Essential Horror Games
Gold
Resident Evil Remake
The Resident Evil Remake (which I first experienced on my trusty Gamecube) is a perfect marriage between compelling horror and entertaining gameplay. Tonally, the game exudes creepiness -- it features its fair share of jumpscares, of course: seemingly-dead zombies that rise up as you pass them, faster and more lethal than ever before; hideous bioweapons that break down doors and skitter out of vents; and the now-infamous zombie dogs that leap through windows and over fences -- but there's also plenty of instances of the more subtle, creeping horror that worms its way into your heart and doesn't leave until weeks after the game is over: journals filled with the musings of hapless groundskeepers and scientists who slowly realize that they'll soon be among the mindless, walking dead; run-ins with colleagues and team members that leave you wondering if you can trust them; research notes detailing horrific experiments that might just be lurking around the next corner. After you've finished your play session and put down the controller, it's difficult to stop yourself from checking behind shower curtains and in closets on the off-chance that there might be some hideous thing hidden just out of sight.
However, in spite of the much-maligned "tank controls" -- which, fortunately, have been made optional in subsequent re-releases -- Resident Evil also succeeds more broadly as a video game. There are a number of elaborate puzzles you must solve to progress through the mysterious mansion you're exploring: collect-and-combine style affairs reminiscent of those found in LucasArts point-and-click titles; areas where you have to extensively interact with the environment to progress, flipping switches, pushing boxes, and rearranging bookshelves to reveal hidden doors or passages; and -- my personal favorite -- simpler fare made more challenging by the presence of some kind of threat: escaping a booby-trapped room before the ceiling collapses and crushes you to death, or sealing an underwater observation area before a mutant shark shatters the glass and swallows you whole. The combat, while simple by the standards of more modern games, effectively ratchets up the tension: the fact that ammunition and supplies are so limited means that every shot counts, and neglecting to keep track of your ammo could cause you to enter a lengthy reloading animation at the wrong time, leaving you helpless as the zombies and monsters close in. And even in the year 2018, it's easy to appreciate why the game was considered to be such a looker in its heyday -- while the graphics aren't anywhere near as groundbreaking as they were at launch and the animations are a little stiff-looking in our mocap-heavy modern era, it holds up well enough that you won't cringe when you boot it up.
Are there more modern horror games with superior mechanics to the REMake's? There certainly are. Are there games scarier than this one? You bet -- but every horror game that came out after Resident Evil owes it a debt, and, unlike many other games considered revolutionary, this one more than holds up today. That's why the Resident Evil Remake is my Gold Essential Horror Game.
Silver
Siren
Known variously as Siren and Forbidden Siren depending on where and when you bought it, this game makes my list for two primary reasons. The first, of course, is that it is terrifying. The game utilizes the unsettling tropes of Japanese horror to great effect and often makes you feel just as uncomfortable as you are scared, whether you're frantically running and hiding from an insane, gun-toting police officer, or stalking through a thick mist, armed with a simple rifle but terrified to use it and attract the attention of an entire town's worth of gibbering, psychotic lunatics. The nonlinear narrative, which sees you jumping from one protagonist to the other and experiencing key events at different times over a period of three days, often leaves you confused and unsettled and keeps you constantly guessing as you try to solve the mystery of why the town of Hanuda's citizens seem to have simultaneously gone mad, drawn to the blood-red sea by a klaxon that sounds at all hours of the day.
The other reason is that Siren features a really interesting and unique mechanic known as 'sightjacking'. The game leans very heavily on a common survival horror trope -- that it is often better to avoid confrontations than to waste meager supplies and ammunition on your foes -- and aids you in sneaking past your enemies by allowing you to see through their eyes as they stalk about searching for you. You can swap from foe to foe as if you were changing channels on a psychic television, enabling you to keep track of their positioning and also get a better idea of the layout of the area that you're in -- an enemy skulking around at the top of a hill can unknowingly give you a bird's-eye view of the dense forest you're trapped in; or, if you're on the exterior of a building, you can sightjack a person on the inside to learn what awaits you behind the door. Sightjacking is obviously a much more limited system than, say, hacking into security cameras or viewing enemy positions on a radar, but its ambiguity does a lot to enhance the horror of Siren and makes the game stand out as a fairly unique survival horror title.
