Isobelle’s Personal Top 5 Horror Games of All Time

Some of my very earliest memories are of me playing video games – sitting at the PS1 in my dad’s home office and endlessly beating the easy mode of my all time favourite puzzle game, or constantly replaying the Thomas the Tank Engine learning games for PC. In all that time, I’ve played games of most genres, and have come to develop a varied and well-developed taste. So today, I’m going to put all those wasted hours to good use, and use my experience to run through my top 5 horror games of all time.

#5 – Dead By Daylight

As my most played Steam game by leaps and bounds (nearly 850 hours!) it would be downright dishonest not to put Dead by Daylight on this list. While I’m rarely drawn to live-service games, the few I do play, I play a lot. DbD is probably only second to Fortnite in terms of personal playtime, and considering I have over a month in that game, that’s saying something. While I initially received this game as a gift, I’ve gone on to buy nearly every character and DLC available.

So what makes it so good? Firstly, it has a ton of replayability – the ready up button is just so clickable, even after you just finished a match you hated. The killer gameplay is extremely fun (once you find a few whose powers you enjoy), and even the survivor gameplay can be tolerable if you have a group of friends to coordinate with. Plus, I absolutely love seeing all my favourite licensed characters show up in the game. I don’t think anything could be more hype than getting to run around as a xenomorph queen or as Michael Myers from Halloween, and I love getting excited thinking about what other cool, obscure characters could be added next. 

For some unfathomable reason, they gave the Xeno queen cake

So why only number 5? I’m sure that I have more hours in this game than in any of the others on this list – possibly even combined – but I just don’t have the heart to give it a higher placement considering how gutwrenchingly frustrating this game can be. Bad matchmaking RNG can completely ruin your play session; the community is an absolutely toxic nightmare; and as a live service game, they can release a bad update pretty much whenever they want – and unlike a single player game, you can’t simply load up an unpatched older version to get around it.

This is a game I hate to love, and which has extracted its fair share of pretty intense gamer rage from me over the years. As addicting as it is, if someone asked me if I recommended they start playing with no existing experience of the game, I’m not sure I’d say yes. Still, despite all my reservations, I know full well that that 850 hours of playtime will sooner or later turn into 1000, then 1500, and so on. Mwah! I love you, DBD… sort of…

#4 – Doki Doki Literature Club

Okay, this one I really have no business liking as much as I do, but come on. The twist may be played out and hammy, it may be edgy and over the top, and it may be a relic of a time in weeb culture that we’ve all collectively moved on from… but I’d be lying if I said this game didn’t leave an impact on me. I first heard about this game as a teenager after seeing some controversy surrounding it online (I believe it was this exact video, what a blast from the past!) and upon discovering that the game was free (in a time when free-to-play games were a little less common than they are today) I jumped at the chance to download it. 

I played through the whole thing in one sitting, and honestly, it really stuck with me – I distinctly remember attending a youth local council meeting the evening of the day I played it (yes, I have always been a massive nerd!) and just letting what I’d experienced marinate. Despite all the captivating discussions of new public toilets and tree trimmings being had at the meeting, I couldn’t get the thought of this game out of my head, replaying the story over and over as I contemplated the rural English countryside beyond the village hall in which I sat. 

Cards on the table, I’m a pretty forgetful person. ‘I forgorded’ is basically my mantra, and often, even the plot of movies and games I really, really enjoyed will erase themselves from my memory after about six months. But this… I still remember details of this game well over seven years after playing it, as if it was yesterday. Not only that, but I remember exactly what I was doing the day I played it, and for someone as forgetful at me, that is genuinely crazy.

The game does so many cool, meta things – plays with the controls in a way I’ve never seen done before, and was even the first piece of media to really expose me to a narratively significant fourth wall break. It has everything – shock value; edge; cute, lovable, and completely unhinged characters; it was everything a troubled teenage girl probably didn’t need in her life, but wanted anyway. Yuri is very much best girl, and she has an extremely appropriate name, if you ask me. Actual to-this-day waifu material right there. And I remember her name, after seven years. I cannot overstate how unusual that is for me.

Unlike some games, DDLC does yanderes well

While I have no idea if this game would still hold up today, I do own the DDLC+ version of the game over on Epic Games, so maybe I should dive in and see if my teenage angst simply gave me rose tinted glasses for edgy slop, or if this really is a genre-defining banger. But, as of writing this list, I’m happy to award a glowing recommendation to the original version of Doki Doki Literature Club.

