Summary

• Horror games don't always rely on the supernatural to scare you. Some explore psychological horror or exploit the fear of other people.
• The Town of Light explores the horrors of outdated medical practices and the exploitation of vulnerable individuals.
• Games like Limbo and Days Gone provide fear through minimalist art styles and post-apocalyptic settings, respectively.

There's plenty of horror out there that concerns the paranormal. Ghouls, ghosts, the dead returning to life to eat your brains, that sort of thing. The genre is filled with it, because the unknown is inherently scary. Messing with people's understanding of natural laws is an easy way to scare them. It's not the only way, though.

There are many superb horror titles that don't require anything magical or physics-defying to take place. Some get their scares from technological advancement and speculating what might await humanity further out in the universe. Others are more focused on the fear provoked by other people. Either way, if the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:idea of spirits and demons makes yo🎃u roll your eyes, some of them may be wor🎃th a try.

Updated October 23, 2023 by Jack Pierik: A significant portion of horror games rely on the supernatural to invoke feelings of fear, terror, and other unsettling emotions. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but if you're tired of seeing demons, ghosts, or other immaterial, malevolent beings ad nauseam, taking a break from games that rely on the supernatural, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Phasmophobia, could be refreshing. This update adds three games that could give you a more informed perspective on the various approaches, styles, and mechanisms that exist within the horror genre spectrum. There are, after all, plenty of ways to scare an audience.

12 🐼 Thꦏe Town Of Light

It's the 1940s, and you've just been admitted to a mental health hospital for promiscuity, depression, and an unstable relationship with your mother. Your name is Renée, and the little comfort you find in life comes from a doll named Charlotte.

The Town of Light creates psychological horror through Renée's harrowing life story, which is both sad and engaging. If anything, it reflects on the horrors of outdated medical practices, the exploitation of vulnerable persons, especially women, as well as censorship, lying, trauma, and gaslighting.

11 Limbo

While there is an open-ended nature to Limbo's plot that leads people to come to different conclusions about the game's true meaning, its minimalist, dark, 2D art style captures a fear that practically every human can relate to; the fear of the dark.

As you explore Limbo's world as a young boy solving various puzzles to find his lost sister, you'll find plenty of dangers lurking in the darkness. From bear traps and shadowy monsters, to glowing worms that attach to your head and alter your behavior, there's a lot that can surprise you.

10 Days Gone

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Days Gone goes with a direct and pragmatic approach to horror, throwing hordes of hundreds, if not thousands of infected at you in a post-apocalyptic version of Oregon. Youꦦ play as Deacon St. John, a former outlaw looking for his once presumed dead wife, Sarah.

As you play, you'll encounter not only various types of zombies that have mutated, but also hostile humans, infected animals, and traps set throughout the world. It might not be the most original kind of horror, but it still manages to get your blood pumping.

9 Manhunt

Of all the animals you're likely to be killed by, humans probably rank at the top of the list. Horror where the monsters are ordinary people hits a little too close to home. The infamous game Manhunt will pit you against the worst humanity has to offer.

Playing as a death row inmate, James Earl Cash, you are forced into participating in a huge live snuff film, orchestrated by a mysterious director. To escape alive means getting past groups📖 of murderers and organized criminals hired to dispatch you, through any means available. It goes without saying that a lot of those means are pretty brutal.

8 ⛄ The Long Dark ꦓ

As humans, we have gotten pretty good at controlling our environment to help us thrive. Technology is able to 💜keep us mostly comfortable and safe. In The Long Dark, all that is gone. A colossal solar flare has wiped out all electrical power on earth. To make things worse, it has d꧋isrupted weather patterns, causing sudden and severe storms.

If the atmospheric chaos wasn't bad enough, when it happened, you were flying over northern Canada, and you find yourself stranded in a barren, freezing wilderness with aggressive, hungry wolves and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:bears with disru𝓰♐pted hibernation patterns. The fear coౠmes from the slow realization of your own fragility, when, without help, almost everyt𒅌hing can kill you.

7 🦂 Sara Is Missing🐲

The internet is full of stories about cursed content. Videos and images that, if viewed, have some terrible consequences in store for the ✤person. While those might just be urban legends, what would happen if people with technological know-how decided to make something like that a reality?

In Sara is Missing, you find an apparently lost phone, and decide to check it, hoping to find the owner. Sadly for you, the owner isn't easily found, and it seems like interacting with the apparently compromised device has drawn the attention of some very dangerous people. You know what they say: no good deed goes unpunished.

6 🍬 Pumpkin Eater 𝔍

Sometimes the reality of death is so much scarier than any indication of life after it. Pumpkin Eater is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a visual novel following 🌞a young girl whose brother is killed in an accid🀅ent.

Unwilling to accept the reality of the situation, their mother rebuilds her son, with a pumpkin for a head. The writing takes a lot of cues from forensic science research, and slowly details the decay of both the body and the family's life as the days pass. There's no monster but grief and the terrible things it does to people.

5 Observer

In the present, insight into the thoughts and feelings of the dead brings up images of mediums and psychics, but what if technology let you do just that? Thanks to the cyberpunk advancements of Observer's world, you are able to do just that.

You play a detective who can hack into the brain implants of living or dead𒅌 individuals to get some insight into what is, or was, going through their heads. The result is generally a trippy, glitching nightmare. If you can puzzle t♏hrough them though, you might just be able to crack a very personal case.

4 ꦡ Korsakovia

The human mind is a very complex thing, and it's something that can easily go wrong. Soon, you are trapped in a nightmare that you cannot possibly escape from.

This is the case in Korsakovia, a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life 2 mod where you play as a man named Christopher, who is suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome. This has caused you to experience vivid and intense delusions. While the doctor's voice tries to assert reality, that you are blind and hospitalized after an intense act of self-harm, what you perceive is very different. A decaying, miserable world of monsters and isolation awaits you.

3 SOMA

Dying is scary. It's one of the cornerstones of scaring people. Perhaps even more frightening is the idea of living, through technological advancement, but losing some fundamental aspect of yourself.

SOMA is a sci-fi horror where an underwater base's AI, the WAU, was charged with preserving humanity. Unfortunately, its creators did not do a great job in defining where something starts and stops being human. As a result, the setting of PATHOS-II is full of semi-robotic abominations, patched together by the WAU in its misguided attempt at preserving humanity. Suddenly oblivion doesn't seem quite so bad.