Creating a proper horror game is no task to scoff at. Cheap jump scares are not enough to turn something into a masterpiece; it’s the eerie setting, the unsettling sounds, and the thrill of a chase that really make your hands sweat and slip on the controller. These are only some of the elements that go into making something like Hideo Kojima’s iconic P.T., the legendary demo for the cancelled Silent Hills.
Naturally, most horror games take place in environments like dilapidated buildings, abandoned villages, and generally familiar but deserted places that have an uncanny ability to cause profoundly disturbing anxiety.
6 Slender: The Arrival’s Abyss
At this point, the Slender Man craze that took the world by storm in the early 2010s is pretty much a memory of the past. A sequel to the original Slender Man game, called Slender: The Arrival, came out in 2013. This sequel was divided in chapters that had different sets of challenges to overcome.
The third level, “Into The Abyss,” sees you explore an abandoned facility accessed through a dark tunnel in the side of a mountain. Here, you have to turn on a number of generators while getting chased by a personification of Creepypasta’s Jeff The Killer. It’s needless to say that the tight hallways and corners of this location are disturbing enough to make anyone want to go look at pictures of kittens.
5 Resident Evil Village’s House Beneviento
This is, arguably, one of the scariest Resident Evil locations ever made. Most of Village takes place in lush environments adorned with spick and span set pieces that do a fantastic job at immersing you into another world. House Beneviento performs this function better than most other areas in the game. As a matter of fact, this is the only place where Ethan’s weapons aren’t accessible, so all you can do is avoid danger.
House Beneviento starts off easy. Initially, it’s just a quaint, empty house that gives off minor eerie impressions. As you take the elevator to the basement, things get progressively more disturbing. Before you know it, you find yourself in the equivalent of an escape room. Getting out is no easy task because, unlike the rest of the game, Ethan can’t fight his way out of this situation.
4 Outlast 2’s St. Sybil High School
Outlast 2 is riddled with plenty of freighting moments and, most of all, disturbing imagery. Nothing in the game quite reaches the level of St. Sybil High School, though. The sensorial disconnect between the Norther Arizona village and this location is palpable: the former carries notes reminiscent of horror films like The Hills Have Eyes, while the latter takes a turn into deep weirdo territory — it’s not a place to mess with.
Luckily, the encounters in St. Sybil are few and far between one another, so you won’t have to keep a clean change of pants around you all the time. Thanks to Outlast 2, lots of players can never see high schools under the same light.
3 Resident Evil 7: Biohazard’s Old House
One particular boss fight in this game is rather insufferable. About midway through the narrative, Ethan has to fight Marguerite in the Old House — the one filled with crawling insects. Marguerite is easily the most haunting enemy in the game, with her long limbs, menacing voice, and decadent façade. It’s not a stretch to say that she’s made of pure nightmare fuel.
Having to fight her is almost impossible if you are terrified of something like Slender Man. Moreover, the place where the encounter takes place is equally unsettling, much like most of the environments in Biohazard. Capcom did a fantastic job building an immersive first-person world that’s both mesmerizing and terrifying, and that’s easily most evident in the Old House.
2 Visage’s House
Visage is widely regarded as a successful P.T. spiritual successor, which is no small feat to achieve. This title possesses the uncanny ability to simultaneously frustrate and draw you deeper into the spiral of madness that constructs the walls of the house, the setting of the game. It’s pretty much impossible to play this for long periods of time without taking breaks.
Every room within the house has a purpose, along with the ability to utterly terrorize and make you turn off the game. It’s amazing how self-closing doors, static radios, and creaking floors go a long way to create the perfect haunting experience. As a matter of fact, these elements work well in concert with one another, creating one of the most haunting experiences the gaming scene has ever seen.
1 P.T. Hallway
The entirety of P.T. takes place in a single, looping, L-shaped corridor that has access to a bathroom. Strangely this area is, undoubtedly, the scariest to ever be created. The demo itself feels haunted while you play it, almost as though the game knows how to mess with your mind.
The radio on the drawer chest tells the story of a murderous husband and father who brutally killed his entire family. Why are we listening to this? And did that light flicker, just now? To this day, there hasn’t been a single area in any game capable of topping this one.
NEXT: The Best Indie Horror Video Games Of All Time, According To Metacritic
