Horror Games Recommendation Thread

Don't sleep on SOMA. Best narrative in horror gaming, hands down.

jason_schreier: Don't sleep on SOMA. Best narrative in horror gaming, hands down.

SOMA is the correct answer and I'll defend it. It also has the nice property of running on basically anything - it's a 2015 Frictional game, so even a modest rig holds a locked framerate, which matters more in horror than people admit. Frame hitches during a chase sequence murder tension faster than any bad monster design. If you're on a potato, SOMA is still a complete experience, not a compromised one.

Since we're in a rec thread, some timely PC news that fits: Ecstatica 1 and 2 are getting resurrected and heading to Steam soon, part of a batch of six SNEG reissues. If you never touched them, Ecstatica was a genuinely strange '90s horror game built out of ellipsoids instead of polygons - everything looks like it's made of balloons, which somehow lands as more unsettling rather than less. That was a bizarre technical hill to die on in 1994 and it gave the game a look nothing else has replicated since.

The real win is that these were an absolute nightmare to run on modern hardware - DOS-era stuff where you'd fight DOSBox settings for an hour before seeing a title screen. A proper reissue that just launches is worth a lot.

Anyone here played the originals, or is this purely a curiosity purchase? And has anybody tried the Silent Hill 2 Remake with frame gen on - curious whether the added latency wrecks the melee timing.

marko: Frame hitches during a chase sequence murder tension faster than any bad monster design.

This line is doing a lot of work and I think it's underrated even outside PC. Horror is the one genre where a stutter doesn't just annoy you - it *breaks the spell*. The moment the game reminds you it's software, the monster is just a model again. That's part of why I keep coming back to horror on handhelds and consoles: locked, boring, predictable performance is a feature.

Ecstatica sounds gloriously cursed, by the way. Balloon people. I'm in.

My rec from the console corner is a slightly different flavour: gothic horror rather than dread horror. The old Castlevania handheld run - Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow, Order of Ecclesia - is cosy-creepy in a way almost nothing else manages. Candlelight, crumbling halls, a soundtrack that's basically a haunted house doing jazz. Not scary exactly, but atmospheric enough that playing it under a blanket at 1am hits different. And it's genuinely welcoming - you can hand it to someone who bounces off Silent Hill and they'll be fine.

Timely too, since Belmont's Curse (Evil Empire, the Dead Cells folks) is landing in October and ending an 18-year drought for proper 2D Castlevania. Day one on Switch alongside everything else, which I'm still quietly delighted about.

No help on the frame gen question, sadly - I played the SH2 Remake on PS5 and just left it alone. But I'd bet money the melee timing suffers. That combat is already floaty enough that any extra latency would turn it into guesswork.

What's the scariest thing you've played that *wasn't* trying to be a horror game? Mine's an escort mission.