8 Best Horror Games From Every Console Generation

Consider, if you will, the horror game. Horror is one of the bedrock genres of fiction, an unsettling story to tingle your spine and terrify your thoughts, so it’s only right it would be represented in video games as well. Of course, it’s a little harder to scare you when all you have to work with are some pixels and MIDI music, but the games of old found a way to make it work, more or less.

Horror has existed as a genre of game as far back as the Atari days, starting simple with grasping around in a dark room, and gradually evolving into the delightfully terrifying microcosm of zombies, psychological horror, and serial killers we know and love today. Horror has definitely had its ups and downs throughout the industry, but we can say with certainty that nearly every generation of game console has at least one standout spook-fest.

8 Haunted House

The Second Generation

The Atari 2600 is generally considered to be the first proper, cartridge-based game console. It’s the earliest of the early days, only a little bit after Pong made gaming interesting. Just making any kind of game, let alone something scary, was a bit of an undertaking, but someone at Atari figured they’d take a shot at it anyway. The result was Haunted House, possibly the most straightforward horror game ever made.

You are a dude in a pitch-black haunted house, and you need to track down three pieces of a cursed urn that have been randomly scattered throughout the house’s 24 rooms. You light your way with candles, open doors with keys, and occasionally dodge a low-tier ghoulie like a bat, a spider, or a spooky ghost. You only get nine lives to escape the mansion, or else… some nonspecific doom will befall you.

Obviously, by today’s standards, this isn’t scary at all. For a moment, though, let’s place ourselves in the shoes of a child in 1982. You’re playing your Atari late at night, living room illuminated only by your TV, and suddenly the spooky ghost appears with a loud static burst and flashing lights. Don’t act like you wouldn’t at least jump a little.

7 Sweet Home

The Third Generation

By the third generation, graphics and presentation were good enough that games could have a genuine chance at freaking you out. There were some horror movie tie-ins on the NES of varying quality, and a couple of spooky adventure games like Uninvited and Shadowgate, but by far, the game that committed to the bit most was the Japan-exclusive Sweet Home.

Based on the 1989 Japanese horror film of the same name, Sweet Home is an adventure RPG in which a team of five unfortunate filmmakers are looking for valuable frescos in an extremely haunted mansion. The game offers a mix of turn-based combat and problem-solving; enemy encounters are randomized, but there’s no way you can actually fight them all off, so you need to either run or exploit their weaknesses as you explore the mansion and find key items.

What’s noteworthy about this game was its inclusion of both permadeath systems and surprisingly graphic cutscenes. If one of your party members ate it, it wouldn’t be pretty, and you’d be without their personal ability like healing or lockpicking. The game’s reception in its time wasn’t anything special, but it’s gained a lot of acclaim in retrospect, largely for inspiring another game we’ll get to in a bit.

6 Clock Tower

The Fourth Generation

Horror was technically an established genre of game by the fourth generation, but a lot of games of this nature were just platformers or action games with some spooky elements, like Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts or Zombies Ate My Neighbors. One of the only true horror games of this era, something that really embodied the oppressive atmosphere the genre would become known for, was another Japan-exclusive, Clock Tower.

Clock Tower is one of the earliest examples of the stalker horror subgenre. Our protagonist, Jennifer, has been brought to a spooky mansion under false pretenses, where she and her friends are being hunted down by a pint-sized killer with very large scissors. Unlike in many horror games, Jennifer is almost completely defenseless. All you can do is run away and occasionally try to juke Scissorman’s attacks as you explore and solve inventory puzzles.

Clock Tower is a deceptively dense game, with three potential endings and a multitude of bad ends and dead ends to inadvertently find yourself in. It’s admittedly not the most user-friendly game, as you have to control the point-and-click cursor with the D-pad, but that slight jankiness inadvertently helps to make the scary moments feel all the more tense.

5 Resident Evil

The Fifth Generation

With the fifth generation came the mass adoption of 3D graphics, which is when console horror games really got to start spreading their wings. Larger, more elaborate environments, grosser, smarter monsters, and more varied forms of gameplay gave rise to all kinds of unsettling experiences. Of course, the cream of crop is a game that needs no introduction, Resident Evil, though you may not know that this was the game I was alluding to before that was inspired by Sweet Home.

Resident Evil took many of the concepts pioneered in Sweet Home and brought them into the third dimension as police officers Chris and Jill attempt to navigate an abandoned manor overrun with the walking dead. Rather than turn-based combat, the game used real-time action, forcing you to stand and aim your gun at any encroaching horrors. On top of that, you needed to collect items and solve puzzles throughout the manor with limited inventory space, forcing you to be selective about what you do and don’t carry with you.

