Games Like Outlast: Horror Where You Can Only Hide and Run

Outlast 2 is the obvious next step: the same camera and night vision, the same lack of weapons, and a cult hunting you through the Arizona desert. If you want to see where Frictional's hide-and-run formula began, Penumbra: Overture sends you down an abandoned Greenland mine to hide from the creatures in its tunnels, and Penumbra: Black Plague takes even your crude tools away, leaving you unarmed in a research complex full of the infected.

The closest match is The Outlast Trials, from the same studio and set in the same Murkoff experiments, though it is built to be played with up to three friends. If you want more Outlast on your own, start with Amnesia: The Dark Descent: it is the game Outlast learned from, slower and darker, with a lantern instead of night vision and a sanity meter that punishes you for staying in the dark too long.

Frictional Games, the studio behind Amnesia, also made SOMA and Amnesia: The Bunker. SOMA keeps the no-weapons rule but moves to a research station on the sea floor, and its creatures matter less than its unsettling story. The Bunker is the most like a chase game of the three: one creature hunts you by sound through a World War I bunker while you keep a generator running. The Designer's Curse is a free game in Amnesia's mould, with puzzles in a dark manor and creatures you cannot fight.

Alien: Isolation is the best pick if Outlast's chases were your favourite part. A single alien that cannot be killed roams a whole space station, learns where you like to hide and checks the lockers, and saving costs you seconds you may not have.

Home Sweet Home and Infliction keep the lockers and the helplessness but swap Murkoff's madmen for ghosts: a vengeful spirit from Thai folklore in one, a malevolent presence in a family home in the other, which you can only stun with a camera flash.

Maid of Sker and Remothered: Tormented Fathers keep the hiding but give it a stalker you learn to read. In Maid of Sker, blind cultists hunt a Welsh hotel by sound, so you hold your breath as they pass; in Remothered, an old man with a sickle hunts you room by room through his house while you hide and distract him with thrown objects. Westworld Awakening does it in VR: you are a host hiding from Hank, a serial killer host, in the labs beneath the park, with nothing to fight him with.

If you want the hiding without the supernatural, Stay Out of the House locks you in a cannibal butcher's house for three days: you sneak, hide in vents and pick locks to get out, in a grainy VHS style.

For slower, more psychological dread, Visage puts you alone in a house where families died, with light as your only defence, and The Mortuary Assistant has you embalm bodies at night while a demon plays with your perception. Resident Evil 7 Biohazard is the furthest from Outlast's rules, since you do get weapons, but its first hours of hiding from Jack Baker in a rotting farmhouse are some of the closest thing to Outlast in a big-budget game.

Five more keep you just as helpless. Still Wakes the Deep strands you without a weapon on a 1975 oil rig in a storm, hiding from a crew that something from under the sea has remade. Amnesia: Rebirth is Frictional's desert sequel, with a handful of matches against ghouls in caves and ruins. Monstrum puts one unkillable monster on a cargo ship whose corridors are built anew each run. White Day locks you in your school at night with a janitor who patrols with a baton, and The Bridge Curse 2: The Extrication is closest to Outlast's camcorder: a film club shooting a horror movie in a haunted university, hunted by ghosts that follow every sound.

If you only try one, play Amnesia: The Dark Descent for the roots of the formula, or Alien: Isolation for one hunter that never stops looking for you.

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