Games We Cover
Reviews, rankings, guides, and direct answers from the articles where each game is covered in depth.
A Short Hike
A small open world on a mountain island, nothing threatening, just exploration and warmth. The best two-hour game ever made.
Alien: Isolation
The only licensed horror game in the last twenty years that actually justifies its license. The Alien's AI runs two independent systems that genuinely learn from your behaviour.
Amnesia: Rebirth
Not as good as The Dark Descent, but better than its reputation suggests. A distinctive colonial Algeria setting and pregnancy-centered narrative give it its own identity.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
The 2010 game that created an entire genre: no weapons, a sanity meter that punishes you for looking at monsters, and a castle that's still the finest horror environment ever built.
Axiom Verge
One developer, five years, and the closest thing to a new Metroid the genre has produced. A lonely, alien, oppressive atmosphere with genuinely inventive weapons and tools.
Balatro
One developer, two and a half years, expected to sell ten copies. A poker-based roguelike that sold 5 million and won Game of the Year 2024.
Big Walk
House House's follow-up to Untitled Goose Game. A co-op exploration game about wandering a vast open island with friends, using proximity chat and creative puzzle-solving.
Blasphemous 2
Dark Spanish Catholic imagery, extraordinary pixel art, and the best art direction in the Metroidvania genre after Hollow Knight. Improves on the original in almost every way.
Carrion
Reverses the roles and lets you play the monster, a pixelly recreation of tentacles and teeth, hoovering up screaming scientists and leaving nothing but parts in your wake.
Celeste
The best precision platformer of the last decade, and a genuinely moving story about mental health told through mountain-climbing metaphor.
Content Warning
Go into a monster-infested underground world with a camera, film whatever terrifying things you find, and upload the footage for views. The best concept in the co-op horror genre.
Crimson Desert
Pearl Abyss's first single-player game, a seamless, loading-screen-free open world with genuinely exceptional post-launch support that turned a mixed launch into a Game of the Year contender.
Crow Country
The highest-rated horror game on Steam, and it's not close. A two-person studio's love letter to late-90s Resident Evil, filtered through a grainy PS1-era aesthetic.
Cyberpunk 2077
An open-world action RPG in Night City that launched broken on base consoles and became genuinely excellent after three years of repair work.
Darkest Dungeon
A turn-based dungeon crawler where your heroes have a stress bar alongside their health bar, push it too far and they don't just get weaker, they break into permanent, party-damaging afflictions.
Darkwood
A top-down survival horror game set in a corrupted Eastern European forest, built around a day/night cycle of scavenging by daylight and barricading yourself against unpredictable AI-driven threats after dark.
Dead by Daylight
Four survivors against one killer. Nearly a decade old and still the game that proved asymmetric horror had a viable long-term audience.
Dead Cells
The tightest action roguelike on Steam. Combat that feels better than most AAA action games, wrapped in a Metroidvania-structured run-based progression system.
Dead Space
A full remake of the 2008 survival horror classic, rebuilt with the isolation, resource scarcity, and dismemberment combat that made the original work, and that EA stripped out of Dead Space 3.
Destiny 2
A free-to-play looter shooter with some of the best gunplay in the medium, built on a monetisation architecture specifically engineered to erode your spending discipline.
Disco Elysium
An RPG with no combat where you play a washed-up detective with amnesia solving a murder. Your internal voices vote on your decisions.
Doki Doki Literature Club
Presents itself as a visual novel about a high school literature club. That's accurate for about the first hour. What it becomes after that is something best discovered blind.
ELDEN RING
FromSoftware's open-world Souls game, with no easy mode and 25 million copies sold, proof the industry badly miscalibrated what audiences would engage with if given the chance.
Far Far West
Built by an eight-person studio. A 1-4 player co-op Western with monsters, magic, and missions, holding up against shooters built by teams ten times the size.
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake
A modern remake of one of Japanese horror's defining classics, two sisters, an ancient camera as your only weapon, and ghosts you can only fight by facing them head-on.
Fear & Hunger
A one-developer dungeon crawler built in RPG Maker that goes to places no commercial horror game would be permitted to go. Genuinely disturbing, genuinely significant, absolutely not for everyone, read the content warnings first.
Fields of Mistria
The highest-rated indie game of 2026 so far. Magic, romance, and a village to rebuild, in a pixel-art farming sim that borrows Stardew Valley's best ideas without just copying them.
Five Nights at Freddy's
One person, one remarkable mechanic, and an entire genre spawned from it. Manage power across five cameras and two doors while animatronics try to reach your office.
Hades
A roguelike where failure advances the story. You play Zagreus, son of Hades, attempting to escape the underworld. Each death is a conversation.
Hades II
Still in Early Access and already one of the best roguelikes on Steam. Supergiant rebuilt the formula from the ground up rather than iterating safely on the original.
Hi-Fi RUSH
A rhythm-action game where everything, combat, movement, the entire world, pulses to the beat of the soundtrack, from Tango Gameworks, the studio Microsoft closed less than a year after this shipped to genuine acclaim.
Hollow Knight
A vast underground kingdom, made by two developers on a AU$57,000 Kickstarter. One of the best Metroidvanias ever made.
