with fuel to ward off enemies, barricade the windows to hide yourself, and set traps as a last line of defense – but they are coming for you, no matter how well you have prepared.
Darkwood’s ability to seep into your pores and haunt you without showing you as much as a limb is uncanny. Rustling sounds, inhuman shrieks, and creaky doors had us smashing the Esc key and walking away from the desktop time and time again. Don’t let the top-down perspective fool you, this is one of the best horror games out there.
System Shock 2
System Shock 2 kicked a particular flavour of first-person survival horror games into gear. It boasts an open-ended structure, with an endless maze of decks and quarters that promote exploration and discovery. It is a lot like being stuck in a haunted John Lewis, except with psychic death monkeys.
The faster-than-light Von Braun is a persistent world that appears to exist and unfold even while your back is turned – building a heightened sense of place aboard the scarcely populated starship.
But it is corrupted artificial intelligence SHODAN who makes System Shock 2 one of the greatest horror games to have ever graced our fair platform. Right up there with HAL 9000 in the soothingly voiced yet subtly evil computer stakes, she torments and tricks you endlessly, transforming an already terrifying survival RPG into an isolationist horror classic. Few space games match System Shock 2’s sense of isolation.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Nightmares aren’t much like horror games; they don’t tend to have rules that make sense. But Amnesia: The Dark Descent is genuinely nightmarish. This is a horror game in which monsters can get at you no matter what, in which sneaking and hiding from these creatures is your only means of self-defence, and in which simply looking at the monsters can drive you insane.
You almost literally curl up into a ball and shut your eyes when Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s monsters are in the room, using audio cues to guess when they have left. Few horror games are as unnerving as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which sticks by the golden rule of horror: fear of the unknown is the most powerful fear of all.
Outlast
Employing the ‘found footage’ style of contemporary horror cinema, Outlast is a first-person exploration game set inside an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Like all abandoned psychiatric hospitals in horror games, this one is populated by a cast of deranged patients and cruel staff, whom you must avoid in order to survive with all of your guts still inside your body. These tropes might be well and truly covered in cinema, but horror games can make the most out of these clichés, and Outlast is the proof.
In order to find your way around Outlast’s dark corridors you must cautiously peer through your camcorder’s green-tinged infrared mode. This gives Outlast a distinctly eerie visual identity, while leaving you feeling vulnerable to baddies creeping up behind you. Your camera’s batteries only last a few minutes, so it is a small mercy that the hospital you are exploring is full of batteries that fit the exact make and model of your camera. Phew.
Dead Space
Like the horror game adaptation of Event Horizon that never was, Dead Space is the story of a fun cabal of ne’er-do-well cultists who bring a deep space mining ship to its flickering, malfunctioning knees.
You are a mechanic armed with a laser cutter capable of strategically dismembering the legions of already malformed alien creatures who now infest the ship, but despite your powerful weaponry, you are never close to being at ease.
Stories Untold
Stories Untold is a fiendishly imaginative package of four small horror experiences, each one told using a different piece of retro tech as the main vehicle for its twisted tales. The opening episode plonks you in front of a chunky old CRT monitor and playing a horror text adventure called The House Abandon. It’s not long before the environment around you begins to mirror that of the story you’re reading as lights begin to flicker, mysterious thuds go unchecked, and imagined noises keep you pinned to the screen in anticipation of a jump-scare that never comes. This methodical pace sets Stories Untold apart from most other horror games in that it’s four episodes care more about mood and atmosphere than cheap thrills.
The spooky stories also span a range of genres and mediums, from a menacing thriller that’s revealed via the process of decoding radio transmissions, to an elaborate sci-fi yarn that sees you carrying out an experiment on a mysterious artifact using a host of machines and contraptions. And while each episode feels separate, they’re tied together in subtle ways and the final act delivers a twist so punchy it would leave M. Knight Shyamalan reeling.
