You can craft weapons but they won't help and you can attempt to learn patterns and layouts, but the world will shift around you. Teleglitch, more than any other game on this list, uses its difficulty as a weapon to terrify. The visuals are lo-fi corruptions that still manage to communicate how awful your situation is, as every room and corridor swims with the hazy form of unimaginably horrible things.
If your reactions aren't up to scratch, you'll suffer, and if you don't learn from your mistakes, you're doomed to repeat them over and over and over and over. Hell, even if you do learn from your mistakes Teleglitch will find new ways to confuse and confound you, and new things to confront you with. Tricky as it is, you'll make progress eventually and that's when the whole situation becomes even more agonising.
You become used to treating life as a throwaway thing and then, suddenly, you're carrying just the right equipment and confidence starts to rise, and you make the biggest mistake of all.
You value your tiny doomed character and you start to think ahead. Not to a homecoming parade or even the next level, but to the next room and the one after. You start to believe that you've got a chance in hell and then the game reminds you that you are in hell and that hell doesn't do chances. Teleglitch is like top-down Doom if Doom were about a terrified survivor of the Phobos incident rather than a rugged space marine.
Big budget horror rarely works well. The temptation to show the money on the screen works against the mystery and murkiness necessary for so much that frightens us. The original Dead Space threw everything at the screen - guts, extra limbs, hallucinations, cult religions, erratic sci-fi - and was content to see at least some of it stick.
It was at the gun-happy end of the survival horror spectrum but it succeeded in creating a strong setting and icky, fearsome set of creatures to laser-carve into pieces. While the 'tactical' limb-lopping might have been slightly oversold, the combat was satisfying and there were some genuine scares.
Dead Space 2 went bigger. Protagonist Isaac Clarke found his voice literally - he was silent in the original, bar his grunts of distress and stomp-sigh and the action moved to The Sprawl, an enormous space station that lived up to its name.
The new setting allowed Visceral to mix the familiar with the strange, as Isaac moved through residential quarters, shopping districts and everything else one might expect in a city. The Sprawl was an urban environment that just happened to be located in the vicinity of Titan. That helped to anchor the ridiculous excess of the game's wilder setpieces but Dead Space 2 succeeds because of that excess - it's loud, violent and paced like a theme park ride.
It's ridiculous that this should be terrifying, really, since the whole premise is that you're alone in orbit around the dead alien planet you're remotely exploring with a drone. You couldn't possibly be any further from anything down there, and it's not likely there's even anything hostile anyway. You have a limited time in which to pilot your little tracked drone around the surface, gathering artifacts and recalling it to the ship so you can analyse them.
If you stay for too long, you'll contract a fatal dose of the radiation that's bathing your entire ship. It's far too eerie. The radiation makes visibility poor, and the atmosphere and wind will repeatedly convince you there is danger nearby.
You could strip out the microphone to make space, but then you're left with nothing in your ears but your own breathing, and the faint, unsettling background noises of your ship. The invisible threat of radiation has never felt more oppressive in a game. The Evil Within isn't just a third-person survival horror game - it is every third-person survival horror game. It begins in madness and swiftly moves to gothic melodrama and Hammer horror.
It contains apparently earnest science fiction concepts and places them alongside hammy mad doctor tropes that would make Kenneth Branagh's topless Frankenstein blush. In one level it introduces invisible enemies that can only be tracked by observing their impact on curtains and puddles, and waves of dynamite-wielding enemies that assault the player and companions in a blood-drenched stand-off.
Throughout all of these tangents and experiments, the game retains almost perfect pacing, finely tuned stealth and combat mechanics, and a level of guts 'n' gore that could make Tom Savini slightly squeamish. What's astonishing - so much so that it's easy to miss - is that the game's almost anthological format allows it to push against the boundaries of survival horror.
Even as the end approaches, new ideas are being introduced and the DLC has continued that trend, playing with a defenceless protagonist and then turning the tables completely and popping the player behind the eyes of the box-headed antagonist. It should be a wildly uneven journey, given how much Tango Gameworks explore using the limited toolset of the survival horror template, but everything hangs together beautifully.
Lone Survivor initially looked like a 2d Resident Evil but as more details emerged, it started to resemble a 2d Silent Hill. That lone developer Jasper Byrne managed to shake off both of those reference points and make something that stands alone is impressive enough, but that Lone Survivor is funny and heartbreaking as well as frightening is astonishing.
No game other than Hotline Miami has a soundtrack so important to its mood and overall composition. Whether it's the improbable jazz filtering through a rotting and apparently uninhabited apartment building or the click of fingers in a Lynchian dream lodge, Lone Survivor's horror takes place in a welcoming sea of synths. The plot demands to be unpicked and although there is a fairly strict structure, replays reveal fresh ideas and the player often has control of the pacing. Some scenes are gruesome but there's a warmth to Lone Survivor.
Not everything is lost, even when there seems to be nobody left alive, and despite the monsters, gore and corpses, the eventual horror is touched by sorrow rather than disgust.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent's water monster captured the imagination of every horror fan who was paying attention. In , Frictional Games squared their horror circle with Amnesia: Rebirth. It's wider in scope, containing not only capsule versions of the haunted house experience to be found in The Dark Descent, but claustrophobic tunnels and sweeping alien landscapes - and, in a surprise for the series, bright sunshine as well.
Though it cracks a little under the weight of wrapping up the complex, history-spanning story of the Amnesia games, Rebirth is Frictional showing off everything they've learned in the last decade. Locations in Rebirth have many layers, and with this Frictional prove they can scare you whenever, however, and with whatever they want. Though there's no water monster this time, the same effect of an ever-present threat, unseen but potentially everywhere, is achieved with monsters that tunnel through the walls.
