Silent Hill
I remember the first video game that truly terrified me. When I played BioShock for the Xbox 360 a few years ago, I was almost too scared to make it out of the bathysphere. When I eventually got up the courage to venture outward, I found myself dodging bullets fired by the mutant population of the underwater city of Rapture, flinching at the manic phrases uttered by the disembodied voices and stepping over charred corpses to accomplish the various missions in the game.
Though BioShock isn’t scary enough to make many gamers’ list of best horror games today, it was my introduction to the immersive terror that can only be accomplished by video games. Video games allow you to enter a virtually rendered haunted house that is unlike any you would find in reality, so they’re perfect picks for a Halloween night in. You can’t go wrong with the tried-and-true horror game classics, such as the pioneers of the survival horror genre, Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but here’s my list of best games to break out this Halloween for a few frights (or jump scares).
Though some people may not be afraid of the living dead, there’s something to be said about how satisfying it is to mow down a field of zombies.
For maximum zombie survival fun, you can’t go wrong with the Left 4 Dead series. As the title implies, you play as one of four zombie apocalypse survivors as you and your team fight your way to safety. Though there are plenty of predictable shambling corpses to take on, the game gets especially tricky with special zombies such as the Boomer, the Smoker, and the Tank, who have special abilities that allow them to separate — or annihilate — individual team members. You don’t know fear until you find yourself dragged away from the other survivors as a new horde descends upon you.
Often considered one of the greatest video games of all time, The Last of Us is a zombie game with a pulse. As you travel with Joel and his young companion Ellie through a post-apocalyptic America, you get to choose between sneaking around and confronting the bad guys, both human and infected. It might not be the scariest game in the past several years, but it’s got a lot of heart and might be a good choice for those easily frightened.
Perhaps the most unique of all zombie games is Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead serial game. This game puts combat secondary to storytelling; you are less likely to spend the game attacking zombies as you are trying to evaluate the trustworthiness of the other human survivors you encounter. The true horror of the game comes from the tension you feel during these interactions and the unpredictability of the world around you.
One of the most interesting horror games to come out recently isn’t even a full game; it’s a game teaser. P.T., the playable teaser for the upcoming Silent Hills, is a sneak peek at the visual update to the long-running survival horror franchise, but it does more than just hint at the game to come. This first-person mystery takes you through a single hallway in a continuous loop as you uncover what happened in the house and solve the increasingly terrifying puzzles that start appearing with every walkthrough. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Of course, the best way to get some real chills and thrills this Halloween is with indie games. Indie game developers come up with and execute some truly terrifying concepts.
One of the most famous indie horror games to come out in the past few years is Slender: The Eight Pages. The concept of the game is simple: you run around the woods at night collecting the eight pages of a diary and avoid coming in contact with Slenderman, a tall, faceless creature fished from the depths of online urban legends. However, as simple as this concept is, it gets harder to focus on your goal when you hear his trademark warning noise and start catching glimpses of the tall man in a suit drawing closer to you.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a puzzle-survival horror game that is bound to make even the bravest gamers squirm. You play as Daniel, a man who is being hunted through a mysterious castle but has almost no memory of his past. He finds a letter from himself and discovers that he erased his own memory. As you uncover the secrets of the castle and Daniel’s past, you must avoid monsters and manage your sanity meter, lest you descend into total madness.
Finally, one of the newest indie horror games, Five Nights at Freddy’s, was released in August, but has been called one of the scariest games in years. You play as the newest security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a Chuck E. Cheese’s knockoff that contains lifelike animatronic characters who are free to wander the restaurant at night. However, these cute characters are particularly volatile after midnight, and they have a nasty habit of crushing unsuspecting night staffers to death by shoving them into unused animatronic suits. Using only the security cameras, lights and electronically locked doors, you have to survive in the restaurant’s office until 6 a.m. without running out of power or getting nabbed by Freddy or one of his deranged friends.
Whatever you choose to play this Halloween, you’ll be treated to an array of things that go bump in the night; just be sure to leave a light on.