While the English dub of the game is very cheesy by today’s standards, in its time, Resident Evil was the authority on scary. There’s still some debate about whether the fixed camera angles and tank controls were a deliberate choice to make the game more tense or just a cost-cutting measure, but intentional or not, they definitely create an unsettling, oppressive vibe that few other games in this generation had.

4 Silent Hill 2

The Sixth Generation

With Resident Evil and its subsequent sequels having thrown down the gauntlet, the remainder of the fifth and beginning of the sixth generation saw a multitude of new approaches to horror games in 3D. In that intervening time, the original Silent Hill released to strong reviews on the PlayStation. While that first game helped Konami get its foot in the door to horror, it was its sequel on the PlayStation 2, Silent Hill 2, that really cemented the series as an all-timer.

Silent Hill 2 sees downtrodden everyman James Sunderland exploring the foggy titular town after receiving a mysterious letter from his late wife, only to find it crawling with indescribable horrors that seem just a bit too familiar to him. The scope of Silent Hill 2 is much larger than that of the previous game, though it still keeps its focus squarely on building a lonely, oppressive environment, even forgoing any form of HUD to keep you entrenched in things.

Silent Hill 2 is still a horror icon to this day for its sheer mastery of the horror vibe. For large stretches, the only sounds you hear are the ambiance of the town and the occasional scratching of an incoming monster, heralded by static on the radio. There’s a reason Silent Hill 2 got a remake even before the first game did: it was just that good.

3 Dead Space

The Seventh Generation

Following the meteoric success of Resident Evil 4 late in the sixth generation, the seventh generation saw the rise of the action horror boom. Everyone was looking to ape Leon Kennedy’s excellent adventure, and so we had a large outpouring of games with overt horror themes paired with a greater emphasis on gun combat. Some of the games released during this time were a bit hit or miss, but one that definitely hit was Dead Space.

Out of all the action horror games of the seventh generation, Isaac Clarke’s journey aboard a derelict space freighter is arguably the one that really understood the assignment the best. It achieves this through a combination of monster and environmental design. The game’s signature beasties, the Necromorphs, are distinct from most of the zombies and killers of the time in that they can only be defeated by strategically dismembering them, forcing you to aim carefully even while they’re bearing down on you.

Additionally, the setting of the USG Ishimura understands what’s supposed to be scary about both cramped spaces in general and the cold isolation of space. No matter how decrepit and monster-filled it is, you literally have nowhere to run, because there is literally nothing but void just outside those walls.

2 Until Dawn

The Eighth Generation

By the eighth generation, players were starting to get a little burnt out on action horror games. You shot one zombie in the head, you shot ‘em all. The genre needed something fresh, something to reinvigorate interest in the horror genre. Ironically, that “something fresh” came from going back to basics and drawing inspiration from the classics of horror slasher films, resulting in the interactive horror experience that is Until Dawn.

Until Dawn is, for all intents and purposes, a fully interactive horror film, in which a gaggle of teenagers makes the very irresponsible decision of throwing a ski lodge party on top of a snow-ravaged mountain full of monsters and murderers. The setup is old-school horror, but what distinguishes Until Dawn is how it utilizes the choices-matter framework that was popular in this era to shape the story.

Depending on the choices you make and whether you succeed in quick-time events, not all of these unfortunate teens will make it out the other side. It’s got all the fun tension and jumpscares of a movie night with the gang, not to mention an overall excellent production with some quality performances by Rami Malek and Peter Stormare.

1 Alan Wake 2

The Ninth Generation

And so, we arrive in the modern day, where horror has entered something of a renaissance. Developers large and small have given us consistent horror titles in a galaxy of subgenres, from the tried-and-true action shooters to the subtler walking simulators. It’s exceptionally difficult to pick out a representative from the current sea of options, but if I had to pick just one standout, I think the honor should go to Alan Wake 2.

The sequel to 2010’s Alan Wake, Alan Wake 2 both picks up on the previous game’s story and ties into the larger connected universe that Remedy spent the intervening time establishing in games like Control. While the original had a good grasp on its tone, telling a metanarrative horror story about a horror story author, Alan Wake 2 gets more into the nitty-gritty while also amplifying the oppressive vibe.

Environments are darker, enemies are more inhuman, jumpscares are more sudden. Granted, it also has its silly moments, like the big musical number, but sometimes you need that kind of levity to really give some weight to the tenser moments, of which there are plenty. It’s both a surprisingly cerebral metanarrative about the nature of fiction, and a generally engaging action horror game, the best of both worlds.