Reccommend Me Scary Games For Halloween

[Schadrach]

I still say that Penumbra Overture is better than Amnesia, but it didn't have the same success. And I suppose Penumbra Black Plague after that, but it makes some uh...missteps that drag it down a little bit, despite parts of it and the game generally being as good as Overture. To be honest, Amnesia A Machine For Pigs got the reaction that it did, but...I'm not really sure that Frictional would have done any better, seeing how Black Plague turned out. Have to see how SOMA pans out, I suppose.

Opinion aside, Amnesia is all over the internet now, so Penumbra might still surprise one.

Also, have a look at the Ice Pick Lodge games - being Pathologic and Knock, Knock! (the latter, if you want a less confusingly translated experience that doesn't need any fiddling).

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, I guess, haven't played that one.

Downfall is a similar game to the Cat Lady (it was the game that the developer made before tCL)

http://www.gog.com/game/knock_knock
http://www.gog.com/game/pathologic
http://www.gog.com/game/downfall
http://www.gog.com/game/i_have_no_mouth_and_i_must_scream

Ice-pick Lodge certainly does "weird" very, very well. They also usually couple it with "dark". I wouldn't recommend Pathologic right now, as they just started working on a remake of it. On the light side, the same people who made Pathologic, the Void, and Knock-knock also made Cargo! The Quest for Gravity.

Knock-knock is kind of awesome, though. Of course, it's also confusing as hell, in no small part because the game refuses to tell you anything, including how the games' mechanics work. Of course, being confusing as hell is intentional, so there's that. Still haven't fiddled with the thing they sent out to certain KS backers for Knock-knock (the Modus/47 machine) enough to grasp the point of it yet.

 

[Rabish Bini]

If you have a 360 then Condemned is pretty good. The only real issue I had with it was the infuriatingly short campaign, but as it was launch (or close to it) title it should be dirt cheap.

 

[joest01]

Try Corpse Party on PSP. In a dark room. And put on some good headphones!
It effed up my sleep for a good long time.

 

[Blue C Jeffrey]

If you're alright with early-access games, I would give Darkwood a try.

Probably the only game I've played in a while that filled me with a sense of dread while playing. Great atmosphere and sound, in my opinion.

Out of the games you have, I would say The Cat Lady is the creepiest.

 

[Adam Lester]

Here are my top recommendations.

-Silent Hill 2+3

-Lone Survivor

-Condemned 1+2

-Call of Cthulu

-Eternal Darkness

-Alien: Isolation

-Shadows of the Damned

-Killer 7

-Fatal Frame

 

[Michael Tabbut]

Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth is a great (but buggy) horror game.
I'd say Saya no Uta (Song of Saya) but only if you like Visual Novels

 

[willoftheboss]

If you have a PS4 I cannot recommend P.T. enough. Those who try to dismiss it as just "jumpscares" or a cheap haunted house game do it a great disservice. If you can stream or have friends it's an amazing social game with no multiplayer component at all.

 

[Teepop]

PT is the scariest game I ever played. In fact I turned it off just before that major jump scare thing. My brother phoned me whilst I was playing and informed me that something like that would happen any second and I just bailed out at that point.

I was so scared and on edge by that point I couldn't look at the screen any more. I was playing alone in a pitch black room with a really nice home cinema system (in my defence) but I've never had anything close to that in another horror game or movie.

If you have an old 360 sitting around I'd be playing RDR Undead Nightmare. That was really cool. It's very creepy but not "jumping out of your seat" scary or anything. I actually found the original game pretty creepy in places too.

 

[Rayce Archer]

Cryostasis. You are alone on a ship full of monsters and the only way to escape is to reach into the pasts of dead bodies and undo their bad decisions and fix things. But this makes things aboard ship worse until they're better. I don't want to say much about the plot because it would be all spoilers pretty much, but there's one particular character whose recurring appearances scared a little pee out of me during late night play sessions.

Spoiler

It's your own empty snowsuit, lumbering after you to put itself on you and return you to the gulch outside the wrecked ship where you died at the start of the game.

