We all love a good scare, whether it’s watching a movie or booting up a new game, while we hold our breath and wait to see what comes next. And for the most part, when it comes to horror games, we know what we can expect: loud noises. Jump scares. Monsters. But much like a great horror movie, there’s one thing that separates anexcellenthorror game from all the rest: a captivating story.
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Share the fear!
Don’t get us wrong - there’s nothing wrong with playing a horror game for the sake of being scared, but sometimes, when we want to dig a little deeper, a story-driven horror game is just what we need.
10Layers of Fear
Picking Up the Pieces
Release Date:
Aug 17, 2025
OpenCritic Score:
The plot inLayers of Fearcomes in pieces and it’s up to you and the main character to put those pieces together. In this first-person psychological horror game, you take on the role of a disturbed painter, navigating the hallways of a Victorian mansion. The mansion is seemingly always shifting and you’ll notice the environment changing with your camera movements.
What may seem like a run-of-the-mill horror exploration game at first will soon take you on a journey through the painter’s psychosis as you unlock memories of the past. Depending on how you play the game, there are multiple possible endings. And once you’re done with the painter’s story, you can return to the mansion once more as The Painter’s Daughter in the Inheritance DLC: Face Your Past.
9The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Put Your Detective Hat On
July 31, 2025
First things first, this is not billed as a horror game. In fact, it’s categorized under “mystery” on Steam, but everything – from the scenery to the rich narrative – builds up like any good thriller. InThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you take on the role of detective Paul Prospero, who receives a disturbing letter from a boy named Ethan Carter. Believing the boy is in danger, you journey to his hometown and learn that Ethan has vanished in the wake of a brutal murder.
Review: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Step by step, through good old-fashioned detective work and the ability to communicate with the dead, you discover the mystery behind Ethan’s disappearance. This game is, in essence, a walking sim – there aren’t many mechanics to master other than walking and interacting with objects – but here, it works because the story itself is so captivating.
8Silent Hill 2
It’s a Cult Classic For a Reason
July 08, 2025
Metacritic Score:
Silent Hill 2 has earned mention after mention on lists like this one, and for good reason: despite being released in 2001, the game has a story so compelling that people still remember it more than 20 years later. We won’t rehash the plot because you’ve probably already heard it: you follow James Sunderland, who journeys to the town of Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his deceased wife.
What has earned Silent Hill 2 a spot on this list is not the fact that you’ve never heard of it. It’s the fact that it still stands as one of the best modern horror narratives, and best of all, a remastered version of the game is set torelease in October on Steam, so it’s the perfect time to revisit the eerie town of Silent Hill.
Try to Expose the Truth… And Stay Alive
July 06, 2025
In Outlast,you play Miles Upshur, a journalist who breaks into Mount Massive Asylum late at night to investigate a report of unethical practices being conducted there. You see the game exactly how Upshur sees his surroundings: through a camcorder, complete with night vision mode and a depleting battery (don’t worry, you’re able to reload the batteries – if you find a spare set laying around.) This unique take on the first-person perspective makes you feel like you are wandering the halls of the asylum, trying to avoid detection by the monstrous not-quite-human creatures that lurk in the dark. There are no combat mechanics as you’ll rely entirely on the use of your camcorder to know when to hide or run.
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Don’t forget: above all, you’re a journalist, and you uncover the horrific practices at Mount Massive Asylum in the same way Upshur does: by recording events with the camcorder and writing notes about what he sees. As you explore the asylum, you can collect documents from the facility – including diary pages from patients and hospital staff – to understand just what really happened here. And most importantly: attempt to stay alive. When you complete the base game, you can play through the Whistleblower DLC, an overlapping prequel to the first game.
6Alan Wake
Writer’s Block Can Kill
July 03, 2025
What is it with writers getting in over their heads that makes for an excellent horror narrative? This time, you follow the titular character – Alan Wake – a crime fiction novelist with perhaps the scariest thing of all: writer’s block.
He and his wife vacation to Bright Falls, Washington, but once they arrive, it becomes clear that things in the picturesque small town are not what they seem. After his wife disappears, the story takes a darker turn when Wake starts living out events from a book he has not yet written. Described by developer Remedy Entertainment as having “the body of an action game” and “the mind of a psychological thriller,” Alan Wake is equal parts fun to play as it is fun to watch unfold.
Demonic Possession, Told Through Polaroids
June 13, 2025
In this first-person psychological horror game, you wake up (and begin the game) as a teenage boy named Luca in a dark room. There’s no explanation about what you’re doing there…until you find a box with pictures of a severed arm and leg in it. From there, you’re able to leave the room, and armed with only an instant camera, try to make sense of what’s happening around you. You learn that Luca has been possessed by a demon and forced to carry out a ritual involving murder and mutilation – and Luca is not the first person that the demon, Madison, has possessed.
