Horror is the most competitive genre in gaming, even though we barely get any major AAA releases besides Resident Evil and Silent Hill. From psychologically intense indie darlings to co-op escapades that produce more laughs than screams, new horror games constantly hit the scene, overwriting our memories of great fright-fests from yesteryear.
As terrifying or fun as modern titles can be, most of them don’t hold a candle to a few forgotten horror games that have slipped through the cracks. These games have been largely erased from our collective consciousness, their presence reduced to nostalgia pieces like this article and maybe the occasional nightmare. Let’s change that, and let’s focus specifically on single-player horror games, since most modern releases focus on multiplayer.
Naturally, these horror games are remembered by those people who originally played them. However, I cannot imagine they are being discovered by new players.
Condemned: Criminal Origins Has The Best Melee Combat Of Any Horror Game
And A Pretty Good Story Too
- A horror franchise that should be on its 5th entry, but stalled after just two.
Full disclosure: Condemned: Criminal Origins is in my top 5 favorite horror games, so the bias is strong with this one. That said, I replayed this recently, and it has stood the test of time. The sequel isn’t bad either, but it doesn’t hit the same highs as its predecessor and suffers from being a console-exclusive.
Putting aside my rose-tinted glasses, Condemned was such a breath of fresh air in 2005, for both the horror genre and gaming in general. While featuring quite a bit of action, Condemned forces you to really get your hands bloody by primarily focusing on vicious melee attacks. Horror should be unpleasant and discomforting, and this game forces those feelings upon you.
Story-wise, Condemned is better than most. FBI agent Ethan Thomas’s homicide case leads him into a run-in with a serial killer who kills other serial killers, and the latter frames the former for the murder of two cops. Wanted by his own people, Ethan must head to the city’s most decrepit corners to clear his name, all the while investigating a mass psychosis that turns people into violent murderers.
That’s an awesome premise, and the execution does not fail to live up to that potential. The brutal melee combat reflects Ethan’s desperation, and you even have access to forensic tools to investigate crime scenes for clues. All these elements combine to create a short but thrilling ride that sticks with you.
Cold Fear Wasn’t Just Resident Evil 4 On A Boat
Also, One Of The Best Horror Games On A Boat
- Launched two months after Resident Evil 4.
Even at the best of times, a horror game doesn’t want to come out near Resident Evil, and 2005 might have been the worst year to drop an action hybrid that clearly takes inspiration from Capcom’s franchise. While it came out too close to RE4 to be a direct copycat, Cold Fear essentially tried to do the exact same thing: push classic survival horror into a modern action direction with an over-the-shoulder camera.
A good horror story needs a good setting, and Cold Fear has that in the form of an abandoned whaling vessel filled with the reanimated corpses of its crew. Tom Hansen is charged with investigating the ship, and he quickly finds himself on a containment mission that goes well beyond his pay grade. Darkworks went out of its way to create as realistic an environment as possible; in fact, the developer went a bit too far by constantly shifting the level geometry to simulate the ship movement, a feature that might trigger motion sickness in some folks.
I am one of those folks. Cold Fear is so far the only non-VR game that motivated me to take a motion sickness pill.
Cold Fear might be more than two decades old by this point, but its gameplay can stand alongside most modern shooters without any trouble. Unlike RE4, you can move while aiming, making the moment-to-moment gunplay feel a lot better while also allowing it to age gracefully.
Click on the game with the higher OpenCritic rating.
Clive Barker’s Undying Expertly Blends Horror And FPS Gameplay
A Horror Game Worthy Of Clive Barker’s Name
- Flopped at launch, largely due to poor marketing.
As the mind behind Hellraiser, Candyman, and a million other masterpieces, Clive Barker’s name holds tons of weight in the horror community, but his games are generally seen as a “lesser” part of his legacy. His most well-known association is Clive Barker’s Jericho, a legendary mess that is kind of worth playing, as long as you go in with low expectations. However, that game’s spiritual predecessor, Undying, is a straight-up fantastic FPS horror game that deserves way more love and appreciation.
Set in 1923, you play Patrick Galloway, a World War I veteran and paranormal investigator summoned to a coastal estate in Ireland by his dying friend, Jeremiah Covenant. As a child, he took part in an occult ritual with his siblings, unwittingly releasing a curse that begins to wipe them all out, only to revive them as something not quite alive or dead. The story isn’t anything out of this world, but it is elevated by creepy, varied environments and thematic boss fights against Patrick’s siblings.
Undying‘s combat has aged surprisingly well, and it echoes BioShock‘s dual-wielding system that combines a gun with something more unusual. In this case, players get to equip period-accurate weapons in one hand and unleash spells in the other, granting them a skillset that is still expansive by horror and even FPS standards.
The Ultimate Prison Escape
I’m slightly hesitant to mention The Suffering, considering it isn’t an easy game to acquire nowadays; however, I imagine a number of people who picked up the game and its sequel before they left GOG have yet to play them. If you have The Suffering sitting idle in your library, it might be time to hit “install.”
Making a great two-parter with Condemned: Criminal Origins, The Suffering is another action-heavy horror game that basks in gore and violence. Rather than an FBI agent, you portray a family annihilator who has no memories of the murders, and Torque arrives at Abbot State Penitentiary on Carnate Island just before an earthquake unleashes a bunch of monsters fueled by the island’s dark history. Escape means surviving through hell.
With help from Stan Winston Studios to design the monsters, The Suffering‘s enemy gallery oozes vile creativity, and it’s the perfect antidote for those bored to death by zombies or ghosts. Besides the top-notch roster of terrors, the game maintains a quick, unrelenting pace that accommodates both action and psychological horror. Really great stuff.
Siren Is Still A One Of A Kind Horror Game
Be It 2003 Or 2026, You Will Either Love Or Hate It
- Specifically Siren, not Siren: Blood Curse. The PS3 remake is a fine horror game, but it sanitized the original in a way that stripped away what made it so unique.
Let’s end things with a weird case. Siren is the definition of a love-or-hate experience, with nearly every element being polarizing. Some people find the game to be frustrating and confusing, a perfectly understandable reaction; conversely, others see Siren as an ambitious experiment driven by an unsettling atmosphere that really gets under your skin. The reasons to play this title now are the same as they were 23 years ago.
Set over a three-day period, Siren takes place in Hanuda, a deeply isolated, mountainous Japanese village cut off from the outside world by a supernatural red sea and an echoing siren. After a cult ritual goes wrong, the townsfolk become Shibito, strange immortal corpses that hunt down any survivors while rebuilding the village. Rather than a single protagonist, you control 10 characters, playing through their stories in a non-linear order set over a period of 72 hours.
One survivor’s actions impact another’s story, and you will find yourself having to shift between characters to complete puzzles. That’s already a cool enough idea to warrant a playthrough, but Siren also has an innovative mechanic that lets you see the world through another person’s eyes, even the Shibito.
