Summary
Horror gamesthrive on the feeling of isolation. The creeping dread of knowing you’re alone, but notalone,is whatlends many horror games their edge. This is why some of the scariest games confine you to a single building: without access to the outside world, your character’s chances of finding help become severely limited.
There’s another, more practical reason: technological constraints. Early survival horror titles didn’t enjoy infinite storage space and lavish budgets, so keeping all the scares in one structure was born of necessity. Whatever the cause, here we celebrate the horror games that made us feel trapped in their single-building settings.
Mark Twain once defined a classic as a book that people praise and don’t read. Sweet Home is very mucha classic in the realm of video games: everyoneknowsit served as inspiration for the Resident Evil series and the survival horror genre at large, but not enough people have played it.
They should; Sweet Home is one of the best-aged NES titles. The game excels at environmental storytelling, resource management, and tension-building, making it an 8-bit marvel. There’s an English fan translation, so you can explore the Mamiya Mansion even if you can’t read Japanese.
The progenitor of classic survival horror as we know it, Alone In The Dark was a 1992 game that introduced most of the genre’s hallmarks: fixed camera angles, tank controls, and backtracking. Clever level design enabled Alone In The Dark’s Derceto Manor to feel much bigger than it was; you were always on the verge of unlocking a new section of the house.
The2024 reimaginingalso takes place in the Derceto Manor, though it opts for a third-person perspective similar to the Resident Evil remakes. How poetic: where Alone In The Dark once inspired Resident Evil, Resident Evil now inspires Alone In The Dark.
Here’s the core lesson survival horror taught us: mansions are a bad place to be. Clock Tower follows in this trend by being set in the titular mansion and putting you in the shoes of Jennifer, an unarmed, unassuming orphan being chased by a short, scissor-wielding maniac. Well, everyone calls him Scissorman, but they look more like hedge clippers from here.
Clock Tower is one of those games that’smore fun to watch a Let’s Play of than actually play; as a point-and-click title designed with the SNES in mind, it makes tank controls feel smooth in comparison. However, its story and scares make it a worthwhile experience, whichever way you choose. Lots of great horror games are kind of clunky; it comes with the territory.
7Scratches
Here’s the premise: An author suffering from writer’s block moves to a secluded house to work on his next book. Alan Wake, is that you? No, it’s Scratches, a Lovecraft-inspired Argentinian horror game. The game is no longer available for purchase digitally, making it another casualty of licensing issues.
Scratches took a big risk by being a point-and-click title in 2006, a time when the genre was left for dead. The game showcases absolute mastery over sound design: the quietness of the house is curiously oppressive, making the scratching sounds in the basement all the more terrifying. It’s almost a relief when the music comes in: anything but that deafening silence.
There is only one moment in Amnesia: The Dark Descent where you’re not inside the castle, and it’s when you’re climbing outside on its ledges to get in through another window. That is just one of the many terrifying moments in this game, which brought unarmed horror protagonists back in vogue.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s exploration is fraught with fear. The game’s sanity mechanic dictates that every patch of darkness and every glimpse of anomalies is a threat. Candles and torches represent safety, but if you want to get out of the castle, you have to gather your courage and press on.
An elite high school is a refreshing setting for a horror game, but then again, Danganronpa isn’t like most horror games. It’s a courtroom drama, murder mystery, and visual novel all wrapped up in one stylish package. The game isn’t particularly scary, but it certainly is tense.
With each murder, with each case, and with each public execution, a new area of the school is unlocked, allowing you to unravel the unsettling truth of Hope’s Peak Academy. The game garnered a devoted fanbase, and with such charming characters, it’s easy to see why. If only they’d stop killing each other off.
Corporate offices in real life are all the horror we really need out of the setting, but Yuppie Psycho has fun with it anyway. Set in an office building and starring a clueless young man, Yuppie Psycho is equal parts grisly and whimsical.
When Brian Pasternack gets a job at Sintracorp, he thinks his life is made despite his lack of qualifications. Once he arrives and his colleagues' strange behavior leaves him bewildered, he finds out the real reason he was hired: to hunt down a witch haunting the building. Yuppie Psycho has beautiful pixelated cutscenes and fun survival horror exploration, even bringing back the limited saves of the old Resident Evil titles.
We’ve already established that mansions areprime real estate for horror. Apparently, Mario’s brother didn’t get the memo: when Luigi wins a mansion in a contest he didn’t enter, he jumps at the idea. Luigi’s Mansion is perfect for when you want thrills and chills without getting overly spooked.
The game bubbles with Nintendo’s soft 3D aesthetic, and capturing ghosts is both fun and rewarding. It’s also rather short; it can easily be beaten in about six hours, making it perfect for an extended gaming session on Halloween.
One of the more high-profile titles to be inspired by Amnesia’s hide-and-seek gameplay, Outlast places you in the shoes of Miles Upshur. As a journalist investigating allegations of abuse at an asylum, Miles quickly discovers that things have gone horribly wrong when he finds the inmates loose and the staff disemboweled.
Miles really should have read the fine print on being in a first-person horror game:you donotwant to be armed with just a camera. Instead, he has to use stealth and good old-fashioned cardio. Outlast has a unique gameplay gimmick in that you can look backward while running just to confirm that, yes, the inmates arestillchasing you.
You knew this was going to be number one. No horror game has ever used a single building setting as effectively as the first Resident Evil. This is the definitive survival horror experience: the Spencer Mansion, with its huge courtyard and underground laboratory, is as central to the game as the characters.
On release, the game shocked audiences with its scarcity of supplies - people were used to shooting their way through video games. The remake doubled down on its unforgiving nature while upping the scare factor even more. Resident Evil wasn’t the pioneer of the survival horror genre, but it certainly popularized it. For experienced fans, the mansion’s layout is as familiar as that of the house they grew up in.
