Have a great scary time without breaking the bank!
We know that Halloween has movies and TV shows pretty much locked up, but what about games? Would you ever go out of your way to play some scary new games to celebrate October and the arrival of spooky season?
To celebrate the launch of Back 4 Blood, the new zombie shooter arriving this week, we wanted to pick some very scary games for you to enjoy at home…
Clip via Back4Blood
But best of all, you don’t have to actually buy them.
Right now, they’re accessible to PlayStation players on PS Now (€9.99 per month, €59.99 for the year) or to Xbox players on Game Pass (€9.99 per month), which is basically Netflix for games: you pay for your subscription and have access to all of the games in the library, which gets plenty of new arrivals every month.
So, with that in the mind for the month of October, these are ten of the best scary games you can play at home right now without having to actually buy any of them.
Alien: Isolation (Game Pass)
Taking place between the events of Alien and Aliens, you play Ellen Ripley’s daughter, who has arrived at a space station looking for her long long mother. Instead, she finds a slimy, acid-spitting alien running around and killing anyone unlucky enough to cross its path.
Clip via Gamespot
Dead Space (Game Pass/PS Now)
More space-based horror, this time heading to an abandoned planet in search of your missing girlfriend, only to discover that the entire planet has been overrun by a species known as Necromorphs. And worse still, the origins of these Necromorphs is just about as terrible as anyone could imagine.
The Evil Within (Game Pass)
As with any spooky situation where you are investigating a mental hospital, it isn’t long before things get properly, properly scary. Coming from the same minds behind the Resident Evil series, so you’ve got to use a mixture of stealth and shotguns to survive the twisted world you’ve been dropped into here.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Game Pass)
Very different from just about every other game on here, this dives deep into the psychological aspects of horror, as you play a warrior who is battling her way into hell itself in order to save your lover. The games developers spoke to several psychologists about how best to implement the idea of psychosis across in an interactive medium, and Hellblade has absolutely succeeded in that regard.
The Last of Us Part II (PS Now)
Not only one of the very best games ever made (don’t @ me, it is), it also features many, MANY nail-biting sequences scattered all the way through it. But in amongst all of the terrifying bits of this apocalyptic survival horror, we’ve got two words for you: Rat King.
Clip via IGN
Prey (Game Pass/PS Now)
Yes, we’re in space again. This time you’re a scientist trapped on a space station filled with mimics – aliens that can easily disguise themselves as anything; a chair, a cup, an empty cardboard box. And you don’t know what is real and what is an alien in disguise until one of them is attempting to bite your face off.
Resident Evil 4 (PS Now)
On either end of the great games within the Resident Evil franchise, there are two very different games. The first is RE4, which leans into the OTT campness inherent of a zombie game. Which isn’t to say it isn’t still very scary in places, because it is, but less psychologically scarring than…
Resident Evil 7 (Game Pass)
Yeah, this is on the other end, pure psychological terror. Very few weapons or ways to defend yourself other than run and hide. Without a doubt the scariest entry in the RE franchise to date, and a reminder that Resident Evil can still make you scream the house down in terror when it wants you to.
Silent Hill HD Collection (PS Now)
Silent Hill 2 still stands tall as arguably the scariest game of all time, but the entries on either side would also rank pretty high on that list. While the HD collection gives them all a bit of a sheen that takes away from the down’n’dirty vibe of their original release, combined they still pack a properly scary punch.
Until Dawn (PS Now)
A surprisingly all-star cast (Rami Malek, Hayden Panettiere, Peter Stormare) feature in this survival horror revolving around a group of teens who spend a weekend at an isolated cabin in the woods… and you’ll never guess, but they’re not alone out there! Pretty much as close to an interactive horror movie as you’re ever likely to get.
Clip via PlayStation
