The Best Horror Games to Play on Halloween

Halloween has always been about stories. The kind told by candlelight or, in our case, glowing monitors. And no medium tells them quite like scary horror games that make you feel the darkness closing in. From the relentless chase of Outlast’s asylum halls to the tense stillness between animatronic jumps in Five Nights at Freddy’s, some of the titles turn the holiday into a full sensory ritual.

This Halloween, skip the haunted house lines and build your own at home. These are the top horror games on Steam that deliver every scream and uneasy silence you could ask for.

Bookmark this list and keep it close. Because when the lights go out and the pumpkins start to grin, you’ll want some of the creepy titles waiting for you.

You don’t understand fear without Japanese horror. Silent Hill f takes that legacy forward into 2025, rebirthing the series and exchanging its fog-shrouded American streets for a Felliniesque sense of quiet disquiet set in rural Japan in the interior of the 1960s. Here, in Ebisugaoka, crimson spider lilies bloom like a curse seething in the dirt. What starts as a coming-of-age tale for the high-schooler Hinako Shimizu becomes something far more ancient, a ritual nightmare of tradition and trauma entwined.

Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/silent-hill-f-review/

Gameplay-wise, the dread of the game sets in through silence: long, bare corridors where nothing happens until something does, puzzles that necessitate clear thinking amid a world whispering threats. You’re forced to look and to hesitate, which are the true mechanics of psychological horror. Out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows, Silent Hill f simply redefines what “Japanese horror” can mean in modern gaming: less about jump scares, more about slow surrender (which for some might be far worse).

You can almost smell the damp metal and rotting air before you even load in. Cronos: The New Dawn wants to wear you down, to make survival itself feel like an act of defiance. Developed by Bloober Team, the studio behind the underrated The Medium and last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake, this 2025 release brings a colder, more mechanical strain of terror to the year’s lineup of Halloween video games.

Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/survival-horror/cronos-tips-guide-help-the-new-dawn/

You're a solitary traveller, sent into the ruins of New Dawn, a town decimated by an unknown contagion that transforms its citizens into monstrous facsimiles of humanity. Every encounter feels deliberately unfair, with death coming quickly. Yet somehow, that’s where the eerie lives: in the slow erosion of control.

Cronos: The New Dawn is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows (PC), including both Steam and Epic Games Store, as well as Nintendo Switch 2, with Linux and macOS versions also supported. It can be as irritating as it is scary, but that’s part of the sadistic fun. When the world seems set to break you, survival is the real puzzle. And of this year’s creepy Halloween games, few depict despair with such harshly surgical precision: horror in which the scariest monster is persistence itself.

There is a certain type of title that baits you with monsters. Then there are the ones that make you wonder why you opened the door in the first place. Dead Take, one of the most arresting new horror games of 2025, smudges that line between fiction and fear until you can’t remember which side of the screen you’re on. From the creators of Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, Surgent Studios comes a twisted psychological escape-room thriller that swaps cosmic myth for Hollywood’s darker magic.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3352690/Dead_Take/

You are Chase Lowry, an actor who has blacked out in a mansion after a debauched party, only to find that his friend is missing and that reality itself seems to be groaning apart at the seams, corrupted by footage and flickering light.

The silence in Dead Take is the first thing it gets right. The mansion’s ceaselessly low, almost subsonic frequency is a sound that opens in your chest rather than in your ears. There is not a part of the house that does not seem to be improvising around your fear. Unlike most escape rooms that scream for you to find the door, Dead Take pushes you deeper inside it—further into the reels of its story.

On PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store; Dead Take is small but extremely memorable, taking around four hours to complete a full run.

Some stories age gorgeously. Asylum is one of them. Senscape’s long-gestating trip to the madness has finally cracked open its doors after more than fifteen years stranded in development purgatory, and what you’ll find inside is as nostalgic and terrifying as it is plain eerie. Inspired by Myst and Riven, this first-person, point-and-click adventure reintroduces a new generation to the wildly macabre world of Horror, returning players to the Hanwell Mental Institute as Adam Johnson. You return as an unnamed protagonist haunted by recurring nightmares, seeking to recover what you remember but greeted by walls that whisper recollections of things best forgotten instead.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/230210/ASYLUM/

What makes Asylum stand out amongst the best Halloween games of the year is not what it looks like, all deliberately grainy, like a lost VHS tape, but how patient it is. Out now on PC (Steam and GOG), macOS, and Linux, Asylum caters to fans of horror that creeps.

It wouldn’t make sense to move through a list of time-tested horror classics without stopping at Silent Hill 2 Remake, especially after mentioning Silent Hill f and the new project brewed from the same team. Launched in 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, the Bloober Team’s reimagining of the original game is a walk on the razor’s edge between reverence and reinterpretation. It holds onto the fog-draped melancholy that distinguished its source material, reimagining James Sunderland’s descent through grief, guilt, and repression in higher fidelity.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2124490/SILENT_HILL_2/

The strongest suit of this edition is atmosphere: the new Silent Hill crackles to life, in a decaying sort of way, the streets and interiors glistening like canned memories gone moldy. The lighting is preternatural, and the remastered score by Akira Yamaoka hums with familiar melancholy. The monsters, exquisitely animated, lurch with the grace of something conjured in a fever dream (Pyramid Head stalks again instead of posing).
As a remake, Silent Hill 2 Remake doesn’t supersede the original, but it preserves what matters most: the disquiet of meeting the monsters we construct inside our darkest reaches. One of the best Halloween third-person games to return to this season, it serves as a haunting bridge between generations, an old nightmare reborn in finer detail.