If you really have to know its deal though:

Spoiler

You are a researcher who died on the way to a stranded ice breaker. You don't know you are dead. The "monsters" on the ship are the souls of crewmen, each contorted into a grotesque symbol of their roles in life. You can enter the memories of the dead and fix their mistakes; even in these memories the maddened crewmen you must fight look like monsters but the other still-sane human crewmen don't seem to see them this way. Eventually as you undo all the death on the ship, the reactor of the vessel, which kind of has a soul, maybe, starts reaching out through the ship with cracks of burning atomic heat that heal you and destroy enemies.
Eventually you learn that the final tragedies keeping the ship dead stem from the captain, the first mate, or the engineer, and their deaths damned the crew to undeath as monsters. You then fight the Greek titan Cronos (yes really) for the right to enter their pasts and prevent the ship's wreck and the destruction of its reactor. Resurrecting the ship brings the captain and crew back to life, they prevent your death, and everything is apparently fixed.

It's a very fun game, and super scary, although it does go on a bit long. Also it was meant to show off water effects using physX and on an ATI card it kind of looks like boring ass.

 

[Schadrach]

If you have a PS4 I cannot recommend P.T. enough. Those who try to dismiss it as just "jumpscares" or a cheap haunted house game do it a great disservice. If you can stream or have friends it's an amazing social game with no multiplayer component at all.

P.T. is awesome, it gives me hope for Silent Hills.

Another one that's interesting is Neverending Nightmares ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/253330/ ) -- it might be a "walking simulator", it might be mostly 2d, but the art style works well for it and it's good and creepy. Been playing it recently, up to 2/3 endings.

Funny story: I first saw it at PAX East 2014, in the Kickstarter room. Got a friend of mine to try it, and while he was playing someone walked up and was intently watching over his shoulder without my friend noticing. When he finished up, he turns to me and says "Whoever designed that game was a sick fucker." Immediately, a voice from behind him (the man he hadn't seen come up behind him and watch him play) exclaims "THANK YOU! I made it to help me deal with my mental issues." My friend was completely unsure on how to react to that, but it certainly had him talking about Neverending Nightmares for the rest of PAX.

 

[ObserverStatus]

I thought these games were pretty scary.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Among the Sleep
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Dead Space 1
Five Nights at Freddy's

 

[wauwau]

Lone survivor is the only title not mentioned up until now.

 

[Therumancer]

Try Corpse Party on PSP. In a dark room. And put on some good headphones!
It effed up my sleep for a good long time.

The Corpse Party concept is great, but I feel it kind of failed as a game since it was too random in terms of some of the ways you could die. Not to mention the fact that it relied on little bits like needing to outrun a ghost while grabbing an item to use on a door to escape, while avoiding holes in the floor, which get frustrating more than scary especially when you watch the lead-in again and again. Sort of like some parts of "Dead Space" where they will have a decent scary moment right before a nasty fight, and if you have to try it multiple times it kind of makes things seem increasingly passe. I think "Critical Miss" even did a parody of this (with a hallucinatory worm going from a horror to giving Issac advice as he respawns after each defeat).

That said Youtube had a fan translated version of the Anime up for a while I believe, it's fairly short (4 episodes I believe) and covers the storyline of the game pretty well and a lot of it's more interesting moments without the gaming bits.

At the end of the day I think JRPGs are generally a bad medium for horror, and that was the problem with "Corpse Party". That and there was very little "game" there at the end of the day and a lot of the parts where you did play it tended to get annoying more than anything. Another attempt at a horror JRPG, Koudelka (which was a prequel to a more popular series about a shapeshifter called Yuri...) ran into similar problems, both in the fact that it became very linear, had a good/bad ending decisive action (which I won't spoil if nobody has played it yet) which isn't pointed out very well, and involved a lot of weapon skill grinding. Perhaps someone will come up with one that works, but it hasn't happened yet to my knowledge.

 

[babinro]

Five Nights at Freddy's

The one and only game in history that I would actually consider scary. It's short and simple but was so wonderfully effective at bringing on the tension and putting you on edge.

I have to emphasize that this is a short gaming experience though. Don't expect to get more than say 1 hour out of it before the novelty wears off. You can push to better learn the mechanics and actually beat the game but it'll no longer be a scary game.

That said...it's still a wonderful and memorable experience. After playing it myself I found myself watching other people play it online and getting quite a bit of 'value' out of that.

