Scary Games to Play With Friends

If your group has never played horror together, start with Lethal Company or R.E.P.O. Both send a crew into dark, monster-filled places to haul out valuables for a quota, and both are as much about laughing at each other as about the creatures. Lethal Company is for up to four players and leans harder on dread; R.E.P.O. takes up to six and makes carrying fragile loot past monsters its own kind of panic. Content Warning swaps loot for footage: you film monsters in an underground ruin and try to go viral. GRAIN ROT is the newest of these loot runs, with crews in fragile wooden bodies riding a cursed elevator down into shifting ruins.

For a slower, more frightening night, Phasmophobia is the classic. Up to four ghost hunters set up equipment in a haunted building, work out which ghost they are dealing with, and run when it turns hostile, and the ghost can hear what you say. Demonologist and Ghost Watchers are the closest to it, with evidence to gather and a spirit to exorcise or catch. Pacify and DEVOUR take the same team of four into haunted houses and cult rituals, where one possessed enemy hunts the group while you complete a task.

If your friends want to play against each other, Dead by Daylight is the long-running choice: four survivors repair generators and try to escape while a fifth player, the killer, hunts them. Halloween: The Game does the same with Michael Myers on Halloween night 1978, and Buckshot Roulette shrinks it to a table, a shotgun and up to four players taking turns.

For a group that wants to escape together, Labyrinthine sends one to eight players through dark mazes of puzzles and monsters, PANICORE traps up to five in an abandoned building with a monster that hears your footsteps and your voice, and Lunch Lady has up to four students sneak through their school at night for test answers while a possessed lunch lady hunts them. Dark Hours turns it into a heist gone wrong, with a monster loose in the building you came to rob. The Blackout Club is the stealthy version: up to four teenagers sneak out at night past a town of sleepwalking adults to record evidence, and if you are noticed, The Shape comes for you, a thing you can only see with your eyes closed.

For a long survival game, The Forest lets a group build a camp after a plane crash and hold out against cannibal mutants, and The Outlast Trials puts up to four friends through Murkoff's brutal experiments. GTFO is the hard one: four prisoners creep through a dark underground complex, and if one sleeping creature wakes, they all do. Barotrauma is the biggest crew: up to sixteen players steer, repair and defend one submarine in the black ocean under Europa's ice, while alien sea monsters, leaks, fires and sometimes a traitor in the crew try to sink it. For something smaller, Species: Unknown puts up to four on an abandoned spaceship with a monster to identify, and Shift At Midnight has up to three friends at a gas station counter at night, checking which customers are doppelgangers. Anomaly Company has up to four friends memorise an office or hotel floor and argue over whether anything has changed.

If your group would rather fight back, Sker Ritual has up to four players hold off waves of supernatural creatures on Sker Island with guns and strange powers, and Space Beast Terror Fright sends one to four marines, on one screen or online, through dark spacecraft with a motion tracker and doors to seal against the beasts. F.E.A.R. 3 is a shooter for two: Point Man and the ghost of his brother Fettel fight through a world warped by Alma, with apparitions between the firefights.

For a group on one sofa, Directive 8020's Movie Night mode lets up to five players each take crew members of a crashed colony ship hunted by an alien that imitates its prey, and decide together who makes it home.

For two players who want a story rather than a party, The Past Within from Rusty Lake splits you between the past and the future, so you can only solve its puzzles by describing what you see to each other. Resident Evil Revelations 2 can be played side by side on one screen, one of you fighting while the other spots items and enemies, and Little Nightmares III lets two friends sneak past its giants together online. REANIMAL, from Tarsier Studios, the team behind the first two Little Nightmares games, has a brother and sister cross a flooded island of giant creatures, in local or online co-op. Inside the Backrooms takes up to four into the endless yellow rooms of internet legend to solve puzzles and find the exit, and Backrooms: Escape Together takes up to six.

Three more are built on the crew. MIMESIS has four friends scavenge buildings where monsters copy their voices and faces, so the teammate calling for help may not be who they sound like. KLETKA puts up to six convicts on a living elevator that eats fuel or flesh as it descends an endless building. Back 4 Blood, from the makers of Left 4 Dead, sends four Cleaners against hordes of parasite-ridden Ridden and mutants up to 20 feet tall; its Steam reviews are mixed, but it is the most straightforward zombie co-op here.

For two, We Escaped a Twisted Game splits a pair of friends apart in a haunted manor so they must guide each other by voice through its puzzles and jump scares, and This is a Ghost is ghost hunting for up to four in which the entities fight back, possessing one player or freezing another with a scream.

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