Halloween is only a few weeks away, but if you're already in the mood for thrills and chills look no further!
It's spooky season again! With everyone's favorite holiday Halloween fast approaching, you might want to play a few spooky and/or scary Steam games to get you in the festive mood before Halloween (or maybe even on Halloween itself, if you're feeling especially brave). And we've got the perfect selection of games to really tousle your bones right here!
To be clear, this article will only cover games you can play on Steam right now. So sorry, Until Dawn, but trapped as you are on a last-gen console we can't give you a spot on this list. Maybe next year? Anyway, let's just get right into it!
Little Nightmares
Let's start with something relatively light, shall we? Little Nightmares is a horror puzzle platformer (yes that's a thing, and it works better than you'd expect) with a classic "Small Child, Scary World" premise and visuals that land somewhere between INSIDE and Spirited Away. The first game already manages to impress with some surprisingly interesting platforming challenges and properly terrifying monsters, and if it leaves you wanting more, there's already an even more beloved sequel waiting for you!
Inscryption
Continuing the theme of weird horror subgenres is Inscryption, a horror roguelike deckbuilder! You're trapped in a cottage with a strange old man who lurks in the shadows and acts as a DM for his tabletop card-based RPG that he insists you play with him, or else. And you'd better not lose either, or else. The roguelike itself is already extremely compelling, but if you poke around the cottage enough you might just get a glimpse behind the proverbial curtain — and maybe wish you hadn't.
The Quarry
You know all those B-horror movies where a bunch of unbelievably oblivious people get trapped in a clearly dangerous situation, and you get to yell at your TV screen about all the bad choices they're making that inevitably get them murdered horribly?
Well, The Quarry basically hands you a controller and goes "Why don't you try and keep them alive then, since you think you know any better?" And if you prefer to watch B-movies with a group of friends, you can also do that in this game with local or online multiplayer!
Outlast
First-person horror games are a dime a dozen these days, but few stand out from them as much as 2013's Outlast, despite its classic premise: You're a journalist trapped in a supposedly abandoned asylum with a number of clinically insane and extremely murderous patients. In order to escape relatively intact you'll have to use your trusty camera's night vision function to avoid threats and find a way out. Or maybe salvation lies in the depths of the facility instead?
SOMA
If you're more in the mood for some existential horror, then SOMA might be right up your alley! Our protagonist is once again trapped in a spooky facility, but deep underwater this time, and instead of monsters or monstrous humans, you're threatened by... robots that think they're humans?
Wait, what kind of facility is this anyway? How did we even get here? This game features your traditional stealth horror gameplay, but also asks some deeply unsettling questions about what makes you human — and forces you to give your answer one way or the other.
SIGNALIS
Remember Silent Hill 2? SIGNALIS takes that and classic Resident Evil, throws them in the blender along with a hefty dose of "Ghost in the Shell"-flavored sci-fi existentialism, bakes the whole mixture until it has that PS2-era crunch to its visuals and serves it with a garnish of cosmic horror.
Its protagonist, Elster, is an android stranded on a strange planet who has mysteriously lost her memories. In order to find them and her lost partner she needs to descend into a facility filled with less-than-cognizant and less-than-friendly other androids — and other, even more dangerous things.
Resident Evil 4 Remake
Moving away from psychological horror to a remake of the father of action horror, Resident Evil 4. In this game, Leon Kennedy returns from RE2 to rescue the president's daughter from a maniacal cult in a Spanish village. And since it's Resident Evil, things go wrong pretty much immediately and there are zombies all over the place. The RE4 remake follows in the footsteps of Capcom's previous RE2 and RE3 remakes, bringing the gameplay and visuals up to date while preserving all the charmingly B-movie-worthy dialogue and plot beats.
Dead Space
Ah, space, the final frontier, filled with cosmic horrors beyond our imagining. If Dead Space (or the obnoxiously named remake Dead Space ) is anything to go by. In it, you're playing as Isaac Clarke, an engineer that is part of an expedition sent to investigate the USG Ishimura, a massive mining ship that went dark some time ago and also happens to have been his wife's last location.
Naturally, as soon as Isaac and his crew arrive things go sideways, their own ship is put out of commission and they are trapped on a giant spaceship that turns out to be filled with space zombies. So we have a missing wife, an everyman trapped in a derelict facility filled with zombies, and some psychological and cosmic elements? It's like a horror Greatest Hits!
Dead by Daylight
On the multiplayer horror side of things, Dead by Daylight could be called the Fortnite of horror media by now, with how many horror IPs collaborated with. It also happens to be one of the most popular asymmetric multiplayer games!
You play as either one of four survivors that need to find and repair four generators hidden throughout the map and leave through the then powered exit gate, or the killer, who needs to sacrifice as many of the survivors to their god, the Entity, as possible.
With dozens of different killers to choose from and hundreds of perks to vary up the gameplay there's plenty of horror-themed fun to be had here. Especially if you can get a few friends into a lobby and voice call with you!
Phasmophobia
Last, but certainly not least, is Phasmophobia, a co-op ghost hunting horror game that tasks you and up to three of your friends with finding and identifying various intangible spirits, demons and anything in between, and hopefully not getting killed by them in the process. The game is still in Early Access but has already exploded in popularity thanks to its ability to give players the full Scooby-Doo experience, "It's right behind me, isn't it" moments and all. Some of your friends are probably already playing it, so make sure you don't miss out!
And that's our Top 10 Steam horror recommendations! Just one more thing: If you do end up playing one or more of these games, make sure to draw your curtains, turn down the lights and put on your headphones for the spookiest experience.