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Point and Click Horror Games: Classic and Modern Picks

Point and click horror trades reflexes for dread: you look, read, combine items and solve puzzles while the place around you grows more wrong. These are the ones worth playing, from the 1990s classics to modern indie games.

The games

15 of the 20 games in this guide are outside your choice (PlayStation) and are left out. Show them all.

  1. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream key art: a man's face with a red eye and no mouth, merged into a microchip, beside the chrome title on blue circuitry PsychologicalI Have No Mouth, and I Must ScreamFive humans kept alive inside the master computer AM, each sent through a scenario built from their darkest fears, from Harlan Ellison's story.
  2. Clock Tower: Rewind key art: Jennifer, a frightened dark-haired girl in a white blouse, in front of a giant pair of open shears, with the mansion's clock tower at night 2D horrorClock Tower: RewindThe 1995 Super Famicom classic: explore the Barrows mansion by clicking while the Scissorman hunts you, and hide when he comes.
  3. Fran Bow key art: Fran, blood running from one eye, holds her black cat before a red-eyed creature, with a skeleton in a top hat and masked figures on the left PsychologicalFran BowA girl escapes a 1944 children's asylum, and the pills she takes show her a hidden world of gore and creatures she has to use.
  4. STASIS key art: a bald man in a dark segmented suit sits hunched with a hand on his head, cables trailing from his back, in a dim industrial room lit by a purple glow 2D horrorSTASISIsometric sci-fi horror: wake aboard a ship falling into Neptune's clouds and search its bloody decks for your wife and daughter.
  5. Detention key art: a schoolgirl in a white shirt and necklace holds a picture frame as stools, a chalkboard, papers and a paper plane fly around her PsychologicalDetentionTwo students trapped in a haunted Taiwanese school, explored side-on and solved with items while creatures from folklore roam.

The genre's classics come from the 1990s. Sanitarium wakes you in an asylum with your head in bandages and sends you through worlds that keep shifting under you, and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream puts five people through nightmares built by a mad computer, with Harlan Ellison voicing it. Sierra made three of the best known: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, an occult detective story of voodoo killings in New Orleans; Phantasmagoria, filmed with live actors in a dead magician's mansion; and Shivers, a night in a haunted museum. Harvester is the strangest of the era, a 1950s town whose cult asks for bloodier tasks every day, and Clock Tower: Rewind brings back the 1995 game where you click your way around a mansion and hide from the Scissorman.

For modern horror adventures with heavy stories, start with The Cat Lady and Downfall by Harvester Games, stark and adult, about suicide, violence and guilt. Fran Bow follows a girl out of a 1944 asylum into a world of gore her pills reveal, and STASIS sets an isometric search for a lost family aboard a ship sinking into Neptune. The Excavation of Hob's Barrow and The Last Door use pixel art for folk and Victorian occult horror, and Strangeland, from the makers of Primordia, is a nightmare carnival.

If you want ghosts and atmosphere more than gore, Jonathan Boakes made a line of slow British ghost stories: Dark Fall: The Journal in an empty railway hotel and The Lost Crown with a night-vision camera and EVP recorder. The Black Mirror is gothic horror in an English castle, with two sequels. the white chamber is a free 2005 classic, now also sold on Steam, and Detention mixes point-and-click puzzles with hiding in a haunted Taiwanese school. Rusty Lake's Cube Escape Collection is the lighter, stranger end: short surreal escape rooms on PC and phones.

If you play one, start with Sanitarium for the classic feel or The Cat Lady for a modern story; if you want something gentle to begin with, try The Last Door.

Questions

What is the best point and click horror game?

Sanitarium and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream are the classics most often named; among modern games, The Cat Lady, Fran Bow and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow.

Are there free point and click horror games?

Yes: the white chamber's Definitive Edition is still a free download from its makers, Studio Trophis.

Are there point and click horror games on phones?

Sanitarium, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Detention and Rusty Lake's Cube Escape Collection are on iPhone or Android, and Fran Bow is on Android.

Is Clock Tower a point and click game?

Yes. You move Jennifer around the mansion by clicking, and hide or run when the Scissorman appears; Clock Tower: Rewind brings it to modern PCs and consoles.

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