16 Horror Games With Good Narratives
Some games have scary parts and good stories.
Survival horror games usually follow a set of rules and tropes that have been around for a long time. But telling a good story isn’t one of them. Horror games are meant to scare you, so the story doesn’t have to be deep or well-written.
This is clear in the Resident Evil series, which has some of the best games ever made in its genre but isn’t always good at telling stories, though it does have a few good ones. But some other titles have managed to scare people while telling interesting stories, which is a great combo. Here are a few good examples.
The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter
The fear and story in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter are both told in a unique way. Unlike most scary games, you don’t fight monsters or have them chase you. Instead, the scary parts come from the game’s tone and the creepy feeling you get in several places.
The story isn’t told in a way that most video games do. There aren’t a lot of stories or explanations. Instead, the story unfolds as you explore the game world and figure out how to get past puzzles. The point of that story is to find a boy who has gone missing. But it’s a lot more than that.
Layers Of Fear
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Layers of Fear, which has a strange name, is a game that comes out in 2023. It is a remake of the first two Layers of Fear games with all of their DLC. They all tell different stories, but they all do it in the same way.
Most of the time, you explore scary places from the first-person perspective and find things that tell you more about your character or are connected to them. While all of this is going on, the games play tricks on you by moving things around and basically messing with your head. So, it’s scary on a psychological level.
Dead Space
The story in Dead Space has never been its best feature. Most people know the series for its great scares, exciting fights, and creepy settings. But you shouldn’t forget about the story in the 2023 version of the original game. Still, the story is interesting.
The basic idea of the story is that engineer Isaac Clarke goes to see the famous rocket called the Ishimura. His goal is to find his girlfriend Nicole, but when he meets a group of dangerous creatures called Necromorphs, things quickly go wrong.
The Quarry
This story horror game has an all-star cast, with names like Brenda Song, David Arquette, and more. The story about a summer camp and a group of young teachers is already interesting, but their great acting makes it even better.
They only have to stay at the camp for one more night, but things quickly go wrong. Without giving anything away, some strong forces make their last night a nightmare. You have to make a lot of decisions that change how the night goes for all the key characters, so you decide how bad it gets.
Resident Evil 2
The stories in the Resident Evil games aren’t always great, but the story in the 2019 remake of the second game is interesting. The game has an A story and a B story, and you have to play through both to get the whole story.
The story is about a zombie outbreak in Raccoon City that kills most of the people living there. Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield are in the middle of a very bad situation. Even though neither of them knows how to deal with this kind of danger well, they have to face it head-on. In the process, they find out some interesting things about what started this whole thing. It’s a good way to tell a story.
Alan Wake
Alan Wake isn’t just a scary game; it also has a lot of action and adventure parts. But it’s still a scary game with a story that keeps you interested. The story is about the main character, Alan Wake, who is a writer who can’t write.
He and his wife go on vacation to a town called Bright Falls to clear their heads. When Wake gets there, he sees right away that it is a very strange place, especially at night. When he starts living out scenes from a book he hasn’t written yet, things get even stranger. It makes for a strange and interesting story.
Until Dawn
A group of young people get together at the ski camp where their friends died on the anniversary of their deaths. The weekend doesn’t turn out to be the fun party they were hoping for, though.
This is the main idea behind the story of Until Dawn. And it’s not that different from what you see in a lot of scary movies. This is on purpose, since Until Dawn is a tribute to old horror movies. Still, the game tells an interesting story, which is made even better by the fact that your choices have a big effect on how everything goes.
Silent Hill 2
The first thing that happens in Silent Hill 2 that makes people curious is that the main character, James Sunderland, gets a letter from his dead wife. It says that she is in a place called Silent Hill. So, he goes there to find out what’s going on.
This is the start of a weird and uncertain story that is easily one of the best horror stories ever told. The game as a whole is also great because it has a lot of smart scares and a lot of mood.
Bendy and the Ink Machine
Bendy and the Ink Machine looks like an old Mickey Mouse cartoon, but it’s a lot scarier. You play as an animator named Henry Stein. His old boss asks him to come back to the company where he used to work.
So far, it sounds good, but when he gets there, he finds that the studio is different from what he used to know. For example, when he first worked there, it’s not likely that evil cartoon characters followed him around and tried to kill him. Over the course of the game’s five parts, you slowly figure out what happened to the place. It gives a unique game an interesting story.
Observer
There are a lot of games that take place in a dark future, but Observer is one of the worst. In 2084, a new digital plague called the nanophage is making life hard for the people of Poland.
The country is now run by a big company called Observers, which also has its own police force. You play as an Observer detective who, when he goes to see his long-lost son, is quickly drawn into a deep secret. During the research, there are a lot of turns and twists. This is helped by the psychological horror parts of Snow Rider 3D, which often make you doubt what you’re seeing.
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series
The Walking Dead by Telltale really helped spread a new type of story-driven games. So much so that calling it a “horror game” is controversial, but there are a lot of zombies and a few scary moments in it.
During the show’s four main seasons, you follow Clementine and her constantly changing group of friends as they try to stay alive in a world where zombies have taken over. During her journey, she changes from a scared little girl into one of the best characters in the history of video games. From the first show to the last, it’s interesting to watch her try to find a place where she can finally feel safe.
The Last Of Us
Even though The Last of Us is an action-adventure game, it has enough scary parts to be called a horror game. And there’s no question about how good the story it tells is. In fact, it has one of the most interesting stories in the history of video games, no matter what type.
The story is about a man and a young girl who have to cross a post-apocalyptic wasteland to get the girl to safety. But what makes the story so interesting is how these two characters connect with each other and how they feel about each other. It helps that the top singers, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, are such great singers.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
In the beginning of the game, Alexandra Roivas goes back to her family’s home after learning that her grandfather was killed. She decides to find out what happened on her own.
In her search, she finds a strange book called the Tome of Eternal Darkness. It tells the stories of a few different people from the past. The main part of the game is watching these stories play out on TV. So, the story has both a puzzle and some made-up facts about the past. In one of the best horror games for the GameCube, the story is made up of these two parts.
The Cat Lady
The Cat Lady is a simple game to play because you just move around and connect with things. The story is what makes the title stand out. The basic idea is that you play as a sad middle-aged woman who has to kill five bad people.
The story has more to it than what the idea says. The story does, after all, talk about things like sadness, suicide, and even cancer. And The Cat Lady doesn’t just use these adult themes to shock the audience; they also lead to some moments that make you think.
Detention
This 2D side-scrolling game takes place in a high school in Taiwan in the 1960s. But it’s not a normal school because it’s full of scary and dangerous animals. As you try to get away from them, you solve tasks and find out more about the scary building.
Even though the game isn’t very long, the story isn’t short. As the story goes on, you slowly find out more about the school and what happened there in the past. Since then, the story has been turned into a movie and a TV show.
Soma
Soma has a lot of puzzles, places to hide from enemies, and exploring to do, but its best feature is its story. In the beginning of the story, the main character, Simon Jarrett, gets a brain scan and wakes up in an underwater research center, which isn’t something you see in games very often. He doesn’t understand how he got there, so he tries to find out.
But the story is about more than just that secret. It also makes you think about consciousness and what it really means to be living. From the beginning to the end, the story is interesting and makes you think.
