Horror games are a staple of the Fall season. As Halloween approaches, millions of players, both old and new, dive in to get spooked. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that October’s Steam Next Fest offers a huge number of horror demos to try.
Whether you’re after something that will keep you up at night or simply want an unsettling dive into a new gaming world, I’ve downloaded and played all the horror or horror-related demos I could find. Here’s my top 10, and you should definitely pay attention to these.
Babette
If you ever had a Tamagotchi as a child, then you’ll either love or hate Babette, depending on how good your memories are. Essentially, you’re tasked with looking after a virtual cat on a pixelated Tamagotchi, except this cat is either a demon, or possessed by one.
Things get progressively creepier as you progress the game, and despite the simple art style, there’s definitely something unsettling about Babette.
Brokenlore: DON’T WATCH
In this deeply unsettling and paranoia-inducing title, you play as Shinji. After receiving bizarre messages from a friend and your parents cutting you off financially, you seem to undergo what can only be described as a psychotic break.
Within your very messy apartment, which, for some unfathomable reason, appears to have no working lights, eyeballs start to appear in the walls, and Shinji must remove them with his knife. It’s creepy, and I found myself looking away on multiple occasions. Brokenlore: DON’T WATCH is definitely not for the faint of heart.
Fear the Timeloop
Fear the Timeloop is, as it sounds, a game based on the concept of a timeloop. You play as Sheriff James Cooper who, while on the hunt for a serial killer, finds himself in a location that he has no memory of and worse, he only has 15 minutes to live. If you’re feeling brave, you can play in Standard Mode, which constantly decreases your health over those 15 minutes, and you will eventually die and end up right back at the beginning all over again.
If you want to explore the surprisingly creepy-yet-beautiful setting filled with corpses and eerie music instead, and shadows that move out of the corner of your eye, you can play on a simplified mode where your health doesn’t decrease unless you’re attacked. Oh, and you can’t save your progress unless you find a videotape, and put it in a VCR.
Final Outcry
A first-person horror game played through the medium of found footage from an urban exploration of an abandoned prison, except you’re in control of the camera and things are incredibly creepy right from the offset. You know that something is going to go horribly wrong, because why else would this footage be classified?
The demo of Final Outcry features the unenviable task of having to hunt down, collect, and then provide body parts to progress. Things just keep getting creepier, and the noises and darkness combine to leave you feeling distinctly unnerved.
Ghost Frequency
If you’re a fan of jump scares, then may I recommend Ghost Frequency? Of all the games on this list, this is the one that literally made me scream and gave me that all-too-familiar adrenaline-fuelled anxiety spike that only comes with a good horror movie or game.
You start off as a paranormal investigator, except you only have five minutes to do what you think you’re supposed to be doing, and then you’re thrown into what can only be described as an introductory pit of Hell. Armed with only a lighter, you’re forced to explore a maze of walls covered in the most creepy children’s drawings I’ve ever seen while distorted voices speak to you.
Kelder
There are a few staple things that make a horror game truly, well, horrible (in the best way): Darkness, a flashlight with limited battery life, and unsettling sounds. Kelder has all of these by the bucket load, and to top it all off, there are some things that are a little too familiar to life outside of the game as well.
Take, for instance, The Man. You’ve probably heard of him or at least seen his face because we’ve all apparently dreamt of him. There are also moments when music comes from nowhere before quickly fading away again, leaving you trying to figure out what the hell just happened before quickly running off in search of the next light source before your flashlight dies.
Nav
Nav is the demo that sparked my desire to write this list, because something about it really appealed to me and then I lost an hour playing just the demo. The game begins in an abandoned Russian town, and as you explore, you realize that you’re going to have to dig up graves to progress.
However, things get really spooky after a visit to your dead Babushka’s house when a well opens up and leads you down into caves and caverns that are home to things unseen. There’s a touch of Alan Wake to proceedings, with enemies dissolving when you aim your lantern at them, and a whole lot of creep factor.
Liminalcore
There’s something deeply upsetting about being lost, although sometimes it can be fun in small doses. Liminalcore will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen or played a Backrooms game, and it’s filled with stark white, tiled rooms that are all interconnected and incredibly difficult to navigate.
The only sounds are the buzzing of the fluorescent lights and the water sloshing around in whatever rooms you find it. There are no jump scares, at least none that I was unlucky enough to encounter, and nobody is chasing you. The horror comes from the feeling of uncertainty and not knowing what’s around each corner.
Lidar Exploration Programme
This one could be considered an odd one out on this list, but if you want something mildly horror-adjacent, then I cannot recommend Lidar Exploration Programme enough. The demo tasks you with using a Lidar scanner to scan objects in a forest, and your only view of the world is through the Lidar points.
Nothing scary happened, and you could even describe this one as weirdly pretty, but the fear of the unknown and inability to see very far in front of you will put you on edge at least a little. This one is safe if you want spooky but not gives-you-nightmares level scares.
Tenebris Somnia
Of all the games I tried while writing up this list, Tenebris Somnia ended up being my favorite. It’s incredibly nostalgic with its pixel art style, but that’s combined with live-action cutscenes that wouldn’t be out of place in an actual horror movie. The effects are great, and part of me felt like I was reliving the joy of playing low-res games on my old Atari.
Your ex-boyfriend has gone MIA, and you still have a key to his apartment. When you arrive to check up on him, you find demonic goings-on and, after combining a few found items, you end up getting attacked by a demon woman who attacks with her tongue. While the gameplay itself might not be the scariest on this list, the cutscenes add the necessary creep factor, and the story will definitely grab you.
