‘Tis the season of spooks, and what better way to celebrate than by playing a few good scary indie horror games? Today I’m looking back at a few titles that really stand out in my memory for both the chills and thrills.
1. ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ (Frictional Games)
The easiest place to begin is at the beginning. My experience (and love) of indie horror games can be traced directly back to the very first one I ever watched and, later, played—Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Though it may look a bit dated now that it’s been out for over a decade, Amnesia was a terror when it was first released, and it remains the original nightmare from which many others later stemmed.
Amnesia used nyctophobia (fear of the dark) as not only a theme but a core game mechanic, which was pretty cool. But it was the abject terror of horrors unseen and an utterly paralyzing vulnerability (you couldn’t fight back at all) that really cranked the spook dial up to 11, and to this day it remains one of the scariest games I’ve ever played—indie or not.
2. ‘This War of Mine’ (11 Bit Studios)
At first glance, This War of Mine doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for this list. A horror game of a more realistic quality than the majority of titles on this list, it doesn’t set out to spook you or gross you out. Instead, the horrors of This War of Mine play on a different primal fear—that of loss.
Because you control all of the survivors in your group, all of the responsibility for their welfare rests squarely on your shoulders. It’s your fault if they suffer or die horribly. If they sacrifice their morals, if they become cold-blooded killers in order to survive, that blood too is on your hands. I became obsessed with saving every single survivor in every single scenario; more than once, I failed, and it hurt every time. This War of Mine is scary in an almost nonfictional way—its story, characters, and setting may be fabrications, but the horrors of war that inspired it are all too real and continue to plague the world to this day.
3. ‘A Plague Tale: Innocence’ (Asobo Studio)
Speaking of plagues (and horrors that are all too real), I played A Plague Tale: Innocence at the perfect time—during a global pandemic! The Black Plague, of course, is a very different disease from COVID-19, but playing a game about any disease with the threat of infection hanging over your head in real life can get pretty intense.
For me though, the scariest thing in this game wasn’t the disease itself. It was the rats. If you’re planning on playing this game in the future, I strongly suggest playing on PlayStation 5 if you can. Asobo Studio took full advantage of the haptic feedback on the PS5 controllers to really ramp up the horror of being surrounded by scores of vermin ready to rend flesh from bone. I will never forget the first time I felt the skittering of rat feet across my sweating palms—and realized I was in for much more of a spookfest than I first thought.
(Both A Plague Tale and This War of Mine may also appeal to fans of the Last of Us franchise—check out this video for even more recommendations in this vein!)
4. ‘Phasmophobia’ (Kinetic Games)
I love Phasmophobia almost as much as I hate it. This is another case of “I watched it before I played it.” But unlike Amnesia, that didn’t save me from a single minute of torture, because every scenario plays out differently thanks to randomized factors and the chaos inherent in any multiplayer experience.
They say there is safety in numbers, but I have never felt safe in this game. Not when my team split up to cover more ground (what fools we were) and I wound up locked in a room by myself with an axe-wielding wraith. Not when I hid in a hallway closet, listening to footsteps draw closer and closer, falling silent right outside the door. And certainly not when my fellow investigator abandoned me to my fate the minute the ghost from my worst nightmares—a little girl with long, black hair and a habit of crawling across floors—manifested in the corner of the room we’d been canvassing. If you have any fear of ghosts at all, Phasmophobia is a guaranteed spook-fest.
(As of this writing, Phasmophobia is still technically under development, with new and ever-spookier updates released on a fairly regular basis.)
5. ‘Doki Doki Literature Club!’ (Dan Salvato)
Cute horror, and specifically cute gore, has been on the rise for years now, and it’s awful. I don’t mean that it’s without merit—I’ll be the first to admit that it can work all too well. Doki Doki Literature Club! is perhaps one of the most effective examples in recent gaming history.
Doki Doki is the sort of game that likes to mess with you. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a haunting descent into madness dressed up as a typically kawaii dating sim. Other games have since tried to replicate this delicate balance, but few have managed to do so as creatively or successfully as the original Doki Doki. To say more would be to spoil it… and if you’ve never played it, I want to make sure you suffer just as much as I did.
Dan Salvato, if you’re reading this, you owe me several therapy sessions.
Kim Berkley enjoys both playing and creating her own scary indie horror games. She is the creator of such works as The Harbinger’s Head, a chilling interactive fiction game inspired by Irish folklore.
