Five Must-Play Horror Games for the PC

We're closing in on Halloween, so now's as good a time as any to fill out your game library with some of the best horror games available for the PC. Most of these are still readily available, but some might take a bit of hunting, and some might have some compatibility issues with modern machines.

Don't look for detailed reviews here. To be honest, some of these games aren't all that great when they're compared to what's available nowadays. I don't claim that these are great video games; they're great horror games. They are atmospheric, scary, and they stay with you.



Clive Barker's Undying: Look, it's got Clive Barker's name on it, for starters. The setting is an ancient, decaying mansion on a foggy, windswept, craggy island off the British coast, inhabited by a family cursed with undeath. It's got pretty much everything necessary to scare the pants off yourself if played in a dark, quite room at night.

And it's a good FPS. Really, really good. You're armed with an array of early 20^th century firearms and occult spells which can be used in combination to fight off various enemies, undead, extraplanar, and otherwise. It uses the Unreal engine to great effect; I still remember walking through a drafty, moonlit hallway in the house with tattered curtains fluttering in the breeze.

It's tough to find, being eight years old, but it's really worth it. This is one of the scariest, most atmospheric games I've ever played. Sadly, and strangely, it didn't sell well when it came out, so you don't see this available in retail, or even online. You can find copies secondhand on Ebay or Amazon, or in the usual way. Ahem.



Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: This is an FPS that came out about five years ago, released by a small Swedish developer who promptly folded. It's a damn shame, because this is a fantastic game. It's set in a scary vampire castle, and takes its inspiration from the film of the similar name.

It's creepy, but it looks dated. It looks like a game that came out three or four years prior, really. What makes this game stand out is the gameplay. The goal is to make your way through the castle to rescue your family from the undead hordes. There are several obstacles. First, the castle map is randomized each time you play. It is literally never the same place twice. Second, you have two hours to complete the game. As soon as you start, the clock starts ticking, and relatives start dropping. If too many die, the game ends. Third, it's hard. I mean HARD. Most combat winds up being melee, monsters are random spawns and do a lot of damage and ammo is hard to come by.

All this adds up to turn what is essentially a mediocre FPS into a phenomenally tense and unique horror game, really something of a survival-horror game. Again, this is one of those games that never really made it off the ground for various reasons (frustrating combat at times, amongst other things), so it's not easy to find.



Left 4 Dead: Ignore if you can the obnoxious use of text-ese; the number '4' in fact refers to the number of characters in the game. Left 4 Dead is the first co-operative survival-horror FPS (note to developers: please send shorter genre title) by Valve or, indeed, by anyone at all. I won't be able to avoid a really obvious, really awful joke, so be warned.

L4D is a game about zombies, fast zombies a la 28 Days Later. The game is broken up into "movies", self-contained campaigns, divided into "scenes". The metaphor probably originated with the name of the AI: The Director. There aren't fixed numbers or positions of zombies—sorry, infected—and you cannot kill all of them. The game in fact generates infected and throws them at the players based on several behind-the-scenes factors in an effort to pace the game. It succeeds at forcing you to escape, rather than just slaughter hordes of infected. It generates real panic, especially if you're playing the game online with others. Add to the endless hordes the team dynamic: when a player is overwhelmed by infected, they can be saved by another player, and if a player is, ahem, left for dead, they aren't available in the next scene, leaving the team short. L4D scores bonus points for competitive multiplayer where players take on the roles of specialized, more powerful infected.

It's a game about zombies. It uses lighting, dynamic music, sounds, and a grainy, "film" effect to faithfully reproduce the feeling of a zombie movie. It's a no-brainer (you were warned) for any horror aficionado.



Silent Hill 2: If you're here, you know about the Silent Hill series, but just in case, here's a brief summary. Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror game, but with a heavy emphasis on plot and atmosphere. There isn't room to say enough to give away the plot, but the bottom line is that SH2 is macabre, frightening, complex, and very replayable. It isn't the kind of game that you breeze through; it requires slow, thoughtful play. You really need to savor the environment and the plot of the game because there is just so much. It's the filet mignon of survival horror, and arguably the best of the series.








Penumbra: Overture: I'm generally suspicious of games made by Europeans. Sorry, I just am. I've played too many weird European games that are buggy, use bizarre play mechanics that don't quite work or just kind of bathe in mediocrity as if it were a Jacuzzi. Even the better ones always seem to have some sort of quirk that makes them too damned, well, European. I know it's a bias and I know it doesn't make sense, but there it is.

Enter the Penumbra series. It's Swedish. Paradox Interactive, purveyor of weird, niche games such as Hearts of Iron, is involved. But, so help me God, this is the scariest series of games I've ever played, and Overture, the first in the series, is perhaps the scariest of the series.

It's a first person, well, adventure game, really, that incorporates a fairly sophisticated physics engine which allows the player to pick up, move, and otherwise manipulate virtually anything on the screen. It follows the rules of survival horror: lots of darkness; a paucity of weapons; a general sense of despair, and; dread.

What makes this game superior to others in the genre is that it does all this with almost no combat. What combat there is, is limited, and dangerous. The game encourages stealth and avoidance by severely limiting the type and amount of weapons. As much as the Swedishness of the game gave me pause, I don't think an American studio would have the nerve to make an FPS without any S, so hat's off to Frictional Studios and Paradox Interactive.

This is one of those obscure (in the USA at least) games that really should be on every horror/suspense fan's shelf.



ALSO RANS:

These are some games that almost made the list but didn't for various reasons.

The Uninvited: Creepy old adventure game that takes place in a haunted house. I played it on a Macintosh; it eventually made it to the NES. Worth playing, especially the non-console version, if you can find an emulator. Tough to find a version that'll run on Vista, however, and 23 years have taken some of the shine off of the chrome.

Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth: Ok, yes it's Cthulu, and yes, it's a creepy game, but it's just too buggy. Get it on Xbox.













Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines: It's a good game, but just because there are vampires involved doesn't make it a horror game, especially when you're a vampire in the game.













The Suffering: This was a great game with a horror theme when I played it on the PS2, and allegedly an ad-sponsored free version is available for download from Midway. However, having attempted several times to download it resulted in virus positives from NOD32. There's a PC version you can buy that's probably worth the $5 or so, but I've read bad things about the port. There's also a difference between a game with scary bits and a scary game. This, along with Bioshock and some others, is more of the former than the latter. It's a fine point, and one that's certainly debatable, but I make an admittedly subjective distinction between horror games and games with horror in them.