Ten horror games worth playing today
Ten picks from the catalogue, and why each one still plays today
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The Last of Us 2013
In a United States overrun by infected for twenty years, the smuggler Joel is hired to get Ellie, a fourteen year old girl immune to the infection, out of the Boston quarantine zone.
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Silent Hill 2 2001
James Sunderland walks through the fog and dark of Silent Hill with a radio that crackles when creatures are near. The horror is psychological, built from regret and fear, and it is regarded as a key example of games as an art form.
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Dead Space 2 2011
In 2511, three years after the first game, Isaac Clarke, now with a voice of his own, fights his way through the Sprawl, a station on Titan, against the Necromorphs.
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System Shock 2 1999
Ken Levine's blend of action, survival horror and role playing puts a soldier aboard a starship in 2114, trying to contain a genetic infection. It is regarded as highly influential on first person shooters.
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Alien: Isolation 2014
Fifteen years after the first Alien film, Amanda Ripley crosses the station Sevastopol in 2137 with an alien on board that cannot be killed and hunts her by sight and sound.
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Resident Evil 2 1998
Two months after the first game, a biological weapon turns the people of Raccoon City into zombies, and the rookie police officer Leon S. Kennedy and the college student Claire Redfield have to get out alive.
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The Evil Within 2 2017
A survival horror game in which the detective Sebastian Castellanos goes into Union, a simulated American town, to rescue his daughter, Lily.
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Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly 2003
A survival horror game in which the twin sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura are trapped in Minakami, a village haunted by hostile ghosts, with an old camera as the only weapon.
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Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem 2002
Twelve characters across two thousand years live the chapters of the Tome of Eternal Darkness, told out of order. As sanity runs low the game itself misbehaves, from statues turning their heads to fake error messages.
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Amnesia: The Dark Descent 2010
A horror game with no weapons, in which Daniel, an archaeologist, wakes with no memory in Brennenburg Castle in 1839, and the monsters are to be fled from.
