It’s that time of year again when we start sequestering ourselves away, peering twitchily through the blinds on the lookout for trick-or-treaters, and getting ready to blare Vincent Price’s laugh from Thriller through a loudspeaker the moment the little runts knock on our doors. After that, we can settle in for some Halloween gaming in peace.
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In the dark spirit of the spooky season, we’ve gathered the DualShockers staff to share their choice of scary games they’ll be playing to commemorate October (or ratherSHOCKTOBER, as this month will unironically be known from here on out on these pages.)
The Evil Within 2 and Silent Hill: Downpour
By Robert Zak
After thewoozy cosmic dread of Scorn, I couldn’t wait to get back to Earth for a more comprehensible and comforting kind of horror. I’ve never played eitherEvil Withingame, and seeing that the second one is a surreal jaunt through some kind of town that exists in the subconscious intrigued me. It feels like this game slipped under the radar and deserves some spotlight. So far I’m enjoying its integration of classic shock-horror with an open-world setting (which you don’t really see much of in horror).
Silent Hillpurists may balk by my choice of Silent Hill game here, but as an emulation nerd I was delighted to see that the series' last entry, Downpour, runs at 60@4K for me on the PS3 emulator RPCS3, overcoming the technical issues that ruined its launch. Plenty of people have said there was a yeah-fine game under the technical mess, and with that out the way I’ve now got a clean run at trying to find it. Plus, it looks kind of shlocky, and Halloween is a great time for shlock.
Alien: Isolation
By CJ Kuzdal
I am currently in the middle of my yearly October playthrough ofAlien: Isolation. I am not the biggest fan of suspenseful games, but the Alien franchise is an exception, so I feel obligated to play through Isolation at least once a year just to get the blood pumping.
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Alien: Isolation is top-tier horror and deserves more recognition as one of the best things to come from the Alien IP. It’s a rare occurrence that a video game based on an iconic film franchise turns out better than most of the movies. If you’re a seasoned horror veteran, a good Alien: Isolation run on Nightmare difficulty will still have you shaking from fear.
Bloodborne
By Jeff Brooks
It’s October, so that means another annual replay ofBloodborne. This game exemplifies everything I want out of a spooky-time game. The gothic setting is eerie and unsettling, terrible monsters lurk around every corner, and the intricate, maze-like level design creates this beautiful sense of being lost—even after playing the game a half-dozen times already.
Every stretch between the safety of the lamps mixes the tension of survival with the thrill of the hunt. Like other FromSoftware games, there’s a bit of a learning curve as you get used to the controls and how the game wants to be played, but once you settle into that rhythm, you can become an unstoppable monster slayer. At least until you stumble upon that next cosmic horror looming in the dark.
Darkest Dungeon 2
By Damien Lykins
Quite bold of you to assume I can carve any time out of my busy schedule of trying to scare trick-or-treaters away from my porch (see, I judge the success of a given Halloween by the amount of candy I manage tonotgive away and hoard for myself). That said, Wayne June’s the perfect narrator for the spooky season… and the rest of the seasons, really. I’d let the man narrate my life. Pack it up and move over, Morgan Freeman.
I haven’t actually checked intoDarkest Dungeon 2’s development status in quite some time, and they’ve added a whole plethora of content since my initial forays into its early access build. Character paths, new areas and enemies, the return of the storied Bounty Hunter (temporary as he is) — there’s a ton of new stuff for me to devour, and Halloween’s the right time for it. But yes, Wayne June’s gravelly intonation is the primary draw.
League of Legends
By Jack Coleman
I’ll be playing a subtler form of horror this spooky season.League of Legendsisn’t what you’d normally associate with terror but oh boy, it’s by far the scariest psychological thriller on the market. Open up the client and queue up for a relaxing game of ranked - you’ll soon find that not everything is as it seems on Summoner’s Rift.
An AFK player on one side, a win trader on the other, a French player whose chat messages are steadily becoming more hostile. He wields quite an array of expletives, and he’s thrown in a fair few insinuations about my mother. Is there anything so horrifying as a game of solo queue? And at the end of it all, I queue up again. I’m engaged in a decade-long struggle versus the scariest game there is.
Pray for me.
Chernobylite
By Kyle Knight
Chernobylitehas been on my radar for, well, since it launched all the way back in 2021. As October arrives (and largely passes by) and I find myself with no new games to really dig into for the month, I think it’s time to see how spooky we can get in Chernobyl. I’m kind of going in blind with this one, despite it being on my radar since launch, I haven’t looked too much into it. The idea of being able to craft and build inside a horror-themed Chernobyl was enough for me to be on board.
Chernobylite also looks visually stunning. It might not be the same for everyone, but I think it really helps the spookiness when a game looks the part. I’ve hyped Chernobylite up for myself for long enough, I can only hope it gives me the fright I’m searching for this Halloween.
By Matthew Schomer
Generating fear through fiction is such an odd concept. For me, it seems the more realistic a work is, the less effective it seems to be. Slasher movies are just gross (or sad if Ireallyliked that character), haunted houses are a delightful display of comedic character acting, and most modern big-name horror games feel more frustrating than scary.
Maybe that’s why pixilated indie horror games, like DYA Games' Viviette, give me the chills that AAA titles just can’t. Take graphics reminiscent of the familiar JRPGs of my childhood, or the cozy farming sims of today, then turn out the lights, make most of my friends disappear, and have one of them become possessed and chase me around the house with a knife at random intervals, cackling all the while. Plus, creepy dolls. ‘Nuff said.