Also from the Stories Untold studio is the horror game Observation, a sci-fi thriller where you assume the role of an AI trying to save a space station in crisis.
Little Nightmares
Although Little Nightmares is on its second outing, it’s still worth picking up the first game in the series – it not only sets the scene for a climactic showdown against The Thin Man in the sequel, but it is perhaps even more terrifying. Set in the claustrophobic corridors of The Maw, you play as Six, a small child trying to flee the horrors of the remote vessel, a place steeped in mystery and malevolence.
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You’ll need to solve puzzles in order to move through a treacherous maze of rooms and corridors, avoiding the inhabitants that dwell throughout. The grotesque Twin Chefs are after you with their sharp butcher knives, and The Janitor’s long arms wind through the air vents after you as you desperately try to escape. It may be a relatively short game, but Little Nightmares manages to ramp up the tension in a grim, unsettling world, while creating a harrowing storyline and taking us on a ghastly journey that ends in an epic finale.
Inside
Similar to Little Nightmares, our protagonist must escape a dark world, where he is hunted and alone, moving through deadly obstacles and avoiding detection. Using a mind control helmet, he can control the hapless, unwitting crowds of people found huddled throughout, to help him move objects and solve puzzles. You’ll also probably die a lot, and like its predecessor Limbo, all the ways you can die are graphic and merciless before the screen fades to black.
Inside’s art style uses monochromatic backdrops and sporadic flashes of colour to create a truly unsettling experience, along with the sparing use of sound and ambient lighting – this sinister, narrative-driven platformer is a horrifyingly haunting ride.
Oxenfree
The story begins – like most cabin in the woods style horrors – when an unsuspecting group of friends journey to a remote island to party, but once they step off the ferry onto an island plagued by forgotten horrors, this party takes a sinister turn. You play as Alex, a rebellious teen, who opens a rift to another world, shaping the story by choosing dialogue snippets and making decisions that determine how the game plays out.
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It’s a supernatural thriller that switches between a paranormal horror and relaxing adventure game, to create a tense, disconcerting atmosphere that carries all the way through to the dramatic finale. Oxenfree manages to genre bend into something magical, beautiful, and utterly terrifying.
Doom 3
Doom 3 is almost as old to us now as the original Doom was when Doom 3 came out, but as is the case for all of the best horror games, all that matters is how scary it is, and Doom 3 is still scary as balls.
As traditional a shooter as they come, the focus here is on a rapidly escalating armoury of weapons with which to slaughter an army of hell demons, upside-down baby-face spiders, and weird alien-bears. The id Tech 4 engine was a marvel of its era, bringing an unfathomable level of detail to what had previously been an array of flat brown sprites.
More than a decade on, the precise timing of Doom 3’s jump scares and pop-up monsters still feels borderline cruel – and its selection of nightmarish enemies perfect horror games fodder.
Man of Medan
PS4 exclusive Until Dawn was a surprise hit back in 2015, telling a ‘cabin in the woods’ style teen horror by letting you make all the tricky decisions. The aim is simple: get all the characters out alive. So if you’re always the one calling out stupid decisions characters make in horror movies, now you can finally see how far your decision-making would get you.
Creators SuperMassive games take this a step further in their long-awaited spiritual successor, Man of Medan, stranding our group of five friends on a ghost ship after a holiday diving trip takes a wrong turn. The choices you make will decide the fate of the five friends, as you progress through a cinematic story, and even though you know your sailing headfirst into horror, the ride is still surprising as it is terrifying. Man of Medan does play on jump scares, but it’s a worthy follow up to Until Dawn, and it’s also a horror game available on PC.
That’s all from us, the very best horror games available on PC. If you’re in need of a little R&R why not check out the best card games or building games on PC? It’s OK, you can come out from behind whatever piece of furniture you’ve been cowering behind, that really is everything – we’re not going to throw a cheap jump scare into the credits or anything like that.
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