How to Fish
Catch a fish, fling it into the air, shoot it mid-flight for bonus money. A physics fishing game that peaked at 142,000 concurrent players within three days of launch.
Inscryption
Starts as a cabin-based deck-building game with a sinister atmosphere, and does not stay there. The most inventive game in the genre by a significant margin.
Into the Breach
A tactics game played on a compact 8x8 grid with perfect information. One of the most satisfying and elegantly designed strategy games ever made.
Iron Lung
Pilot a cramped, battered submersible through an ocean of blood on a moon, taking photos in near-total darkness while something moves out there in the murk.
KARMA: The Dark World
A first-person psychological horror game set in an alternate 1984 East Germany ruled by a surveillance corporation, where you dive into suspects' minds, the most visually stunning horror game I've played, despite a middling 72 on Metacritic.
Layers of Fear (2016)
Most games can make you jump. Few can make you doubt yourself in real life. An unreliable narrator explores a spooky, empty house that quietly rearranges itself around him.
Lethal Company
The solo-developer project that made co-op horror mainstream. Land on moons, scavenge scrap for your quota, and survive whatever's inside the facility with you.
Little Nightmares II
The best horror game made for people who don't typically play horror games. A child navigating a world built for giants who want to consume them.
Loop Hero
An idle roguelike where you build the world your hero walks through, one card at a time. One of the most original game concepts in years.
Mewgenics
Edmund McMillen's years-in-the-making cat-breeding roguelike. Breed, train, and send genetically unique cats into tactical combat.
Mina the Hollower
Yacht Club Games' first genuine follow-up to Shovel Knight. Whip, burrow, and dash through a gothic pixel-art world as Mina, a Hollower on a desperate rescue mission.
Mixtape
A narrative adventure built around 1990s American nostalgia and a licensed alt-rock soundtrack (The Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, The Cure), released to a genuinely unusual gap between glowing critic scores and a more divided player reception at launch.
Monster Train
Slay the Spire for players who want more faction variety and strategic layering. Choose two faction combinations from five options, generating 25 possible starting combinations.
Mouthwashing
A two-to-three hour PS1-aesthetic psychological horror game about a crew falling apart on a stranded freighter, told in deliberately disorienting non-linear order, one of the most disturbing games of 2024.
Mundaun
A weird, creepy Swiss folk-horror tale, hand-drawn in scratchy black-and-white pencil, about revisiting your hometown after your grandfather's death and uncovering an ancient family curse.
Night in the Woods
The best-written indie game on Steam. A story about depression, small-town America, and finding meaning after dropping out of college, told through an anthropomorphic-animal cast.
Nine Sols
The Sekiro of Metroidvanias. Precise, timing-dependent parry combat set in a Taiwanese mythology-inspired Taopunk world unlike anything else in the genre.
Observation
You play as the AI managing a space station after something has gone wrong, not the person trying to survive. The most conceptually original perspective inversion in psychological horror.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword
Capcom's first new Onimusha in 20 years, and a genuinely excellent one: demanding swordplay, a deep soul-economy build system, and none of the launch-day monetization baggage the publisher's last few big releases carried.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
The most visually beautiful game in the Metroidvania genre. Watercolour art, exceptional movement, and a final hour that will genuinely make you feel things.
Outer Wilds
A solar system stuck in a 22-minute time loop. The only game that makes exploring astrophysics feel genuinely emotional.
Outlast
A first-person found-footage horror game with some of the best atmospheric design in the genre for its first two hours, undermined by an escalation into jump-scare spectacle in the second half.
Papers, Please
A dystopian border-inspector simulation that delivers moral horror through pure bureaucratic mechanics. Made worse than any conventional horror game by design.
Phasmophobia
Six years old and still one of the most-played games on Steam. Enter haunted locations, identify the ghost type using real evidence, and get out alive.
Poppy Playtime
An abandoned toy factory, a grappling-hook glove, and mascot characters that stopped being cute the moment everyone disappeared, free to start, released episodically since 2021.
PRAGMATA
Capcom's sci-fi action game where you control astronaut Hugh Williams and android companion Diana simultaneously, his guns, her hacking, across a moon base after an AI takeover.
R.E.P.O.
Up to six players collect valuables from haunted locations while physics-based chaos ensures nothing goes to plan. The best co-op horror game of 2025, not close.
Resident Evil 2
A from-the-ground-up remake of the PS1 classic, melding old and new so perfectly that it's essential nearly two decades after the original's release.
Resident Evil 4
Leon's visit to a plague-infested Spanish village, remade with tightened gunplay and a broadened Merchant's stock, without losing what made the 2005 original a landmark.
Resident Evil 7 Biohazard
The series' first-person reinvention, feeding off the best horror movies of the last twenty years and delivering a genuinely subversive, unsettling family in the Bakers.
Resident Evil Requiem
Leon Kennedy returns after fourteen years away from the mainline series, splitting the campaign with a new character, Grace, whose sections trade confident gunplay for genuine survival-horror tension.
Resident Evil Village
Ethan Winters' search for his daughter in a gothic European village ruled by four distinct, monstrous lords, most famous for Lady Dimitrescu, but the whole village earns the attention she got.
