There’s one very special time of the year to me. It’s that one time where we get to watch movies in the dark, scream like little girls and generally just feel creeped out. Of course I’m talking about Halloween, the scariest time of the year. Being a bit of a self-proclaimed horror connoisseur, I’ve played all kinds of horror games. However, as a horror fan, it’s been difficult to find big budget games that are actually scary.

Resident Evil and Silent Hill, once bastions of horror, have quickly devolved into games with little to no scares. Games have been “focus grouped” to the point where any scares are viewed as a bad thing. Even Dead Space, a series that built itself on atmosphere, has felt the need to throw co-op into the game to ensure that anyone who gets scared by it are more comfortable playing.

Of course, horror has never been about being comfortable. It’s quite the opposite, actually. Horror games, by their nature, are meant to disturb and unsettle you. Would Silent Hill 2 be viewed as one of the best video games ever made if it had “made people more comfortable playing”? Of course not. Thankfully, because of the growing “indie gaming scene” there are more and more horror games and many of them are free to very low cost.

Where Am I?

Most people in the gaming world know about Slender: The Eight Pages from ParSec productions. The game has been hailed as one of the scariest games ever made. However, people may not know about Where Am I? from the same developer. Where Am I? is, perhaps, an even more psychological experience. While Slender is a more free-form game, allowing the player to explore the woods so long as they don’t get caught by the Slender Man, this game is all about creating a linear, horror experience. The game is simple: your character travels through a gray set of corridors, traveling between multiple rooms. As the game progresses, the screen becomes darker and more distorted, the only sound is the echo of your footsteps as they hit the floor.

What really makes Where Am I? work is how well the game makes you just feel uncomfortable. Occasionally, you’ll come to a room where the simply are no ways out. You’ll turn around and the entrance will be gone. You might be stuck in a room for a little bit of time, wondering if this will be it for your character. The game isn’t done with you just yet. It wants to keep making you feel more and more uncomfortable. It’s a quick five minute game, but you’ll likely leave those five minutes feeling far more uncomfortable than any recent Silent Hill game.

Where Am I? can be played in your web browser through ParSec Productions website.

SCP-087

Another internet sensation, the Secure Contain Protect wiki chronicles a number of “paranormal” items and people. Each of these items is given a numeric label. SCP-087, classified as an “Euclid” object (because its “behavior cannot be unerringly predicted, either because the item is sentient, it behaves outside of current scientific knowledge, or its nature is simply poorly understood at present”) is seemingly just a stairwell. Within the SCP world, however, this stairwell has a secret: no one who travels down it comes back.

SCP-087 (the game) has players travelling down this doomed stairwell in an attempt to understand its nature. Much like Where Am I? SCP-087 depends upon building tension. As you travel down the stairwell, you’ll hear faint sounds in the distance. The walls may distort and return to their normal color. The game is designed in such a way that you’ll likely never experience the same occurrences twice. As with both of the other games on this list, the game ends in a brutal fashion but the tension it creates is enough to make even the most hardened veteran of the horror genre feeling scared. SCP-087 is for free.

The Fourth Wall

If you follow me, you may remember that I talked at length about Vidiot Game by Jesse Ceranowicz. He has a unique talent for taking completely unconventional ideas and making them extremely interesting. The Fourth Wall is a prime example of this.

The Fourth Wall could best be described as an abstract horror game. Available on the Indie section of Xbox Live Arcade for 80 Microsoft Points and for the same price on PC, the game have little to no real premise in its set up. Your character simply exists within a strange, twisted, and often times beautiful looking world. You have absolutely no idea what is happening, but you know it’s bad. It’s a game that to this day, I can’t bring myself to complete again without being a bit unnerved by the sound effects.

Paranormal

Let’s get away from the psychological scares for a moment and talk about some good old jump scares. While some horror fans don’t view jump scares as “legitimate” because they don’t cause you to walk away from a game or movie feeling uneasy inside, I still enjoy the in the same way I enjoy watching Bad Boys II. Yes, it’s not the most effective thing that could have been done, but it’s still a lot of fun in the right environment.

Paranormal is, in essence, as close to a Paranormal Activity game that we may ever get. After believing his home to be haunted, a young artist picks up a camera to record all of the scary stuff going on in his home. The game plays out over the course of four nights, each one having larger jump scares than the last. You may go into the bathroom to find the door slam loudly behind you, as blood pours out of the sink. A fire might randomly start in your kitchen. Perhaps the best scare, in my opinion, occurs when you try to leave the kitchen. I’ve seen multiple people play this game and this particular moment gets everyone. The game costs $10 and is available from the developers website.

All of these games are nearly flawless in terms of execution. They can easily scare anyone and even seasoned horror fans like myself were fairly shaken after playing each of these games. At the end of the day, these games are super cheap and you owe it to yourself to check them out.