A lot of genres had one of their best years on record in 2023, and horror was no exception. Here are our picks for the best horror games of 2023, presented in alphabetical order.
We technically hit the survival horror triple crown with new releases in the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame franchises, although “technically” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. At the same time, we got revivals of both Dead Space and the long-dormant System Shock series, the return of Alan Wake, and an unusually solid and far-ranging pack of indies.
This has been an excellent year to be a fan of horror games, whether you’re into expensive mainstream hits or zero-hype underground productions. Naturally, that has to come hand in hand with the knowledge that 2023 has also been a terrible, uncertain year for anyone who makes games for a living. Here’s hoping for better horizons for developers in 2024, or failing that, an industry-wide unionization drive.
The Best Horror Games of 2023
Alan Wake 2
I didn’t actually think this would come out, and I’m pleased to have been proven wrong. On the one hand, Alan Wake 2 is a deeply weird story about fiction and our relationship with it, and on the other, it’s about being hunted through the woods at midnight by possessed hillbillies.
AW2 is, to be fair, self-referential to a fault, both to itself and to the art and craft of writing. Just like the original, it also wears its influences on its sleeve, with greater-than-normal doses of “Twin Peaks,” Silent Hill, and Stephen King. There are a lot of nits you can pick.
Just the same, when AW2 fires on all cylinders, it’s one of the most effectively atmospheric horror games this year, particularly when you’re forced to head back into Alan’s twisted version of New York.
Amnesia: The Bunker
Video games don’t do enough with World War I in general, and horror is precisely the right genre for it. No glory, no heroes, no righteous causes – just an entire generation of European youth getting murdered in trenches. Now, with Amnesia: The Bunker, that can include you.
The key to The Bunker’s success is its lack of direction. You’re trapped in an underground WWI facility with a monster, which has few, if any, specific scenario triggers. You always know it’s there, along with a handful of other dangers, but not when it might attack or from which direction. With a lot of horror games, you can eventually figure out ways to game the system, but The Bunker doesn’t give you the space or time to do so. It’s a frenzied burst of adrenaline that lasts just long enough to work.
Dead Space
Motive Studio took an interesting approach to remaking Dead Space in that it kinda didn’t. The 2023 version of the game is more like an expansion, which bolts entirely new areas and missions into the existing game.
That overhauls the Ishimura into what’s arguably one of the great settings of video game horror, at least for its generation and possibly of all time. It’s a giant creaking hulk of a ship that’s never even heard of safety regulations, which was all rusty edges and unnecessary spikes even before the space zombies showed up. Mix that with overhauled weapons, a streamlined plot, some new missions, and a few judicious edits that excise the worst parts of the original, and Dead Space 2023 is a solid franchise revival.
Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
It’s frankly a miracle that Fatal Frame hasn’t been thrown down the memory hole. Until Koei Tecmo rereleased Maiden of Black Water in 2021, FF (a.k.a. Project Zero in the EU) was one of the best-regarded but worst-selling franchises in horror gaming. The series is a cult classic in every sense of the term.
Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the fourth game in the series, was previously exclusive to the Japanese Wii and somehow stayed obscure despite being co-directed by SUDA51 (No More Heroes). It got localized and ported to other systems this year, and while it’s still got a healthy amount of leftover jank from the Wii’s mechanics, Mask is as relentlessly creepy as the best moments in any other Fatal Frame. Give it a look, if for no other reason than to encourage Koei Tecmo to remaster the first three games in the series.
Homebody
The real killer in Homebody is time. Also, the dude with the mask, but mostly time.
Homebody is a surreal puzzle/horror game that’s probably not what you’d expect from the team that made Dream Daddy. In the main, Homebody is an adventure game with a time-loop mechanic, where you’ve ended up stuck in the worst Airbnb on record. In 10 real-time minutes, a killer arrives, and you need to figure out how to escape in the time between then and now by finding the solutions to all the bizarre puzzles that are scattered throughout the house.
The subtext of the game, which rapidly becomes text, is about the dull horrors of growing up. Sometimes, you fall out of friendships; sometimes, people stop being important to you, and there’s no particular reason why. Worst of all, there’s that peculiar free-floating anxiety you can get in your 20s that whatever you were supposed to be doing, this was not it. Homebody is about all these things. It’s a metaphor with a knife, and it’ll stick with me for a while.
