Many trumpeted the death of survival horror in the late aughts, but like so many “dead” genres (or one of the zombies you’ll face in many of these games), it’s come shambling back to spook us when we least expect. Triple-A games like Resident Evil or Dead Space form a solid core for this revitalized genre, but the real joy is found in the weird stuff: submarines welded shut in oceans of blood, disgusting moldmen running around body horror dystopias, mods for 20 year old games that give their forebears a run for their money are just a few of my favorites among the best horror games on PC right now.
Silent Hill 2 Remake
PC Gamer’s got your back Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware.
Release date: 2024 | Developer: Bloober Team | Steam
There was some understandable trepidation about another studio taking on the beloved horror classic, Silent Hill 2, before Bloober Team’s remake released. But also, James Sunderland’s wacky wife adventure has been effectively locked on PlayStation 2 for over 20 years.
A combination of emulation issues and non-CRT displays means the fog just never looks quite right, and the less said about the official PS3 “remaster,” the better. Despite a cavalcade of hour-plus YouTube essays inspiring new waves of interest, it’s been challenging for new players to see what all the hubbub was about.
But, miraculously, Bloober Team did the thing. The Silent Hill 2 Remake has thoroughly impressed all the Silent Hill 2-likers on our team, making this one of the best, and certainly the most accessible way of experiencing Silent Hill 2.
Read More: Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 was more remix than remake, and that’s why it was great
Resident Evil 4 Remake
Release date: 2023 | Developer: Capcom | Steam
Okay look, Resident Evil 4‘s never been the scariest entry in its series, but it is essential. Between it’s attaché case inventory management and frantic crowd control, it’s an extremely tense experience while also offering some truly standout horror set pieces in its middle and later portions. The remake’s take on the Garrador enemy especially is inspired. Act 2’s castle remains one of the most atmospheric locations in gaming, its sumptuous, decaying 17th century interiors given new life on the RE Engine. Other entries on this list may be spookier, but there’s a reason the genre hasn’t been able to get over Resident Evil 4 in 18 years.
Read more: Resident Evil 4’s knife parry is the best thing to happen to the series in 18 years
Alan Wake 2
Release date: 2023 | Developer: Remedy Entertainment | Epic
The first Alan Wake was more spooky than scary, but its long-awaited sequel is genuinely frightening. Half-survival horror, half-spiral into surreal nightmare, Remedy’s latest is a bold, ambitious storytelling experiment that’s also full of tense and thrilling battles against the shadow-possessed Taken. Playing as both FBI agent Saga Anderson, investigating a series of ritual murders, and Alan Wake, a writer desperately trying to escape an ever-looping dream dimension, you delve through an adventure where a dark fiction is twisting reality in knots. Bold, brilliant, and bizarre.
Read more: One of Alan Wake 2’s expansions sounds like it’s going to take us back to Control
Scorn
Release date: 2022 | Developer: Ebb Software | Steam
Scorn‘s like a gross Myst, Myst with guns and body horror. This first person adventure sees you crawling through the guts of a fallen civilization, one where everyone else went to the rapture a long time ago, leaving you to puzzle at their remains. Are you an unlucky member of its citizenry left behind when everyone else peaced out? More likely you’re the grist for their biological mills, somehow spared that awful fate and now waking up into a different, possibly more awful fate.
The combat is challenging and has the same cadence as an old, tank-controlled PS1 survival horror game. While there may be a case that Scorn would have been stronger focusing purely on exploration and puzzle solving, The combat does have a certain delicious tension and demands the same movement mastery as juking Crimson Heads in the Resident Evil Remake. Ebb quickly patched the game’s initial rough checkpoint system after launch, making Scorn a hands-down horror slam dunk.
Left 4 Dead 2
Release date: 2009 | Developer: Valve | Steam
A horde of great four-player co-op shooters followed in the wake of Left 4 Dead, much like the hordes of zombies follow its protagonists. Some of those co-op shooters are great, and you’ll find them over on our list of best FPS games, but Left 4 Dead 2 remains one of those games that’s still worth keeping installed for whenever you and up to three friends feel like working together to push across a slice of zombie-infested America.
The rhythm of Left 4 Dead means it always tells a story. Both quiet moments and swarming attacks are punctuated by special enemies with attacks that force you to work together, and Left 4 Dead 2’s survivors—Coach, Rochelle, Nick, and Ellis, as well as the returning characters from the original game—chat and banter with each other like a functioning unit in a way that encourages you to do the same.
