While Halloween only comes once a year, horror fans have plenty of choices available to scare their socks off on PlayStation. Whether you have the PS5 or are still running the reliable PS4, there is no shortage of scary games to rush a little excitement into your life. Here is a list of the best horror games you can play on PlayStation, listed alphabetically.
Related: The 10 best survival horror games
The best horror games on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5
Alien: Isolation
In Alien: Isolation, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda has been told that the flight recorder for her mother’s ship, the Nostromo has been found, so to find closure with her mother’s disappearance, she boards a space colony ship occupied by a Xenomorph that is continuously hunting her and anyone else alive.
Alien: Isolation is truly terrifying in the fact that you do not have much of a chance to fight back against the Xenomorph. Much of the game will rely on you finding areas to hide and hoping the beast does not find you. You will find yourself sweating and your heartbeat racing while you navigate the ship.
The Evil Within
In The Evil Within, you play as Sebastian Castellanos, a detective who is down on his luck after losing his daughter to a fire and his wife disappearing. He has been forced into a project called STEM, a machine that mends minds together with one mind at the center being the basis for the world. The problem with that is the mind at the center is a mentally unstable man bent on revenge.
The Evil Within has many horrific monsters and locations you will fight your way through and is sure to creep you out. If you play the game and decide you like it, a sequel was made that picks back up with Sebastian as the main character again, but we don’t think it hits the highs that the original did.
Little Nightmares
Little Nightmares has you playing as a little kid in a yellow raincoat that will need to run through different creepy environments and survive. The big draw of this game is the boss battles that will pit you against giant creatures you would maybe expect to see in a Tim Burton film. The game is creepy more than actually scary, so if you are not a fan of jump scares, but still want something unsettling, this is our recommendation for you.
Outlast
Do psychiatric hospitals freak you out? Give Outlast a try. It takes place in Mount Massive Asylum where the inmates have taken control and killed the staff and freelance investigative journalist Miles Upshur is now trapped inside. If you are a fan of gore, there is going to be plenty of it for you here in this first-person survival horror game. Like some other choices on this list, the game is played from a first-person perspective, so everything that happens is right up in your face and forces you to react without thinking.
P.T.
P.T. (or Playable Teaser) is a unique case because unless you had it downloaded on your console before Konami took it off the store, you can no longer access the game. It was a demo made by Hideo Kojima teasing the kind of nightmares you would encounter in the Silent Hills game that he was working on along with Guillermo Del Toro and Norman Reedus. However, the fallout between Kojima and Konami led to the full game being canceled and P.T. being wiped from the store.
Many people consider this demo one of the scariest games of all time even though it never saw a full release. In the teaser, you continuously walk down the same hallway with creepy things happening as you go by. While only people who originally owned the demo can access it, there are still always YouTube gameplay videos available for you if you ever wanted to see a live fetus in a bathroom sink.
Prey
Prey is probably more of an action game than a horror one, but we included it just for the Mimics that hide in the open. These little, black spider-like creatures transform themselves into the objects littered around the space station you are on and jump at you when you least expect it. If you are a fan of Bioshock, there are small bits of gameplay similar to that here where you can equip yourself with different powers and eventually make yourself into a Mimic if you want. Not the scariest entry on the list outside of being jump-scared by an unsuspected Mimic, but worth a shot if you never played it before.
The Quarry
Have you ever wanted to play a horror movie? Well, Supermassive Games has plenty of titles to allow you to do that, with The Quarry arguably being the best of them. This game has you decide the fate of a group of camp counselors who stayed behind at their camp to throw a party not knowing of the monsters that lurk nearby, ready to hunt them when the moon turns full.
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 2 released in January 2019 and is a complete remake of the original Resident Evil 2 that released on the original PlayStation. In the game, you play as either Leon Kennedy or Claire Redfield in a zombie-infested Raccoon City Police Department. A bunch of the Umbrella Corporations mutations will do their best to take a piece out of you, most notably led by the unstoppable Mr. X who will continuously stalk you down and appear out of nowhere.
Resident Evil 2 is great for anyone who wants to take a trip back to Raccoon City and experience the classic horror game in a new freshened-up way with combat controls closer to Resident Evil 4, rather than the clunky tank controls of the original game. The dark corridors allow anything around the corner to jump on you and take a bite out of your chosen hero.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard VR
For the first time in the long-running franchise, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard featured a first-person view to make the player feel more immersed in the creepy Baker house. While the base game is scary enough to get you on your toes, if you have a VR headset, you’re going to want to go there for the scariest of experiences. The entire game is playable in VR so you can get right up and close with the Baker family and their “hospitality.”
Until Dawn
Until Dawn is another Supermassive Games horror playable horror flick. The story focuses on a group of friends who are taking a vacation at a winter cabin. Someone (or something) begins hunting them down, and it is up to your choices and handling of the quick-time events that decide who dies and who gets to see the sun once again when the night ends.
Until Dawn is a smartly constructed game that separates itself from the likes of a Telltale game while focusing on a story. It’s on the cheaper side of games and has a lot of room for coming back to change the ending. Also, if you are a fan of Rami Malek or Hayden Panettiere, their characters play prominent roles in the game.
