Summary
High school is already difficult for many teenagers to navigate, and that’s without the horror. With them, the epic highs and lows of the high school setting take on new, dark depths. The labyrinthian halls become a maze of survival, and the masses of students and staff that lurk within become possibly life-threatening dangers.
These games (many of them multiplayer!) are taking all of your memories of high school and replacing them with a nightmare version that plays on all those adolescent fears. Fear you might realize, in playing them, you haven’t outgrown at all.
10Hide And Shriek
Free & Funny Fear-Fest
If you’re a fan of multiplayer and campy horror, you might want to check out this game. You play as students of magic at Little Springs High and Innsmouth Academy, sneaking around a dark school and trying to scare one another using various traps and pranks. To make things even more interesting: you’re both invisible.
Each one vs. one round lasts ten minutes, and you earn points by scaring your opponent, successfully trapping them, or performing rituals. While this may not be a heart-stopping horror game, it’s sure to be a fun nightat the very low cost of being completely free to play.
9Harthorn
What Waits Within?
School is out for winter break, and you play as a part-time security guard hired to keep an eye on the campus while it’s empty. The only problem? You’ve found a broken window, and it looks like it isn’t empty after all. To make things more sinister, the window has been broken from the inside.
In this short, indie game,the sprawl of the high school becomes a dangerous setting split into a lot of rooms that could contain anything from a new puzzle to certain death. Hopefully, you can solve what’s happening here before it solves you.
8Lunch Lady
Multiplayer School Survival
You, and up to three of your closest friends, have a great idea just before exams: why not break into your high school and steal the test answers? Unfortunately for you, there’s also an evil lunch lady roaming the halls with you. Oh, and she’s also possessed. Bad luck.
To win, you and your friends will have to find all ten pages of test answers before the lunch lady finds all of you. Going hand in hand with the size of the high school setting, there’s proximity voice chat, scaling difficulty in each round, and multiple difficulties for the whole game.
7Doki Doki Literature Club
Deceptively Dangerous Dating Sim
Seemingly a cute dating sim about a high schooler who joins an after-school literature club with four cute girls, this game takes a dark turn only once it gets you comfortable with your navigation of the social interactions.
When this dating sim starts, it warns you that it contains disturbing content, and that’s something you’ll want to take seriously. If you, by some miracle, don’t yet know the very meta twist that happens in the second half of the game, don’t let us spoil it. Go ahead and experience the slow-burn psychological horror for yourself.
6Baldi’s Basics In Education And Learning
Better Beware, Baldi’s Aware
Loosely taking inspiration from the terrible edutainment games of the 90s, Baldi’s Basics is a free, very strange horror game that puts you in the path of Baldi who, to put it mildly, isn’t a very good teacher. If you get his quiz questions wrong, he gets so angry he tries to kill you. And, trust us, you can’t possibly pass.
The only option you have left is to collect enough notebooks to escape the high school. To do so, you’ll also have to dodge a number of stereotypical high school characters who will get in your way, such as a bully and a school janitor.
5Phasmophobia
Urban Exploration With Real Ghosts
Create your own haunted high school fun in this ghost-hunting multiplayer game. One of the largest maps you can choose to play in the game, the high school, has 64 rooms ranging from the massive gym to the tiny bathrooms. It feels like a real, abandoned location ready to explore (and potentially die in).
Though the layout of the map is relatively simple and easy to navigate, it’s difficult to find the ghost’s room with so many to explore and easy to get yourself trapped and killed during a hunt. Especially with those long, locker-lined halls that leave you completely exposed.
4The Classrooms
The Backrooms Meets High School
After his little sister went missing, Robert Chen took up his VHS camcorder and decided to go explore her old school, which had recently been condemned. Instead of finding a normal, abandoned high school, he instead found himself in an endless cycle of repeating classrooms and hallways.
In this game, you take up Robert’s exploration of these strange, procedurally generated maps and the entities found within. Each time you enter this universe, adjacent to ours, it’s completely different, so there is a high replay value.
3Misao
Counter The Curse
After the reclusive Misao goes missing, the school she attended eventually transforms into a horrific other-world, with threats lurking around every classroom door. In order to free yourself and your classmates from this cursed world of new horrors, you have to find out what happened to Misao.
The game not only features a very creepy high school setting but also a number of horrifying monsters inventing new ways to kill. It’s a short, scary story that’s recently been fully remastered.
2Corpse Party
Inside The Haunted Halls Of Heavenly Host
Now, while it is true that Heavenly Host is an elementary school (not a high school), it’s also enough of a nightmarish blend of multiple school locations, that it’s not reallyjustan elementary school. Plus, you play, for the most part, as a group of high schoolers who have gotten sucked into this nightmare by performing what they thought was a friendship charm.
From there,you navigate through a pixel maze of corpses,trying as hard as you can to get everyone back out safely while solving the mystery of how this place exists in the first place. All while these poor, hormonal teenagers are trying to deal with their complicated relationships.
1Detention
Taiwanese Tragedy
In this absolutely gorgeous game by Red Candle Games, you play as two students, Wei and Ray, who have become trapped in an alternate version of their high school. Heavily influenced by the true stories of a period Taiwan’s history known as the White Terror, which was a period of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party that lasted from 1949 to 1987, the story blends real world horror with supernatural history.
Not only is the setting perfect for the balance between coming-of-age and government control, but the atmosphere of the alternate high school is truly haunting.
