Best Horror Games of the Last 15 Years

The Resident Evil 2 remake dials all of what made the first RE2 game scary up to 11. Dark corridors keep players on edge, while resources are kept intentionally limited. Moreover, despite using third-person shooting controls, combat is slow by design, which inspires a necessary sense of helplessness. All of these are key ingredients for successful survival horror, but the secret sauce to Resident Evil 2’s success is Mr. X. In this remake, players have to contend with a giant pursuer who can lay them out in a few hits and can only be stunned, never stopped. They have enough healing items and ammo for a regular zombie, but do they have enough for Mr. X? Your constant inability to answer that question is enough to keep you in a cold sweat. – AG\

5. Bloodborne

All Soulsborne titles carry an air of terror. The games all take place in a grimdark world where civilization has crumbled and everyone is either undead, insane, or both. That’s to say nothing of all the mutated wildlife. Bloodborne takes horror in the Soulsborne genre to a different level.

Bloodborne starts off like most Soulsborne titles: Players are thrust into a “tutorial” that provides the bare basics right before throwing them into the deep end. Like Dark Souls before it, many of Bloodborne’s scares come from the fear that a monster is waiting around every corner to snack on your larynx. However, Bloodborne’s scares are far more effective thanks to what really sets the game apart: excellent use of gothic and cosmic horror. The further players progress and the more they witness, the more enemies push the limits of body horror. Sound design sets off imaginations since the grunts and roars of terrifying beasts are occasionally heard in the distance. The lore, in true FromSoftware fashion, provides enough breadcrumbs to terrify players without providing all the answers. As is true of horror from every medium, nothing is quite as frightening as the scares thought up by an unfettered imagination. – AG

4. Alien: Isolation

The secret to good horror is keeping audiences on their toes. If you can accurately predict what will happen next, the illusion is dispersed, and all fear evaporates. This is a huge hurdle for horror games, especially when players want to replay a title since they will already know where each scare is located. However, Alien: Isolation’s scares work because they don’t fall into that trap.

Alien: Isolation is a movie tie-in where players control Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda Ripley, on a mission to find out what happened to her mother. Amanda’s research takes her to Sevastopol Station, which is unfortunately home to an alien that is seemingly immune to bullets. This perfect killing machine is the key to Alien: Isolation’s success since it runs off of one of the most advanced video game AIs to date. As players wander through the game’s station, the alien does the same. It can not only leap out of any doorway or ceiling vent, but it also learns as time goes on. The only way to survive is to soak in the game’s atmosphere and sound design, which hide subtle clues as to the alien’s whereabouts. Not even safe havens in other horror games, such as save rooms, are safe in Alien Isolation, which makes sure players are always on edge and on high alert. – AG

3. Until Dawn

While “fun” isn’t the word most often used to describe the absolute greatest horror games ever made, there’s something to be said for a horror game that manages to be equally enjoyable and scary. In many ways, Until Dawn might just be the best example of a fundamentally enjoyable horror game that doesn’t skimp on the scares.