Balancing form and function is difficult in any game. In horror, the challenge is even greater than in some other genres. Fear is delicate, hard to build, and easy to destroy. For some games, creating an atmosphere of dread is the focus. Whether the player is given an arsenal of weapons or nothing at all, the challenge remains the same: endure, survive, and attempt to preserve one’s sanity.
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Scornleans heavily into body horror to disconcert players, mixing puzzle-solving, exploration, and combat to keep players on their toes. Fans of the game who are looking for similarly unsettling games have a variety to choose from, whether looking for an FPS, top-down exploration title, or even a point-and-click adventure. Here are some horror games thatScornfans are sure to love.
6Amnesia: The Dark Descent
How much control should players have when it comes to facing monsters? Some games believe in giving the player an arsenal of weapons and tools with which to combat the things that go bump in the shadowy corners of their worlds. Others try to restrict the player as much as possible, limiting ammo and healing items or even making combat impossible, forcing players to hide or run to stay alive.
Amnesia: The Dark Descentis solidly in the latter camp. Only running or hiding will help the player survive against the creatures that prowl these corridors. It’s a slow-burn experience, and while that isn’t for everyone, those who prefer horror centered around exploration andpuzzle-solving like inScornwon’t be disappointed. Gradually uncovering the game’s sinister lore is a thrill and unnerving from the very beginning.
5Silent Hill 2
Despite the uneven performance of some of its titles,Silent Hillis a titan in the genre. It’s easy to see why.Silent Hill 2and the rest of the best games in the franchise have a pitch-perfect understanding of slow-burning dread. The town of Silent Hill is as unsettling and claustrophobic an environment when the player is wandering its fog-shrouded streets as it is when they arecreeping past horrifying nursesin the bloody halls of a hospital.
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The lore surrounding the town, Pyramid Head, and the game’s other resident horrors is great, giving players plenty of reasons to keep exploring. Balancing puzzles, exploration, and combat,Silent Hill 2is arguably the pinnacle of the franchise, a disturbing romp through the fears and guilt of its protagonist. Years after its release, its flattened, low-fi graphics continue to do it justice. Silent Hill may be one of the creepiest towns in any horror game, andScornfans looking for a new environment to terrorize them need to look no further.
TheDead Spacefranchise built its reputation on a tight blend of atmospheric horror, gruesome violence, and tight combat. Plenty of sci-fi games have used body horror to throw an army of hideous creatures at players, but facing down a twisted monstrosity of flesh doesn’t necessarily make a game scary. It’s hard to leverage even the best imagery into authentic horror.
Dead Space 2does an excellent job of keeping the player on their toes. Its jump scares feel earned, and its claustrophobic environments do a great job of giving players the creeps longbefore the Necromorphs even show up.Using a Plasma Cutter to saw off enemy body parts in a desperate attempt to stay alive is bloody business, and the game does a great job of integrating horror into its basic mechanics.
3Darkwood
Perspective plays an important role in creating horror. The intimacy of the first-person perspective tends to make jump scares more surprising and environmental horror creepier, which is one reason that it’s so popular in the genre. There are brilliant third-person, 2D, and isometric horror games, but first-person arguably remains the default for scaring players.
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Darkwoodis a rare counterexample, a top-down horror game that sees players investigating a terrifying forest, scavenging for supplies, and doing their best to barricade their home against the evil that shambles about in the night. Thanks in part to brilliant sound design and reliance upon one’s flashlight to know what’s going on nearby,Darkwoodis a fantastically creepy and surprising title that fans ofScorn’satmosphere would do well to check out.
2I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
Harlan Ellison is not a writer who comes to mind when most people think about horror games, butI Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream(based on Ellison’s 1967 short story) remains one of the best-written and most disconcerting games in the genre. Though it lacks the realistic graphics of its modern competitors, its pixilated aesthetic remains gross and disturbing in equal amounts.
ThoughI Have No Mouth, and I Must Screamis a point-and-click title, it’s darker and more upsetting than almost any other game in the genre. A rogue AI has killed every human on earth, except for five people who it has kept alive and tortured. The game grapples with some extremely heavy subject matter and demands a variety of trigger warnings, but for those looking for exceptionalhorror with a satisfying endingand difficult themes, it doesn’t get much better.
1Alien: Isolation
For fans ofScorn,there may be no recommendation more fitting thanAlien: Isolation.Though they may share few mechanical similarities,both games owe a heavy debt to the art of H.R. Giger.The Swiss artist’s biomechanical designs inspired a legion of imitators, but none exactly like those of Giger himself. When the goal is to make the environment itself as immersive, disconcerting, and just plain weird as possible, Giger’s work is a powerful asset.
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Beyond the fantastic map design and sound design,Alien: Isolation’sbiggest selling point is easily the AI behind the Xenomorph itself. There are few things scarier in gaming than an enemy capable of adapting to the player’s strategy, learning and growing along with them to make hiding and escaping ever more difficult. Evading the titular alien is as frightening as it is difficult, making this game one that’s sure to linger in players' minds.