Related: Best Fighting Games of 2023
My Friendly Neighborhood
This might’ve been the hardest sell of any game I played this year. My Friendly Neighborhood is a PG-rated survival horror game, and you spend most of it on the run from crazy sentient puppets. It still works, somehow. I’m not kidding.
As Gordon O’Brian, middle-aged city repairman, you show up to an abandoned soundstage to figure out why it’s still broadcasting. It turns out that all the old puppet performers who used to work here never got the chance to leave. Now, they’ve been driven mad by isolation and are so happy to see you that they might kill you by mistake. Imagine the Jim Henson version of BioShock, and you’re most of the way there.
The premise is undeniably cracked, but there are a couple of genuine scares found throughout MFN, particularly toward the end. It’s a short, strange blast through the dark side of Sesame Street.
Resident Evil 4
Science said it couldn’t be done: the Resident Evil fan community has found yet another thing to argue about until the heat death of the universe. The original 2005 version of Resident Evil 4 is weirder and campier, but the 2023 remake plays better, fits more neatly into the series around it and lets you kill Ramon Salazar by bouncing an egg off his face.
RE4R does work better overall as a horror game, however, if only because it features a more vulnerable version of Leon. The military superhero of the original has been replaced with a cynical sack of untreated PTSD that’s more in line with the character’s later appearances on the Resident Evil timeline. His exchange with Ada, asking whether people can or do really change, is closer to the heart of RE4R than it gets credit for.
That adds to a sense of simmering tension that I never really felt in the original game. The Ganados and their assorted backup monsters are relentless, and especially on your first run, you’re constantly scrambling for whatever small advantages you can wring out of each situation. It’s less horror than most RE games, but RE4R leans harder on the “survival.”
Slay the Princess
There isn’t a lot you can say about Slay the Princess that doesn’t spoil it somehow. It’s a visual novel with a remarkably simple premise: you’re a nameless hero who’s out to slay a nameless princess before she has the chance to end the world.
Along the way from point A to B in that story, you’re given dozens of options to fulfill, defy, contradict, or otherwise mess with the premise. Its interactivity is part of its narrative, and while you’re smart to assume Slay the Princess is going to get weird, I promise you that you don’t know how.
Sons of the Forest (Early Access)
There’s an optional setting in Sons of the Forest, Peaceful Mode, which removes almost every enemy from the game. Even then, it’s surprisingly creepy. With enemies, it’s terrifying.
Sons of the Forest traps you on an island after a rescue mission that goes bad, where you’ve got slim resources and no practical backup against an army of mutant cannibals. It’s not going to be for everyone since it doesn’t give you much in the way of direction, and it’s easy to get stuck.
That being said, it does force you to explore a vast, lightless series of caves, and those caves were responsible for five or six of the scariest moments I faced in any game I played this year. Bring a friend if you have to, but Sons of the Forest is the dark horse contender for the best horror game of 2023. Once it comes out of Steam Early Access in February, it’ll be an early contender for 2024 as well.
System Shock (2023)
Sometimes, the scariest experiences of the year come in day-glo ’90s pink.
Like Sons of the Forest, the 2023 System Shock remake gets a lot of its impact out of its lack of guideposts. Nightdive Studios faithfully reproduced all the 1994 jank of the original System Shock while turning it into an immersive sim like 1998’s System Shock 2.
What Nightdive didn’t do was give you any of the dozens of standard quality-of-life bonuses that video games have accumulated over the course of the last 29 years. It’s just you and one of video games’ great all-time villains, trapped together in a twisted maze of an environment that makes next to no sense. You’re at SHODAN’s mercy right up until you aren’t, and that’s when the game switches from threatening to intense.
To my mind, that tension slips System Shock in just under the wire to become one of the top horror experiences of the year. It’s got a few jump scares on offer, but the core of the experience comes down to that sense of paranoia and confinement. There’s a real glee on display with System Shock‘s sadism, from SHODAN’s taunts to the constant appearance of fresh murder robots, and you’re never as safe as you might dare to think.
For more of our Best of lists for 2023, check out the following:
Best Action-Adventure Games of 2023
Best Nintendo Switch Games of 2023
Best Apple Arcade Games for 2023
Best Xbox Series X/S Games of 2023
Published: Dec 28, 2023 09:12 am