 

[PinkiePyro]

what kind of scare you looking for

ambient creepiness that keeps you on edge till you piss yourself or a jump scare type that will do quick scares with rest periods?
(* denotes gore levels)

you want ambient creepiness
- amnesia ****
- slender *
- fatal frame series **-***
- corpse party *****
- Among the Sleep *

if you want jump scares
-five nights at Freddy's *
- the forest (beware its still beta) ***

something in the middle
- evil within *****
- Don't starve *

 

[joest01]

Try Corpse Party on PSP. In a dark room. And put on some good headphones!
It effed up my sleep for a good long time.

The Corpse Party concept is great, but I feel it kind of failed as a game since it was too random in terms of some of the ways you could die. Not to mention the fact that it relied on little bits like needing to outrun a ghost while grabbing an item to use on a door to escape, while avoiding holes in the floor, which get frustrating more than scary especially when you watch the lead-in again and again. Sort of like some parts of "Dead Space" where they will have a decent scary moment right before a nasty fight, and if you have to try it multiple times it kind of makes things seem increasingly passe. I think "Critical Miss" even did a parody of this (with a hallucinatory worm going from a horror to giving Issac advice as he respawns after each defeat).

That said Youtube had a fan translated version of the Anime up for a while I believe, it's fairly short (4 episodes I believe) and covers the storyline of the game pretty well and a lot of it's more interesting moments without the gaming bits.

At the end of the day I think JRPGs are generally a bad medium for horror, and that was the problem with "Corpse Party". That and there was very little "game" there at the end of the day and a lot of the parts where you did play it tended to get annoying more than anything. Another attempt at a horror JRPG, Koudelka (which was a prequel to a more popular series about a shapeshifter called Yuri...) ran into similar problems, both in the fact that it became very linear, had a good/bad ending decisive action (which I won't spoil if nobody has played it yet) which isn't pointed out very well, and involved a lot of weapon skill grinding. Perhaps someone will come up with one that works, but it hasn't happened yet to my knowledge.

Whoops, only saw this response now. But Halloween is not yet upon us so here goes.

The "gameplay" isn't what makes this game scary. There are no jump scares to speak of. Yes, there are some puzzles to solve while being chased by some ghost or other but it's all just to set the tone. What makes this game so freaking scary is the music, and all the little tidbits of exploration that slowly come together to shape an image in your head how one victim after another lost their mind, got killed by a loved one, or vice versa. And all that remains is a 16bit pixelated pile of bones. And the soundtrack is what makes it all come together. It absolutely needs to be played with headphones. If you allow yourself to get immersed in it I guarantee that this is a very Halloween worthy horror game.

Actually, part of the magic is how it achieves the level of horror it does with 16bit sprites and anime cut scenes. But it is probably the very circumstance that it lets your brain fill in the details that makes it work. Again, if you open up to it.

Which I absolutely do not recommend to everyone. This thing has the potential of messing up your sleep. Some people look for that. You know who you are.

 

[Dalisclock]

Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth is a great (but buggy) horror game.

I second this. The bit with the Polyps....*shudder* Too bad I can't finish the game due bugs near the end when I reach the final boss(I can't inflict any damage on it).

 

[Dalisclock]

Cryostasis: The sleep of reason-Little known horror game where you're trapped on an icebreaker which is frozen in the middle of nowhere. And a lot of weird stuff is happening. Also has an interesting mechanic where you will slowly freeze if you don't get to hear sources fast enough. That and somehow you can change the past to open up routes and prevent bad things from happening. Fairly strange and surreal.

Anyone who understands what exactly was going on during the final battle is smarter then me. Even the wierdness preceding it does very little to prepare you for the final boss battle.

Also, The Last Door. A heavily Lovecraftian/Poe inspired series. Currently has one season, with the second about to begin. Episodes are fairly short(about an hour long) and the graphics are retro-pixal(like early 1990's) but it sounds really great and it's really, really creepy.

Like the one above, you'll have more questions then answers by the end of season 1, due to the surreal nature of the game. It does make things a lot more disturbing but can also be frustrating. Hoping that season 2 sheds more light on just WTF is going on.