Clock Tower 3
While I can't honestly say that Clock Tower 3 has aged especially well -- it wasn't exactly a looker even when it released in the early 2000s -- I still appreciate it for its place in the history of gaming: when a lot of other horror games were putting you in the shoes of special forces officers or hardened military vets, Clock Tower 3 dared to make its protagonist a peppy, utterly-nonthreatening schoolgirl with extremely limited means to defend herself. Players must guide Alyssa on a horrific journey through time as she works to save the souls of the damned by outwitting and outfoxing their murderers, all while piecing together her family's tragic and sinister history. As Alyssa only has a bottle of holy water with which to fend off her enemies, running and hiding is key to surviving, as is making use of special items like rings of temporary invisibility. Near-misses from her foes' weapons will cause Alyssa's panic meter to spike, and if it hits its peak, she'll lose her composure and begin to scramble clumsily away from them, inadvertently setting herself up for an inevitable killing blow.
In spite of its mediocre graphics and its ambitious-but-cheesy plot, Clock Tower 3 is still fun to revisit due to its interesting mechanics and the feeling of helplessness that it so successfully evokes.
Haunting Ground
Haunting Ground is undoubtedly a scary game, even if its story is a mess and the various antagonists you face off against are utterly bizarre -- but the real reason that I've chosen to include it in my list is that cute pooch in the above picture. His name is Hewie, and he is your constant companion throughout your hours-long attempt to escape the creepy castle you've found yourself in. Hewie is fairly sharp as far as AI companions go, even by today's standards. If you train him well -- by praising him when he does what you want and scolding him when he misbehaves -- he'll become an obedient and useful ally, distracting your foes, discovering hidden items, and providing much-needed moral support as you're chased around by the castle's unsettling denizens. Treat him poorly, however, and he'll wander off, refuse to obey your commands, and ultimately become more of a hindrance than a help. I don't think I've ever played a game where I felt more like I was training an actual dog, which is impressive when you consider the sheer number of canine sidekicks that have popped up throughout gaming history.
If you like horror
and doggos, Haunting Ground is definitely worth revisiting.
Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location
Horror-comedy is a fun little subgenre. Using humor to break up the tension of an otherwise-horrifying game can be a useful tool for making new scares feel fresh; conversely, an amusing moment at the right time can throw you off your guard just before a heart-stopping jumpscare. By the time Scott Cawthon released Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, he'd had several games' worth of time to refine his horror-comedy chops, and it shows: whether a cheerful, automated voice is happily informing you that, yes, you will be belly-crawling across a room inhabited by a deranged robot that will kill you if it hears you make the slightest noise, or your helper 'bot's increasingly-frantic entreaties for the monstrous, animatronic bear stalking you through a parts and service room to "go back to sleep" are falling on deaf and fuzzy ears, you'll find yourself chuckling as frequently as screaming while playing through this ambitious point-and-click horror experience.
FNAF: Sister Location is a fine game to play on its own, but longtime fans will enjoy the many wink-and-nod moments that reference or expand upon the franchise's lore. I particularly enjoyed the secret 'bad ending', which caps off with a final-boss-style encounter that leans heavily on the mechanics of the series's first game.
Bronze
Parasite Eve
While Parasite Eve's scares tend to be more muted and subtle than those of the other games on my list, this is definitely still a game that exudes an unsettling and uneasy tone: cutscenes feature flesh melting off of bone and animals mutating into hideous monsters, and gameplay often involves trekking down narrow hallways and dark alleys and pumping bullets into revolting beasts that just won't die. While action- and survival-horror games are more common than horror-RPGs, Parasite Eve is a part of a sub-subgenre that is nevertheless important to the history of horror in gaming -- after all, the Famicom's Sweet Home, often considered to be a proto-survival-horror game, is itself an RPG -- and you'll definitely step away from the game feeling uncomfortable in your own skin.