#3 – Misao

Misao is an interesting entry, as it is the first game on the list which I ‘haven’t played’. Okay, that’s only technically true – my hands weren’t the ones on the keyboard, but I played this together with somebody, and as a primarily story-driven RPG maker game, being the one at the controls wasn’t particularly important for enjoyment. And what a story it is! Another entry on my list full of over-the-top edgelordery and teenage angst, this game takes place in a haunted school transported to another dimension, and tells the tale of a lonely ghost as she wreaks her revenge on the students and faculty, with a good helping of gore along the way.

And sure, I have my nitpicks – one thing that bothers me personally is that if you play as the boy, you have romance options, and if you play as the girl, you’re stuck with the ‘we’re totally platonic BFFs for realsies, totally not two girls in love we promise’ trope. While I get why this was done, it’s a little disappointing when I’m used to many more modern games like Stardew Valley that take a more open-minded approach to romanceable NPCs’ sexualities. Since this was made in an RPG maker, there are also certain jankeries to the game and its engine which are unavoidable, but ultimately quite charming.

However, I can overlook all that, as this game is the source of my all-time #1 waifu Miss Library – a clingy, book-loving nerd who becomes your bestie and guides you through the story. I would do anything for her, and I honestly think the fact that if you refuse to be her friend she just instantly stabs you to death is entirely justified. How could you say no to that face? 

Mood

This is the second game on this list where I like it in large part because I strongly romanticise one of the major supporting characters – I wonder if there is some kind of running theme here?

All that aside, it is a great game with a compelling story, and I would highly recommend anyone check it out if they have the time.

#2 – Dead Nation

I’ve already talked about how much I love Dead Nation in my Top 5 Zombie Games list, but it would be downright insulting to not give it a spot on this list too. It’s hard to understate just how much time I sunk into this game, grinding my way through increasingly high tiers of difficulty and scraping through levels by the skin of my teeth, both in co-op and solo. It was always exciting to check the global stats at the end of every mission, which tracked what countries worldwide had killed the most zombies. The hordes of zombies are huge, chaotic, and a ton of fun to mow down with the wacky variety of weapons that range from the tried and true shotgun and rifle, all the way to giant blade launchers and electric shockers.

The Shocker in action

The gameplay is fun, tactical, and methodical – it requires a large amount of strategy; skill; and trial and error, especially at higher difficulties – while also just being fast-paced fun when it needs to be. And I received this game for nothing. 

Hey, I just realised that I haven’t actually paid for a single game on this list so far – whether they were gifts, free-to-play, claimed in giveaways, or just enjoyed via backseat gaming over Discord, it seems that the best things in life really are free.

#1 – Ghost Master

Ghost Master is an outright, certified childhood classic, and definitely high on the list of my favourite games of all time – regardless of genre. I remember playing this on my PC when I was a really young kid, and just being absolutely obsessed with its blend of horror, humour, and fun gameplay to create a true management game classic. As a kid who loved to make-believe as a ghost hunting investigator in whichever shed or garage my extended family allowed me to poke around in, this game really hit the spooky spot imagining the other side of the equation.

You are cast as a manager of an elite squad of ghosts, and your mission is to scare the piss out of as many mortals as you can, often while completing additional victory conditions to satisfy your ghostly agenda. It’s definitely a part of that 2000’s wave of games with very self-aware, tongue-in-cheek humour, and has a bunch of references to the horror genre that I didn’t understand until adulthood. Because I’ve memorised how to solve pretty much every puzzle in the game off by heart from replaying it, it sadly no longer offers much challenge, but driving a houseful of hapless mortals to literal insanity, running screaming from their place of comfort simply never gets old.

The ghosts in this game are truly “shocking“

This game also recently had a faithful re-make release into early access with added trophies and other Steam trappings, and it has pretty good reviews so far. As the game was aging badly from a technical standpoint, this was a much-needed freshening up for a timeless classic.

Conclusion

With everything from live service first person slashers, indie titles made in RPG/VN makers, retro management games, and classic 2D shooters, my tastes in horror games are honestly pretty varied. While these games might not always be the most polished or the most well known, they’re all games that have stuck with me, remained buried in my brain for potentially years after I played them. Whether it was because the story was cool and edgy enough to etch itself into my psyche, or that it was simply a nostalgic childhood classic, these are my top 5 horror games of all time.

If you enjoyed this list, check out some of our other opinion pieces.