The 2024 Until Dawn Remake reimagines the original experience in Unreal Engine 5 for PS5 and PC, raising the tension with cutting-edge lighting, thick fog, and skin-prickling sound design. The rigid angles are gone; in their place is a fluid over-the-shoulder view that brings you closer to fear.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2172010/Until_Dawn/

The story continues to play out over one night, tracking friendships and creeping dread, but its new glossy sheen further isolates them. Swirling snow and lantern light fill the space between cabins; footsteps crunching over the tundra sound like static in the cold. Even the familiar feels unsettlingly fresh, as the anticipation turns to dread under its realness.

The old saying goes that you can’t step in the same river twice, and Until Dawn Remake is here to prove it wrong. Because browsing back through our list of best scary games won’t just end with this near-perfect scare-em-up, it’ll let you experience them all over again, if only ten degrees closer to disaster.

Some remakes chase nostalgia. Resident Evil 4 rekindles it with precision. This 2023 reimagining of Capcom’s 2005 classic turns old fear into something sharper and more purposeful — a Halloween horror game that feels both cinematic and tactile. Leon Kennedy’s return to the plague-ridden Spanish countryside is soaked with atmosphere: torchlight flickers on wet cobblestones, distant chants echo through empty fields, and the tension never truly lets go. Combat feels more organic now, less like clockwork and more a matter of instinct, every evade or parry buying you a heartbeat’s worth of safety before the next surge of violence.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2050650/Resident_Evil_4/

What’s remarkable is how Resident Evil 4 never fades from collective memory. Each Halloween season, it resurfaces online in TikTok edits and fan montages, proving that people don’t get tired of its balance of action and unease.

Alan Wake II puts you inside the kind of feverish dream that doesn’t totally shake off — a psychological thriller framed in neon and dread. Remedy’s follow-up takes all of the cult classic elements and proceeds to make it even scarier and more desperate. Split between FBI Agent Saga Anderson’s grounded investigation in Bright Falls and Alan’s nightmarish struggle through the Dark Place. The game flows like a lucid dream. It’s like Twin Peaks and True Detective had a baby and threw up all of their weird brilliance over the Pacific Northwest.

Source: https://www.godisageek.com/reviews/alan-wake-2-review/

Now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, Alan Wake II is one of the most strikingly beautiful, narratively brave horror relases in years. It's a world filled with psychological tension and artistic gumption, from the rhythmic dance of lamps to full-blown musical hallucinations that play like a cinema you can control. Remedy’s mix of mystery, meta-narrative, and survival horror makes darkness a character in its own right.

But the spirit of Halloween is also about togetherness and fun shared with family and friends, especially when you queue up a game that lets you band together or play side-by-side. Here are some of the best co-op horror games for group sessions.

Phasmophobia is the one you load up when the group wants real chills. It's a great pick with terrifying ghosts. And it has its charm in how quiet everyone gets when the temperature drops and your breath turns visible on screen. One person reads EMF levels, another whispers, “Did you hear that?” and the rest pretend they’re not about to flee. It’s equal parts science experiment and séance, a modern campfire story you play instead of tell.

If you’d rather laugh than scream, Overcooked! 2 fits the festive atmosphere perfectly. It's Halloween levels replace tension with manic joy in the kitchen. It’s the kind of game that brings people together through total disaster, where everyone’s shouting, no one’s cooking right, and somehow it’s still the best night ever.

Little Nightmares III transforms fear into something almost beautiful. You and your partner move through a world of toys, shadows, and soundless dread, wordlessly keeping each other alive. It’s slower, quieter, and strangely intimate, the kind of game that stays with you long like a dream that never quite eases its grip.

Dying Light: The Beast ratchets up the energy, sacrificing silent dread to a rush of motion. Rooftop runs beneath a bleeding moon, friends screaming directions while something snarls at your heels. This is co-op horror at full speed, the kind that leaves you breathless and laughing once you make it to sunrise.

And if your squad is in the mood for something untainted by nuance and splashily bloody, Killing Floor 3 coaxes out the monster hunter in us all. It’s over-the-top, a typhoon of neon gore and heavy metal — but it captures that holiday vibe, the sensation of having survived something together. Each wave of mutants is a toast to teamwork, each win a group howl.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1430190/Killing_Floor_3/

But you know what? There’s surprisingly little out there that truly captures Halloween itself. Most titles lean into horror, the screaming and surviving. They’re fantastic, terrifying, and unforgettable, sure—but they’re not really Halloween.

So maybe your game could be the first one to change that. Choose your treats with a game outsourcing studio that knows how to mix art and atmosphere, and we’ll give life to your game. From eerie environments to stylized animation and spine-tingling effects, Argentics has the creative power to turn your idea into something unforgettable. After all, every great Halloween story deserves a game that truly comes alive.