11 Gruesome Horror Games, Ranked By How Much They Made Us Scream

Despite being afraid of literally anything and everything on the planet, I love Halloween. Octobers mean dutifully logging a slasher a day in my Letterboxd account, or using my journal to hash out what Friday the 13th would have been if Jason were handsome under the mask (he’s a waterlogged hermit, but does he really need to look like a fucked up tadpole?).

Being a horror obsessive while feeling like a scared child can get confusing, emotionally. It’s shutting your eyes to see stars when you don’t like the dark. But to help categorize my uncategorizable, the fear and human inconsistency, I decided to talk to some Kotaku staffers about the horror games we like. Then, I ordered our games based on how much they creeped us out, from passive black cat to the wet-rags-over-skin shivers.

I see now that fear is a bumpy sliver of sound, a potholed road to confronting the unknown. “Long is the way / And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light,” John Milton writes in Paradise Lost. But by “light” I think he meant “slideshow.”