Return of the Obra Dinn
A deduction mystery aboard an 1800s merchant vessel where every death is a puzzle to solve. The most original game design of the last decade.
Returnal
Not an obvious scary game on the surface, but a strong vein of cosmic horror runs through everything Returnal does, Lovecraftian alien ruins, wrong-shaped monsters, and a terror that comes from trying not to die every ten minutes.
Scorn
The most visually distinctive horror game ever made. Pure H.R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski, with deliberately obtuse gameplay and unmatched atmosphere.
SIGNALIS
A two-person survival horror game that references Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Evangelion simultaneously, made over six years, and quietly better than what any major publisher shipped in the genre the same decade.
Silent Hill 2
A stunning remake of one of gaming's most abiding horror stories, driving James Sunderland's personal demons home in 4K clarity alongside iconic monsters like the nurses and Pyramid Head.
SILENT HILL f
Not a mainline entry, but just as spooky and atmospheric as the series' best outings. Set in 1960s Japan, schoolgirl Hinako Shimazu confronts terrifying monsters after her hometown is overrun with a sinister fog.
Skull and Bones
A naval combat live-service game that cost a reported $750 million and eleven years to make, and plays worse than the Black Flag naval combat Ubisoft built in 2013 for a fraction of the cost.
Slay the Spire
The game that invented the deck-building roguelike genre. Build a deck over the course of a run, fight enemies with it, and try to reach the top of the spire.
Slay the Spire 2
The genre-defining deck-builder gets a real sequel. Set a thousand years after the original, with 575+ cards, 278 relics, and series-first 4-player co-op.
Slender: The Arrival
The official expansion of the Slender Man mythos that took internet horror mainstream, collect pages, keep your flashlight charged, and never let the Slender Man catch you looking.
SOMA
A sci-fi horror game set in an underwater research station. The monsters are the least scary thing in it.
SONG OF HORROR Complete Edition
Permadeath survival horror across five episodes, investigating disappearances tied to a mysterious antique music box called The Presence, lose a character and they're gone for the rest of the game.
Stardew Valley
A farming and life-sim RPG built entirely by one person over four years, one of the most beloved indie games ever made, and still one of the best value propositions on Steam a decade later.
Still Wakes the Deep
A 1970s North Sea oil rig, cut off from the world, where an ancient horror has been disturbed by drilling into something that should have stayed buried.
Subnautica 2
The Early Access sequel to Subnautica, on a new alien ocean world with rebuilt base building, optional co-op, and a controversial no-weapons stance, genuinely good already, with real, known gaps versus the finished original.
Sunless Sea
Literary Lovecraftian horror set on an underground ocean beneath London, where the rules are incompatible with human sanity. Horror that accumulates through writing rather than jump scares.
The Backrooms 1998
A first-person found-footage take on the viral Backrooms internet horror concept, a young teen falls into the depths of a liminal, endless facility in 1998, and something in there is not alone with you.
The Evil Within
Shinji Mikami's spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4, throwing detective Sebastian Castellanos into a nightmare world of grotesque creatures and warped reality.
The Last of Us Part I
A full remake of the 2013 post-apocalyptic classic, following Joel escorting Ellie across a ravaged United States, a genuinely excellent, morally uncomfortable story that Part II then had the courage to actually follow through on.
The Mortuary Assistant
Your first day at River Fields Mortuary. Embalm the dearly departed on your gurney, and try not to notice the ominous woman in white staring back at you from the end of the corridor.
The Outlast Trials
Red Barrels take the camcorder dread of the original Outlast and hand it to a group, Cold War-era human experimentation trials, solo or with up to three friends.
The Sinking City 2
A Lovecraftian survival horror sequel built by a Kyiv-based studio between 2023 and 2026, during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that shifted the series from open-world investigation to focused Resident Evil-style survival horror.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
One of the greatest playable interpretations of the source material ever made, swing axes and stab screwdrivers into zombies' heads, or cautiously explore rotting houses, terrified of every corner.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
An open-world RPG with genuinely exceptional writing and quest design buried under 100 hours of structurally identical filler and one of the more mediocre combat systems in a critically acclaimed RPG.
Undertale
An RPG where you don't have to fight anything. Made entirely by one developer, Toby Fox, and one of the most emotionally affecting games ever made.
Until Dawn
A pack of randy teens go on vacation to an isolated mountain cabin, only to find something heinous is set on killing them off, willfully, soulfully entrenched in slasher tradition.
Vampire Survivors
The game that created the entire 'bullet heaven' genre, automatic movement, automatic attacks, and the purest possible version of the roguelike progression loop, for the price of a coffee.
Visage
An Amnesia-inspired haunted house game where sanity, light, and darkness are your only real tools, widely considered one of the most genuinely frightening indie horror games ever made.
What Remains of Edith Finch
Every death in the Finch family is a short playable sequence in a different style. The cumulative effect is profound and lingering, delivered in about two hours.
Windrose
A pirate survival-crafting game with soulslite combat and genuinely great naval battles, peaked at 222,134 concurrent players in Early Access and earned it.