13 Creepy Games to Get Your Fright on Tonight

This sci-fi horror series sends you on a nerve-shredding adventure that begins on the derelict Ishimura interstellar mining ship. A creepy story unfolds through discovery, exploration, and mysterious visions, and you must fight reanimated corpses driven by some unknown extraterrestrial force. The series spawned a few sequels and spin-offs, but the original is my favorite. EA has announced a next-gen remake that promises updated graphics and some other enhancements.

Included with EA Play

Ruling the horror roost for nearly three decades is no mean feat. The Resident Evil series gave birth to the survival horror genre and has continued to reinvent itself over the years, steadfastly refusing to die, just like all the best monsters. It swerved into shooter territory for a few years but returned to its survival roots with the terrifying Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which left me a sweaty wreck when I attempted to play it in VR. The campier Resident Evil Village is the latest release, but the excellent Resident Evil 2 remake is also worth playing.

The original game casts you as a night-shift security guard watching a bank of monitors at an off-brand Chuck E. Cheese. As the story gradually unfolds through phone calls from your predecessor, you realize that the animatronics are moving around. The clever design drains your limited power when you bring the monitors up, use the lights, or lock the doors, so you have to use them sparingly to track Freddy Fazbear and friends and avoid falling victim to one of them. It’s an elegant horror game that nails the jump scare, and it spawned a series of weird and wonderful sequels. 

We've linked to The Core Collection, which includes many of those sequels, but if you just want to try the original, you can get it for cheap (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch). It's also available on Android and iOS.

Included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate

If you get frustrated by people making daft moves when you’re watching slasher movies, Until Dawn is your chance to see how well you would fare. A modern take on point-and-click adventures, you must unravel a mystery on the remote Blackwood Mountain and try to survive until the sun comes up. Quick-time events that require split-second decisions and fast reflexes keep you on your toes. A solid cast (including Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere), high production values, and a mix of genre tropes and twists make this game as close as you can get to starring in a slasher flick. Until Dawn is a PlayStation exclusive. PC and Xbox gamers looking for something similar should try Man of Medan from the same studio.

Included with PS Now and PS Plus Collection

Dripping with creepy atmosphere, Little Nightmares is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer that challenges you to escape the mysterious underwater Maw. As you guide the wee, raincoat-clad protagonist Six through a series of horrifying digital dioramas, you must solve puzzles and stay stealthy to avoid discovery and death at the hands of some grotesque monsters. It is quite a short game, but if you’re left wanting more, Little Nightmares II is an excellent prequel that delivers more of the same.

Included with PS Now

If you enjoy a perplexing mystery that promises to mess with your head, Prey is peerless. A memorable opening gives way to an alternate world. You gradually glean the history by reading various emails and listening to recordings you discover as you explore the spooky space station, Talos I. Shape-shifting creatures mimic seemingly innocuous chairs, trash cans, and other objects, keeping the tension high and providing jump scares aplenty. Worse is lurking. Ostensibly a first-person shooter, Prey stirs in RPG elements, puzzles, and moral choices that elevate the experience.

Included with PS Now and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate

This elegant psychological horror RPG was funded through Kickstarter and is often mentioned in the same breath as Undertale and Earthbound. On the surface, the cute pixel art feels welcoming and familiar, but there are dark depths to explore. A group of kids explores the dreams of the eponymous sleeping boy, Omori, but there is something badly wrong with him. The soundtrack, writing, and art combine to great effect and largely overcome the repetitive turn-based RPG combat. There’s a lot to discover, different paths and endings, and the game has fun and quirky moments. But the underlying theme of depression and despair seeps through and packs a real emotional punch, so approach with caution if you are feeling fragile. Omori is the horror RPG of your nightmares. It’s PC-only right now, but console versions are in the works.

If you want to get together with some friends and slay zombies, there is no better game than Left 4 Dead 2. Valve expanded on Turtle Rock’s excellent original concept to turn out a highly polished co-op experience that hits all sorts of horror high notes. The level design, the sound effects, the music, and the zombies are a glorious love letter to the horror genre, and it plays like a dream. It may be more than a decade old, but it lumbers on, and few games provoke such a visceral feeling of tension as you struggle to keep everyone alive or such deep satisfaction when you manage to push through. 

There may not be a Left 4 Dead 3, but Turtle Rock’s Back for Blood (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) just landed.

This mystery thriller was recently remastered and is well worth a look whether you have played it before or not. The engaging story casts you as a best-selling crime writer searching for your wife after she disappears in a mountain town in Washington on vacation (of sorts). The atmosphere and plot of this captivating episodic mystery make up for occasionally clunky gameplay and awkward camera angles. Alan Wake stirs in plenty of reverent horror references, but Stephen King’s influence is the most keenly felt, and this is a must-play game for his fans.

A wonderfully creepy sci-fi horror full of unreliable narrators, SOMA challenges you to figure out what the hell is going on and what the right course of action is. You play as Simon and find yourself stuck in a research facility on the ocean floor with broken-down robots for company, but they don't seem to know they are robots. The exploration and puzzle-solving are fun, but the haunting philosophical questions the game raises are what makes it. Developer Frictional Games was also behind the Amnesia and Penumbra survival horror series.

Included with PS Now

Fighting your way through the fog of a spooky, monster-filled small town searching for your dead wife is what horror games are all about. Arguably the greatest horror game series ever, Silent Hill proved incredibly effective at building dread with superbly atmospheric settings and sound design. The wonderfully creative nightmare creatures frequently had me frantically backpedaling in revulsion, but there’s a haunting quality to this series that stays with you long after you put the gamepad down. Overdue a proper remaster, there are several games in the series (Silent Hill 2 is the best), but they are aging. The slightly disappointing HD Collection includes the second and third games for PS3.

The withdrawn P.T., a 2014 playable teaser for the sadly canceled Silent Hills game designed by Hideo Kojima with some help from filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, shows the glorious resurrection that might have been. We can only hope it will rise from the dead one day.

There are a lot of great horror games that just missed out on a place here. Hunt a serial killer in Condemned: Criminal Origins, embark on a surreal top-down nightmare in Darkwood, or clash with a creepy cult in the Outlast series. Phasmophobia is a co-op game that casts you as paranormal investigators. Bloodborne is an excellent action RPG with a Gothic horror veneer. The Evil Within is pure survival horror. Enter the mind of an insane artist in Layers of Fear, fight a murderous cop in the thrilling 12 Minutes, and face all kinds of horror in postapocalyptic games like The Last of Us and the Metro series.