Scariest Resident Evil Games Ranked

However, this game’s actual scares are few and far between. There are some creepy implications in this game’s story (the entire Alexander and Alexia relationship is certainly disturbing), but this game spends a little too much time treading on what was quickly becoming familiar ground. Much of it is closer to “eerie” than “scary.” This game borrows heavily from the Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 playbook, which means that it’s obviously creepy at times but rarely feels surprising enough to be genuinely scary for more than a few moments. 

9. Resident Evil Revelations

The generally underrated Revelations games looked to offer a slightly scarier Resident Evil experience at a time when the mainline titles were pivoting toward the action genre. While Revelations is still pretty action-heavy (much more so than the earlier RE games), it still tries to scare and intimidate players much more than RE 5 and 6 did. 

Revelations is at its best when it finds that balance between action and old-school survival horror. The game’s ship setting (a weirdly recurring setting for some of these spin-offs) offers a wonderfully claustrophobic atmosphere as well as an excuse for the designer to construct some truly twisted deep sea creature designs. While Revelations starts to depend a little too much on its action sequences toward the end, there are too many genuinely effective bits of horror in this game to ignore. 

8. Resident Evil Revelations 2

Honestly, the Resident Evil Revelations games are roughly equally scary. Both try to balance horror and action, and both struggle to maintain that balance for the entirety of the experience. Unlike Revelations, though, Revelations 2 features several sections that are genuinely terrifying rather than “somewhat scary given the circumstances.” 

In fact, the opening half of Resident Evil Revelations 2 is so good that I kind of wish Capcom would go back and find a way to turn that section into an entirely new game. Revelations 2‘s early island setting results in these kinds of Evil Dead meets The Descent moments of classic genre terror that will leave you wondering why more people don’t talk about this game. The uneven second half of this game will answer most of those questions, but this title’s shortcomings don’t entirely wash away the brilliance of its best moments. 

7. Resident Evil 4

The idea that Resident Evil 4 isn’t scary has taken on an unfair life of its own in recent years. To be fair, there is some truth to that assertion. This is the point in the franchise when Capcom started emphasizing action over survival horror scares. Furthermore, Resident Evil 4 isn’t nearly as scary as some of the RE 4 clones that would follow (most notably Dead Space).