Games Like Silent Hill: Fog, Guilt and Psychological Horror

Start with the series itself. The Silent Hill 2 remake rebuilds the 2001 classic, and Silent Hill f is a new, self-contained story: a fog swallows a mountain town in 1960s Japan, red flowers spread through its streets and a schoolgirl fights and solves puzzles while never quite sure what is real. Silent Hill: Townfall moves the series to first person and to St. Amelia, a fog-bound island town in Scotland in 1996, where you hide, fight and tune a pocket television to signals from the town's past; its Steam reviews are mixed, with praise for the town and its sound and complaints about long stretches of hiding. Silent Hill: The Short Message is free on PlayStation 5: a short first-person story in which a teenager follows messages into a crumbling apartment block where reality breaks apart, with no combat, only exploring, reading and running from a monster. Silent Hill 4: The Room, Team Silent's 2004 game, is back on PC through GOG: Henry Townshend is locked in his own apartment behind a chained door, and the only way out is a hole in the wall into a nightmare. On Xbox, Konami still sells two older games that play on Xbox One and Series X|S: Silent Hill: HD Collection, the one way to buy the original Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 today, though its HD versions thinned the fog and drew criticism for technical problems, and Silent Hill: Homecoming, in which a soldier comes home to look for his missing brother.

For the same mix of survival horror and dread from smaller studios, start with Signalis. An android searches a collapsing facility for someone she lost, with scarce ammunition, puzzles, static, visions and a reality that comes apart. Hollowbody was made in the image of the early 2000s survival horror games: a woman searches a rain-soaked, walled-off British city for her missing partner while skinless creatures stalk the ruins. Post Trauma is a homage to the PS2-era classics: a train conductor wakes after a panic attack in the Gloom, a surreal dimension of nightmarish architecture and abominations, and solves puzzles while choosing whether to fight or avoid what hunts him. Crow Country takes the PS1-era look to an abandoned 1990 theme park with a mystery at its heart. Tormented Souls is built the old way, with fixed camera angles, scarce ammunition and puzzles: Caroline Walker wakes in a bathtub in an abandoned mansion-hospital at Winterlake while searching for two missing girls. In Tormented Souls 2 she takes her sister, whose nightmare drawings come true, to a clinic in the Chilean mountains that hides a darker other side of reality.

If what you love most is Silent Hill's otherworld, The Medium is the closest in spirit. Its spirit world of bone and twisted trees sits beside the real one on a split screen, and its music was co-composed by Akira Yamaoka, the series' composer. Alan Wake 2 also moves between a small town and a looping nightmare place, with a writer's horror story coming true around its heroes.

For psychological horror without much combat, Layers of Fear and Observer: System Redux build their nightmares out of one person's mind, in a painter's shifting mansion and in the memories of suspects. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is the Japanese ghost-story counterpart, a mountain of shrines and vengeful spirits where a camera is your only weapon.

Three smaller games take the fog and the otherworld their own way. Heartworm follows a grieving young woman to a house in the mountains said to open onto the other side, and into a foggy world made of memories, where an old camera is her defence. Lost in Vivo sends you down a storm drain after your dog, into sewers, tunnels and places that keep twisting and closing in. Them and Us leaves the one survivor of a 1978 bus crash on a fog-bound road at the edge of the wilderness, as a surreal, deadly nightmare comes down with the night.

Comatose puts the idea of a town shaped by one mind in first person: Laura is trapped in her own unconscious, a fog-bound deserted town that grows more corrupted as she digs up memories of abuse and loss, with scarce supplies and monsters around the corners; it is in Early Access on Steam. Lone Survivor tells the same kind of dreamlike, psychological survival horror in 2D pixel art: a masked man scavenges a diseased city for food and bullets while hunger, exhaustion and the pills he takes blur what is real. On phones and Switch, Forgotten Memories was built as a tribute to Silent Hill and 1990s survival horror, and its cast includes voice actors from Silent Hill 2.

Lake Haven - Chrysalis starts from a plain police call: a detective checks on a woman no one has heard from in 13 days, and her house turns dreamlike and gruesome under fixed cameras and tank controls in the low-poly PS1 manner.

For something free, Simulacrum - Chapter One on Game Jolt copies the early Silent Hill games closely: fixed camera angles, a pocket flashlight, riddles such as a ring cylinder lock and notes written in the same stilted, ominous voice.

If you only try one, play Signalis for the closest feel of survival horror and dread, or The Medium for Silent Hill's otherworld and its composer's music.

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