New Horror Games of 2026: The Releases Worth Playing

The big releases first. Resident Evil Requiem is Capcom's mainline game of the year, with Grace Ashcroft and Leon Kennedy and a camera you can switch between first and third person, and it is one of the best-reviewed horror games on Steam this year. The FATAL FRAME II: Crimson Butterfly remake rebuilds the 2003 ghost story of twin sisters in a village of vengeful spirits, and REANIMAL, from the team behind Little Nightmares, sends a brother and sister across a flooded island of monsters, alone or in co-op. SILENT HILL: Townfall moved the series to first person in a Scottish island town; its Steam reviews are mixed, with praise for the setting and complaints about pacing. Directive 8020, the new Dark Pictures game from Supermassive, crash-lands a colony crew on an alien world where something copies their faces; its Steam reviews are mixed too, but it can be played with up to five on one sofa.

Some of the year's most loved horror is small. MOLE puts you at the controls of a drilling vessel whose crew has vanished, working its gauges by hand as a Signal calls from below. Endacopia is a surreal point-and-click about a boy who has lost his senses, and Idols of Ash is a short climbing game down into the dark with something huge behind you. The Incident at Galley House, from the makers of The Roottrees are Dead, is a deduction game about a 1936 massacre.

Rusty Lake's Servant of the Lake is one of the best-rated games of the year: you serve the Vanderboom family in their alchemy, through the studio's unsettling rituals and puzzles. The Dark Rites of Arkham is a pixel-art detective story of a sealed-room ritual murder and witches who escaped Salem, and Tormentum II is a dark point-and-click in which you wake a prisoner inside a world you made.

LOVE ETERNAL is a psychological horror platformer about a child stolen by a lonely god, crossing more than a hundred screens of traps in a castle built of bitter memories, and Angel Engine seals you in an operating room in a ruined future, working on comatose test subjects against the clock while demons come for you.

For longer games, Pathologic 3 gives you twelve days to save a plague town and the power to rewind time, The Sinking City 2 is survival horror in a drowned 1920s Arkham, and Crisol: Theater of Idols arms you with a gun that fires your own blood on a cursed Spanish island. Iron Blight is the pick for fans of old-style survival horror. Wicked Seed is a third-person horror RPG of foggy woods and empty streets with survival horror roots, and DIVE or DIE: Children of Rain sends you down into a drowned abyss for relics before the black rain floods everything.

For something different, KLETKA is co-op for up to six in a hungry elevator, lily's world XD is a missing girl's 2004 laptop, MOLDRISE is a climb up an apartment block driven by a mould in your head, and Static Dread: The Submarine keeps a crew sane under the sea. CAPTURED 2 is one of the year's best-rated anomaly games, a looping late-90s apartment you search by flashlight and photograph.

With friends, Shift At Midnight has you serving night customers at a store, checking their IDs and shooting the ones who are not human, and it is among the most reviewed horror games of the year. GRAIN ROT takes a crew down a cursed elevator into ruins of wooden bodies, Fears to Fathom: Scratch Creek is the series' first two-player episode, and Halloween: The Game lets one player hunt Haddonfield as Michael Myers while the others try to survive him; its Steam reviews are mixed. Twisted Tower is a shooter up an abandoned 1950s resort tower full of twisted mascots, and The 7th Guest Remake rebuilds the 1993 puzzle mansion of a toymaker and his six guests.

More of the year's small, well-rated horror: Feed The Pit sends you into a dark forest to hunt the wealthy for a cult while a new monster stalks every mission, and Comatose, in Early Access, is retro survival horror inside a woman's unconscious mind. Retail Hell makes you the only clerk of a convenience store between life and death, Photomaly hands you your late father's photo studio and the wrong things in its prints, and [HERROR] Gas Station Case is a 1999 night shift at a remote gas station as people vanish in the woods. Heaven Does Not Respond is analog horror on a dead man's corrupted desktop, The Skin Stapler a PSX-style grindhouse hunt for a serial killer, and Mama's Sleeping Angels takes up to four friends through a hungry goddess's dreams.

If you play one, play Resident Evil Requiem; if you want something smaller and stranger, start with MOLE, Endacopia or Servant of the Lake.

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