It's also a story about body horror and a threat coming from within, as much as it's about the monsters without, and as such you can never really relax even in the moments that you're supposedly safe. The Ghost Of You is an interactive horror story in which you play as a woman called Libretto. She's recently bereaved, and has been, to coin a phrase, through some shit. The prologue has her invited to a concert by a close friend who she's not seen for a long while - Libretto has pushed everyone away in her grief, and even going to the concert hall is a bit of an ordeal for her.
It turns out more than one reunion is on the cards, as she suddenly runs into her ex-girlfriend, whose heart is clearly as broken as her own. It's foreshadowed, so not a total surprise, but the horror in The Ghost Of You descends with shocking violence. The people at the concert go through absolute hell, and it's down to you to guide Libretto through the night and try to escape without losing the people you love. It quite soon becomes a sort of multiple choice adventure game, in which you pick a path through the building, decide what to say or do with any survivors, and how to avoid or escape danger.
Though gruesome, it never feels exploitative or pornographic - even an optional vein of slightly warped eroticism depending on some of your interactions is an interesting and thought out subplot. Another year, another new Resident Evil game on this list. Resident Evil Village sort of Resi 8, in number if not name follows on from protagonist Ethan's antics with the infinitely horrible Baker family in Resi 7.
A year on, and Ethan finds himself up against the denizens of that village, which is full of werewolves, yes, but conveniently also has some big baddies each in their own grim house.
Our month-long retrospective will touch on just about every type of game you can imagine — so be sure not to miss any of it! Subscribe to GameZebo. Home News Best of Best Horror Games of by. Best of Related Stories Games of the Year Android iOS PC. Twin sisters try to escape a haunted village with the help of the Camera Obscura, a camera with the power to see the impossible.
Votes: T Horror, Mystery. Armed with a camera capable of fighting ghosts, a teenage girl searches a haunted house in search of her brother. M Horror, Mystery, Thriller. M Drama, Horror, Mystery.
After receiving a letter from his late wife, from Silent Hill, James Sunderland makes his way to the town in an attempt to find her. Votes: 6, Horror, Mystery, Thriller. New Siren game takes place on a small island town in rural Japan. The town is quiet, and peaceful, until one night evil invades, and it's dark history surfaces. M Action, Horror, Mystery. A death row convict must fight his way to freedom when nightmarish monsters invade the prison.
M Adventure, Fantasy, Horror. Over the course of two millenia, twelve men and women are linked together by an accursed book known as the Tome of Eternal Darkness. Daniel, a young man, awakes in a dreary castle with no memory of his past and discovers that he deliberately erased his memory and must travel through the dark halls to kill the evil baron Alexander. Stars: Richard Topping , Sam A. Mowry , Bill Corkery , Eric Newsome. Votes: 1, Heather is suddenly thrust into a strange alternate reality filled with demonic imagery and twisted monsters.
She quickly comes to find that the events unfolding around her have something to do with her past. Votes: 3, M Action, Crime, Horror. Ethan Thomas, a former Serial Crimes Unit investigator, is brought back into action to hunt down the killer of his former partner and uncover the disturbing secrets behind an increasingly dark and violent city.
Henry wakes up to realize he's confined in his apartment. He is then forced to crawl a mysterious hole in his bathroom; a gateway that leads to grisly realities, holding both secrets and answers. Votes: 2, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is great, but if you've already played it or don't mind skipping ahead, the much more recent Amnesia: Rebirth is brilliant, too—and it even turns the horror up a few notches with a "profoundly disturbing" story, as Leana described it in our review.
Prepare yourself for an eldritch nightmare amid somewhat dated but still scary design and environments. Pathologic 2 is nasty. It will sit on your hard-drive like a gangrenous limb, in need of amputation. If this sounds like a criticism, it isn't. Beyond the dirty, putrefied atmosphere, Pathologic 2 is weird and theatrical, frequently breaking the fourth wall and questioning your role as the player. You have 12 days to save a town afflicted by disease, paranoia, mob justice, and paranormal happenings.
That ticking clock isn't just for show—events unfold in real-time and you have to make difficult decisions about what you want to do and who you want to save. It's exhausting, yes. It's gruelling, yes. But it's also unique and unforgettable. Not content with resting on Shinji Mikami's reputation—he's the man responsible for the best Resident Evil games, as well as God Hand and Vanquish—The Evil Within 2 swaps the purer survival horror of the first game with a more open world full of grotesque and at times stomach-churning sights.
This is a psychological horror that aims to find terror away from pure jump scares. It's intense, often thrilling and definitely ambitious.
Of course, if you want the more traditional approach, the first The Evil Within is also worth checking out. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos should be a ripe playground for gaming scares. It rarely works out like that; the fiction often put to use in ways that fail to convey the sheer magnitude of its ancient and maddening horror. Despite the bugs and the clunkiness, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a first-person survival horror that both stays true to its source, and provides a multitude of ideas through its many and varied levels.
You'll go from escaping an assassination, to being hunted by cultists, to fighting off Shoggoths and Deep Ones. Every minute, roughly fifty billion jump-scare-laden horror games are added to itch. Built on the shambling bones of the Half-Life 1 engine, Cry of Fear is at times an FPS, at other times a survival horror and puzzle game, and at all times a cinematically minded experience clearly inspired by the game it's built upon.
Many of the best horrors combine genres like this, from Dead Space to FEAR, so it's great to have another horror game that understands the value of variety.
0コメント