Dino Crisis
There are many respects in which Dino Crisis could accurately be described as "Resident Evil, but with dinosaurs" -- but it is nevertheless an effective, frightening, and competently-made horror game. My favorite thing about Dino Crisis is the way that it incorporates branching paths into its story. There are various plot points where protagonist Regina can choose to side with one of her two constantly-bickering teammates -- the gung-ho, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later Gail, or the more brainy and technically-minded Rick. Aside from influencing which of the multiple endings you'll achieve during your playthrough, this also leads to different gameplay scenarios: following Rick's plan will generally involve more puzzle-solving and less encounters with hostile dinosaurs, while agreeing with Gail tends to lead to shoot-'em-up scenarios that require you to fight your way through gauntlets of prehistoric predators. This is a fun way to accommodate the tastes and interests of a broader swath of gamers, and it adds a layer of replayability to the game that I really appreciate.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
With the possible exception of Clock Tower 3, I'd say that Eternal Darkness has probably aged the worst out of any of the games on my list -- it was originally developed as a Nintendo 64 game before being switched over to the Gamecube during its development, and it shows. Nevertheless, I'd be remiss not to include this game due to the sanity system alone: in addition to a red health meter that tracks how close your character is to dying, and a blue magick meter that shows how much power you have available for spellcasting, there is a green meter that indicates your character's mental state. The sanity meter lowers as you meet eyes with eldritch monsters and witness seemingly-impossible events, and soon things begin to happen that make you, the player, question your own perception: bugs seem to crawl across your television screen, your save file appears to spontaneously delete itself, or a splash screen pops up that thanks you for playing the Eternal Darkness demo. These "sanity effects" are so numerous and so creative that I was utterly fooled by them on more than one occasion during my first playthrough of the game, and I can honestly say that no game before or since has caused me to experience dread on such a personal level.
Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny
Like Resident Evil 4 and its copycats, Onimusha 2 is more of an action-horror game than a horror-action game, but the spirits and demons you face off against as you play it are still fairly creepy and unnerving. My favorite thing about this game, though, is the almost dating-sim-esque component that takes place in the hub town of Imasho: there, you can spend gold you've earned on gifts for NPC allies that appear throughout the story, and giving the right gifts to the right people can influence the game's narrative arc and difficulty. Lavish a friend with the appropriate presents, and they'll pop up later on to help you take down tough enemies; neglect or misunderstand them, and they might ignore or even betray you. While other games would later refine and expand upon this basic idea, Onimusha 2 was a relatively early adopter, and there's undoubtedly a certain charm to giving bouquets of flowers, exotic fruits, or "fancy paper" -- whatever that means -- to hardened and battle-tested warriors.
Doom 3
The Doom franchise has had a lot of success with its recent return to its fast-paced, action-packed roots, but Doom 3 will always be my favorite game in the series. This was my first experience with first-person horror, and the level of immersion I experienced when I initially played the game -- at a friend's house, on his gaming PC, with the lights off and the headphones on -- really can't be overstated. Doom 3 was a graphical powerhouse at the time of its release, the voice acting is more than solid for its era, and it managed to deftly weave together lots of gameplay elements that have since become staples of the horror genre: crew logs and voice diaries that you can play back as you wind your way through dark tunnels and corridors, in-game computers with their own user interfaces that you can manipulate at mousepoint without sitting through loading screens, and seamless action-to-cutscene transitions all help to make you really feel as if you're fending off demons on the surface of Mars, flashlight in one hand, BFG in the other.
<Voting Start>
<Gold - 3 Points>
Resident Evil Remake
<Silver - 2 Points>
Siren
Clock Tower 3
Haunting Ground
Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location
<Bronze - 1 Point>
Parasite Eve
Dino Crisis
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny
Doom 3
<Voting End>