Are you tired of feeling safe and happy all the time? Is your daily life filled with feelings of safety, contentment, and peace? Do you want to escape all the oppressive goodness that surrounds you? Well, look no further – these games are for you.
Here, we’ve collected over a dozen of the most disturbing and disturbing horror games in recent times. These selections cover a variety of genres and styles, but every single game manages to pack at least a little punch of the scary. So take a look, find your game, and get your skeleton ready for some fresh air because you’re about to jump out of your skin.
Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 is as depressing as it is scary. This 2001 game gave us some of the most recognizable enemies not only in the series but in all of horror gaming: the murderous sexy nurse and Pyramid Head. But it’s the psychological elements and unsettling atmosphere that really strengthen its creepy factor.
The 2024 remake seems even more overt about this, as if everything scary about the game has been turned up a few notches. Like the original, you play as James Sunderland, who travels to Silent Hill in search of his (dead?) wife, only to discover a hostile ghost town.
I didn’t relax for a moment during my first playthrough. This is mainly due to the game’s incredible sound design, which creates an atmosphere of ever-increasing tension until it becomes almost unbearable.
In areas like the prison, the cacophony of ominous sounds in the darkness – galloping horses, clanking metal, running creatures – made me so nervous that I had to force myself to turn away from the game several times to get some air. It really makes you nervous.
The Silent Hill 2 remake is more combat-based than the original, and enemies are abundant. They lurk in corners, crowd narrow corridors, drop from the ceiling; it’s impossible to avoid them. They’re also annoying when they’re doing nothing but staring at you from the end of a dark corridor (a certain Pyramid Head moment comes to mind here).
It also has a number of shocking encounters, which made me scream embarrassingly several times. As a horror fan, this is exactly the experience I was looking for.
And, without going into any spoilers, it could be argued that the scariest thing about Silent Hill 2 isn’t the monsters, but the dark sides of human nature that it exposes. If you want a game that will scare the crap out of you, you really can’t go wrong with this game.
The Longing
Part of the way between a point-and-click adventure and an idle game, The Longing is a soulful, often darkly humorous reflection on loneliness, patience and, really, life. You play as a small, sooty-looking servant named Shade, who serves a giant king alone and deep underground.
As the king enters an uninterrupted sleep, he commands you to wake him in 400 days, at which time he will end all fear and longing in the world. Then a timer appears at the top of the screen, and the 400 days begin to pass in real time, even when the game is closed.
What happens after that is up to you. You can wait out the actual year-plus and see what happens. You can disobey your orders and seek out the outside world. You can just exist somewhere in between, reading public-domain books, decorating your underground home, exploring caves, taking your time. No matter what, the clock keeps ticking, each second carries its own decision.
To call The Longing an acquired taste would be an understatement: it’s glacially slow by design, with no enemies to fight or dense gameplay systems to immerse you in. But few games are so evocative or so singularly focused. It’s a project that makes you wonder why more video games aren’t this daring.
Indica
Indica is a soulful game. It’s (mostly) a third-person story, set in an alternate 19th-century Russia, and features an outcast nun, Indica, who has the voice of the devil in her head. Based on this premise, the game is filled with flurries of whimsical absurdity, religious critique, and raw human suffering, always with a wink and a nod.
The entire game is steeped in a frenzied tension between lightness and anguish, and the developers at Odd Meter have struck the balance just right. Indica’s reality is a frozen hell world filled with pain and isolation, but she also encounters laugh-out-loud moments that make the experience feel more like a romantic comedy than a psychodrama about a grieving nun.
The game also slips into a lighter visual style as it delves into Indica’s past, evoking memories from pixelated platformers in sun-drenched environments.
Indica is a great example of maturity in video games. However, it does contain scenes of sexual violence – though they’re handled delicately and don’t feel exploitative. Indica thrives in the murky area between pleasure and discomfort, and it’s worth playing for those looking for something completely original.