Best Horror Games of 2025: The Year's Standouts

2025 was a strong year for horror on every scale. The biggest release was SILENT HILL f: a schoolgirl in 1960s Japan searches her fog-covered hometown, solving puzzles and facing grotesque monsters, in a story by Ryukishi07 with five endings. Bloober Team, who remade Silent Hill 2, followed it with Cronos: The New Dawn, a heavier survival horror game in which you burn down creatures before they can absorb their own dead and grow stronger. Tormented Souls 2 kept the fixed-camera tradition of the 1990s alive in a remote Chilean town, and Labyrinth Of The Demon King turned a first-person dungeon crawl through demon-haunted feudal Japan into survival horror, with saves only at shrines. Dying Light: The Beast brought Kyle Crane back for revenge across an Alpine valley of the infected, the year's big zombie game.

The indie side was just as strong. Look Outside sets a survival horror RPG inside one apartment building after everyone who looked out a window was changed, and you scavenge, fight in turn-based battles and decide which neighbours to trust. No, I'm not a Human puts you behind your own front door at night, deciding which strangers are human enough to shelter. DEAD LETTER DEPT. makes a typing job frightening, and s.p.l.i.t, from the maker of Buckshot Roulette, does the same with a command line. The Séance of Blake Manor is a supernatural detective story in an Irish hotel on All Hallows' Eve, and ROUTINE arrived at last: a lonely moon base built on an 80s idea of the future where hostile machines patrol and there are no waypoints.

Doors and night shifts were a theme of the year. That's not my Neighbor has you check each visitor's face and papers at a 1955 apartment door to catch the doppelgangers, Who's at the door? makes the visitors possible hallucinations of a patient with psychosis, and Kiosk leaves you cooking alone for late-night customers at a rain-soaked fast food stand. Heartworm sent a grieving young woman into a foggy otherworld with only an old camera, in the PS1 style. KARMA: The Dark World sent a Thought Bureau agent into suspects' memories in an alternate 1984 East Germany, and Dead Take had a struggling actor search a Hollywood mansion for a missing friend by splicing together corrupted video files.

With friends, 2025 belonged to R.E.P.O., where up to six players carry fragile loot through dark buildings while monsters roam, and MIMESIS, where the monsters copy your friends' voices and walk among you. Damned 2 brought back a small asymmetric favourite: four survivors escape cursed buildings while a fifth player hunts them as the monster. White Knuckle, still in Early Access, is a solo climbing game with a horror heart: something rises from the depths as you haul yourself up.

For stories, Tiny Bunny is a black-and-white visual novel about children disappearing into a forest, with 20 endings, and Urban Myth Dissolution Center is a pixel-art occult mystery about Japanese urban legends. Five Nights at Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic took the series into a costume inventor's manor with a monster that can be anyone. Two of the year's best are free: Saihate Station, a strange station after the last train, and The Children of Clay, a half-hour stop-motion puzzle about an ancient figure.

Start with SILENT HILL f if you want the year's big console horror, Look Outside or No, I'm not a Human for something original, and R.E.P.O. if you have friends to play with. For the newest releases, see the guide to new horror games of 2026.

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