Of course, you may well be playing with mods that replace those survivors with Hatsune Miku, Deadpool, Master Chief, and Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw, all fighting across Silent Hill or Helm’s Deep. That’s just another reason Left 4 Dead 2 keeps bringing us back 4 more.
Read more: Great moments in PC gaming: ‘Don’t startle the witch’
The Outlast Trials
Release date: 2023 | Developer: Red Barrels | Steam
Co-op horror is a tough row to hoe: Killing Floor and Left 4 Dead could just as easily be described as “horror-themed action games,” and while they can produce moments of panic and suspense, true horror is hard to maintain when you have friends around to ease the tension.
That’s what makes The Outlast Trials so intriguing. It’s a full-send effort to translate the previously single player series’ trademark sense of abject horror and degradation into a co-op stealth experience, and it largely succeeds. Come for the sickening ’50s Jolly West-alikes trying to get in your head, stay to be menaced by lumbering, malformed, slasher film creatures while your friends try and fail to help you.
Killing Floor 2
Release date: 2016 | Developer: Tripwire Interactive | Steam
Killing Floor 2 offers a similar sort of high-zombie count, frantic survival as Left 4 Dead but with more of an emphasis on stationary wave survival than proceeding through linear levels. It also, quite crucially, has the advantage of being a live, well-supported game. Left 4 Dead will live on by sheer quality and reputation, but Tripwire is on that grind keeping Killing Floor players awash in new maps and cosmetics. A perfect “catch up with your friend from high school for a few hours on a weeknight” game if there ever was one.
Read more: Killing Floor 2 is a polished, fun co-op horde shooter with a healthy server browser
Faith: The Unholy Trinity
Release date: 2022 | Developer: Airdorf Games | Steam
Basically think “The Exorcist, but on the Commodore 64.” Faith primarily renders in bright pixels on dark black backgrounds, with absolutely phenomenal rotoscoped cutscenes. It’s like if the eerie, primeval games from non-IBM PC compatibles of the 1980s were given the Shovel Knight treatment: 8-bit computing “as you remember it.” Airdorf is able to mine a lot of surprising horror and depth out of this art style, and the Faith trilogy is a substantial supernatural horror experience.
Iron Lung
Release date: 2022 | Developer: David Szymanski| Steam
Iron Lung is an absolute must-play, a pound-for-pound shocker of a game. Six bucks and 90 minutes for something unforgettable. You play as the single crew member of a makeshift submarine lowered into an ocean of blood on an alien moon. The doors and windows are welded shut against the pressure, and you have to use X and Y coordinates and a blurry chart of the sea floor to navigate its pitch-dark chasms. Your goal is to take pictures of the unnerving things at the bottom of this faraway sea, but something else stirs in the deep. I first started Iron Lung at 1:45 AM with everyone else in the house asleep, and its imaginative premise, impeccable atmosphere, and knockout audio design had me so stressed I went running back to Super Mario Land 2 for comfort.
Read more: YouTuber Markiplier is adapting Iron Lung into a movie
Fear & Hunger
Release date: 2018 | Developer: Miro Haverinen | Steam
A word of warning: Fear & Hunger is easily the most “content warning” game on this list, even more than the Outlast series. It includes shocking depictions of gore and sexual violence, though I would argue it approaches these ideas with a maturity and thoughtfulness that justifies their inclusion: It’s transgressive, but not tawdry.
Taking inspiration from Berserk, Silent Hill, Nethack, and more, Fear & Hunger is a JRPG-style game where you plumb the depths of a mysterious, seemingly endless dungeon in search of a charismatic military leader who descended below. Each of the four playable characters has their own reason for wanting to find the guy, and the plot spirals out of control into the realm of esoteric, cosmic horror—what is the meaning of human thought and progress in a world this cruel?
But Fear & Hunger’s crushing difficulty and visceral brutality remain a constant amid its loftier storytelling ambitions: Combat is exceptionally difficult, resources scarce, and rewards few and far between. With permanent character death and maiming, F&H has an almost roguelike structure, and a “game over” often entails a fate worse than death, one you might glimpse in the fleeting moments before a fade-to-black.
I hear the sequel, Fear & Hunger 2: Termina, is a bit more accessible on the difficulty front, though no less horrific and affecting than the original game. It presents the WWII era of F&H’s bespoke fantasy world, a story set during a mysterious festival over the course of several days, boasting a more nonlinear structure reminiscent of Pathologic or Majora’s Mask.
The best psychological horror games
Signalis
About The Author
