October is upon us, and with Halloween approaching, it’s a great time to get your yearly dose of horror. From creepy websites to free classic horror movies, there’s spooky entertainment for every taste. If you’re in the market for brand new video games, The Evil Within and Alien Isolation both launched this month, offering you two solid, big budget options to get your fix.
If games at full retail price are a little too scary for your wallet, have no fear! Great horror games have been coming out all year for PC, and many of the best ones are twenty dollars or less now. Check out these five great 2014 horror games, and see if one of them gets your spine tingling.
It’s hard to be afraid of problems or enemies when games let you play fit, capable action heroes. That’s because helplessness is a big part of fear. Among The Sleep capitalizes on this truth by putting you in control of a two year old child pitched into a warped, colorful world of nightmares. You’re limited to ordinary skills like carrying objects, throwing them, toddling and crawling, so you’ll need to flee from the things that haunt you. With only your teddy bear to keep you company, you’ll have to seek out four items strongly tied to your happiest memories to help you find your way home, and along the way, you might come to terms with exactly why you’re so afraid in the first place.
Neverending Nightmares is far and away the most gruesome and shocking game on this list. Game designer Matt Gilgenbach set out to make a horror game that was uniquely his by bringing to life the images that haunt him in his own battle with depression. The result is a game that’s far more authentically disturbing than most. After a vision of murdering a young girl, you’ll bolt upright in your bed. With no guidance as to where to go or what to do, you wander around mansions, forests, and asylums, all rendered in a detailed ink and paper art style, and punctuated by splashes of color. Often the colors will draw your eyes to blood or viscera, but other times they highlight helpful objects like candles to guide you through the darkness. You’ll meet many a horrifying end as you play, but each time the nightmare begins anew, amplifying the sense of helplessness. Rest assured, there are endings to Neverending Nightmares, but they may be tough for the squeamish to reach.
Point-and-click adventure Year Walk came out on iOS in 2013, but arrived on PC this year to unnerve a broader audience with its gripping, cryptic tale. After a fight with an unrequited love, you decide to take a Year Walk; an old Swedish ritual said to grant one a glimpse of the future. As you wander the snowy woods though, it becomes clear that someone, or something, is watching you. Delve deeper into the game’s mysteries, and each success will take you a step closer to the maddening supernatural forces that haunt you. Year Walk will challenge you with puzzles that require diligent note taking and pattern recognition, so have a pen and paper handy as you pursue forbidden knowledge of what lies ahead. Once you get your glimpse of the future, will you resign yourself to fate, or will you change time’s course, no matter the price?
Horror crafters love to use creepy children and wicked clowns to terrify us. Taking something familiar, kind, or innocent and reimagining it as evil is a frightening time-tested recipe, and Five Nights At Freddie’s puts the trope to work for jump scares galore. You play a night security guard at Freddie Fazbear’s Pizza, and any threat of a break in is nothing compared to your problems with animatronic puppets that want to make you one of their band in a very permanent way. To keep your intruders at bay, you can rapidly flip between the security cameras or lock down the panic room doors. That is, if you can keep your electricity usage within corporate policy’s strict nighttime power ration. Run the generator out before sunrise, and you’ll be at the mercy of some very big, very insistent puppets. How much are they paying you again?
Do you literally only have 30 minutes to enjoy a spooky game? In the same way that Portal made a big impact without overstaying its welcome, They Breathe is a game that delivers a satisfying shudder in a single sitting. You play a frog navigating a flooded forest. As you dive beneath the murky waters, you’ll need to observe a series of strange predators to exploit their weaknesses while you chase down critical air bubbles to stay alive. To tell you anymore would be to risk spoiling what makes They Breathe fit on the list, but for less than the price of a good burger, you can probably afford to find out.
A big budget might ensure better graphics and sound, but developers don’t need huge teams and millions of dollars to generate jumps and cringes. Give one of these games a try and join the celebration of all things spooky!
Have you played any of these games? What did you think of them? Tell our community which one is your favorite in the comments.
Need a horror game that’s absolutely free? Check out One Late Night!
Image Credits: playing video games Via Shutterstock
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