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To unravel the horrors behind the demon’s past, you must search everything; inspect photos taken with your instant camera; solve puzzles. But be warned: there are several disturbing and unsettling moments in this game and multiple jump scares. If those sorts of scenes make you squeamish, we would recommend that you proceed with caution.
A Real Haunted House
August 23, 2025
Here we have another take on the first-person psychological horror experience, this time set in a – quite literally – haunted house. You play as Dwayne Anderson, an isolated alcoholic who, in the opening sequence, is pictured loading a gun and pulling the trigger on his family. Now, he appears to spend his days in a house tormented by spirits. In one of the first moments of the game, you’ll receive a phone call from a concerned neighbor: “I know it’s late and I know that I tend to be a little anxious about small things. I apologize for that, but I’m getting a bit worried… I haven’t seen you out of the house in about three weeks. Is everything alright?”
As you explore the house, the spirits that lurk will play tricks on your mind – light bulbs will flicker and break, doors will slam suddenly. Visage is split into three chapters, each centered on a past resident of the house. As you learn more about the home’s dark past, you’ll learn more about Anderson’s own life and what led him to committing such horrific acts at the game’s start.
3Until Dawn
You Determine Who Lives and Who Dies
July 12, 2025
Can you survive Until Dawn? This choice-and-consequence game puts you in the driver’s seat of ten friends – Sam, Mike, Jessica, Ashley, Chris, Matt, Emily, Josh and his twin sisters, Hannah and Beth – and their decisions. Well,mostof their decisions. The fate of the sisters – Hannah and Beth – is already decided. We see Hannah and Beth chased off a snowy cliff by a mysterious figure and we learn that the two sisters are never found. A year later, Josh invites the aforementioned cast back up to the Blackwood Mountain Ski Lodge for a party held in memory of his sisters. Nothing seems too out of the ordinary at first – you switch between each character’s individual perspective as they arrive at the lodge and learn a little bit about each of their personalities – but things quickly start getting strange. A masked man begins haunting friends at the lodge, trying to pick the friends off one by one, and elsewhere, characters are hunted by supernatural creatures.
Review: Until Dawn
It’s up to you, and the choices you make, to decide who lives and who dies. And now, with a movie in production and a remastered and enhancedUntil Dawn set to hit Steam in October, it’s the perfect time to return to the mountain. Best of all, if you opt to wait for it, the remaster has been rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5 and the trailer promises breathtaking new visuals to experience Until Dawn in a way like never before.
Fear Of The Ocean Comes to Surface
June 25, 2025
From the creators of Amnesia: The Dark Descent,SOMA is a sci-fi horror gamemade unique by its setting: hundreds of miles beneath the Atlantic ocean in an underwater research facility. This game is a stand-out from others in the same genre as it relies on something very real: the fear of drowning and the mysteries of what lives in the depths of the ocean. We follow the main protagonist, Simon Jarrett, who undergoes a brain scan and wakes up in the PATHOS-II facility to a dying radio and dwindling food supply as one of the last humans on Earth.
SOMA follows Simon’s journey – and your journey as the player – to find other survivors, and ultimately, try to escape, running into monsters and robots (and an A.I. that will have you wondering what it means to be “human”) along the way. Much like the other games on this list, there is no fighting back against the monsters that hunt you in SOMA – you may hide or you can run. The choice, ultimately, is up to you.
1Resident Evil: Village
One Man’s Journey to Save His Daughter
July 19, 2025
I know, Resident Evil is not what you think of when you think of great, cohesive narratives, butResident Evil: Villagedeserves a spot on this list all the same. The eighth installment in the Resident Evil franchise, Village serves as a direct sequel to Resident Evil 7 and as such, we again play as Ethan Winters. The game opens with what seems to be a picture-perfect family, showing Ethan with his wife Maria with their six-month-old daughter Rosemary enjoying a night in. Suddenly, everything changes when Chris Redfield (you may recognize him from earlier Resident Evil titles) and his men show up, murder Ethan’s wife and kidnap him and his baby daughter.
The actual “game” begins when Ethan awakens from a car accident and realizes that his daughter is nowhere to be found. As Ethan, you have to traverse a village ravaged by werewolf-like mutants and defeat lords that each govern their own stronghold, and that’s where this game shines. The individual stories about each side character that you encounter are just as captivating as finding out what happened to Rosemary and ultimately, Ethan’s fate, and make for a gripping tale all the way through, even if you haven’t played the whole Resident Evil series.
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