When it comes to new horror games, there are times of feast and famine, and this past year we gorged until our bellies bulged and our mouths dripped with gruesome grease. In 2024, we received a rich spread of dark experiences from solo creators, indie teams, AA developers and AAA studios in a vast array of genres and visual styles. There was a fantastic Silent Hill 2 remake and beefy updates to contemporary classics like Phasmophobia, Alan Wake 2 and The Outlast Trials, and there was also a steady cadence of brand-new horror franchises expanding the genre in unexpected ways.

First, let’s take a moment to celebrate a sampling of the year’s fresh horror universes. In 2024, we got the following new titles:

• Crow Country from brothers Adam Vian and Tom Vian at SFB Games

• Fear the Spotlight from husband-and-wife team Cozy Game Pals

• Hollowbody by solo dev Nathan Hamley at Headware Games

• Home Safety Hotline by Utah studio Night Signal Entertainment

• INDIKA from Spain- and Kazakhstan-based studio Odd Meter

• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess from Capcom

• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes by the high-strangeness experts at Simogo

• Mouthwashing from Swedish indie team Wrong Organ

• Slitterhead by Silent Hill and Gravity Rush creator Keiichirō Toyama at Bokeh Game Studios

• Still Wakes the Deep from horror veterans The Chinese Room

This is not a comprehensive list of new horror franchises in 2024, but it’s a suitable demonstration of how vast and varied the offerings were this year. Indie studios are leading the charge when it comes to fresh ideas and original mechanics, of course, but there are also plenty of references to early-2000s graphics and PS1- or PS2-era survival horror on this list. The combination of innovation and nostalgia is particularly potent in titles like Fear the Spotlight, Crow Country, Mouthwashing and Hollowbody. These games infuse blocky 3D worlds with modern sensibilities and smooth animations, resulting in experiences that illuminate the staticky memories of Resident Evil and Silent Hill that lurk in our heads. This is how we wanted those games to feel, fixed camera angles be damned — or, in the case of Hollowbody, lovingly embraced.

Cozy Game Pals

It should also be noted that Fear the Spotlight marks the debut of acclaimed horror-movie maker Blumhouse as a video game publisher. Fear the Spotlight is the first release in Blumhouse’s lineup — which includes future titles from EYES OUT, Half Mermaid, Perfect Garbage, Playmestudio and Vermila Studios — and it’s an excellent exploration of low-fi teenage drama and dread. The horror-game revolution is upon us and Blumhouse is absolutely going to snag a piece.

The least horror-like game on the above list may be Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and it also happens to be the only title from a AAA studio. I’ve included it because, as a dedicated fan of horror games, I think Kunitsu-Gami checks plenty of boxes: It features huge, disgusting demons and a lethal blight that envelops whole towns in skeletal yet strangely juicy organic material. Its monster designs feature colorful displays of lechery and body horror, and there’s comfort to be found in its tense strategy-action gameplay loop. Kunitsu-Gami wasn’t marketed as a horror experience, and it certainly contains just as many scenes of stunning beauty as it does grotesquerie, but I heartily recommend it to any horror fan. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Capcom

INDIKA is another entry that straddles the genres of horror, camp and religious satire, but it definitely features a few scenes of soul-piercing terror. Plus, the literal devil is your friendly companion throughout the game, and that has to count for something. Among scenes of grief, inhumanity and devastation, INDIKA is a laugh riot, and it’s a preeminent example of mature themes handled well in video game form. An additional genre-bending standout from 2024 is Simogo’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It contains incredibly satisfying logic puzzles in a hotel made out of mysteries — but phantoms haunt the hallways, there’s a corpse in the back garden and every scene drips with palpable unease. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of the best and most unsettling games of the year, period.

Still Wakes the Deep, meanwhile, offers a familiar and beautiful brand of monster-stalking horror on an oil rig in the middle of the angry North Sea. It’s a must-play game for any horror fan, acting as a vessel for The Chinese Room to show off its skills in building authentic worlds and cultivating ceaseless tension with a paranormal edge. Plus, it's one of the best-looking games I played on PS5 all year. Slitterhead is another one for the action-horror players out there, presenting a supernatural mystery in a version of Hong Kong that’s been infested by body-snatching demons, featuring buckets of blood and frantic close-range combat.

The Chinese Room

The year began with the release of Home Safety Hotline, a simulation of a 1990s call center where players help diagnose and treat household pests, which include otherworldly threats like Bed Teeth, Fae Flu, The Horde, Laundry Gnome, Mirror Nymph, Toilet Hobb, Unicorn Fungi and others. Home Safety Hotline really was the amuse bouche of 2024’s horror game lineup — and Mouthwashing is the dessert. 

All the horror kids nowadays are playing Mouthwashing, a polygonal first-person romp through a stranded space ship filled with doomed crew members steadily losing their minds, overseen by a maimed captain with a maniacal, bandaged smile. Mouthwashing is strange and claustrophobic, and it’s a fabulous way to end the year in horror gaming.

Bloober Team

But we haven’t even talked about the existing franchises yet. The Silent Hill 2 remake from Bloober Team, the Polish studio behind Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, was a brilliant success, even in the face of exacting standards from longtime series fans. The remake looks and feels like the game that players remember, only spit-shined and smoothed over, and Silent Hill 2 remains just as terrifying in 2024 as it originally was in 2001. Maybe even more so. Bloober Team had a lot to prove with this one, and they made us elder-Millennial horror players proud.

Alan Wake 2 was one of the best games of 2023, horror or otherwise, and it received two significant batches of DLC this year: Night Springs landed in June and The Lake House went live in October. Each bit of content not only keeps Alan Wake’s hellish world alive, but it adds depth to the cross-franchise universe that Remedy is building between Control and Alan Wake. Personally I always want more Alan Wake, and in that regard, 2024 didn’t disappoint.

Red Barrels

Two live-service indie games, The Outlast Trials and Phasmophobia, also saw major updates in the past 12 months. After entering early access in May 2023, The Outlast Trials studio Red Barrels has been working to establish a solid cadence of new content drops, and this year they really got into the groove. The Outlast Trials launched in full in March 2024 and it’s received multiple updates since then, introducing new enemies, maps, game modes and limited-time events for the players trapped in the Murkoff Corporation’s secret Sinyala Facility. The amount of work that Red Barrels puts into The Outlast Trials is endlessly impressive, especially considering there are only about 65 developers at the studio.

Phasmophobia has an even smaller team than Red Barrels, but they’re making big moves. The crew at UK studio Kinetic Games have kept Phasmophobia alive since its Steam launch in September 2020, and this year, they finally brought the ghost-hunting game to consoles. Phasmophobia hit PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 29, and it also came to PS VR2. Kinetic Games has grand plans to keep supporting and expanding Phasmophobia in 2025 and beyond, so even though the console release happened four years after launch, this is really just the beginning.

Simogo

There it is — our humble ode to horror gaming in 2024. It’s been a dozen months of indie innovation and gorgeous gore, with a side dish of fabulous remakes and sizable updates. Some new horror games push against the boundaries of the genre, expanding our ideas of what’s scary and why, while others find fresh ways to dissect classic tropes. It’s a case of modern cuisine vs. comfort food, and on my plate, there’s plenty of room for both.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/dang-2024-was-a-great-year-for-horror-game-fans-160009640.html?src=rss