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2024 was a bumper year for horror, not only on the silver screen but also in the gaming sphere. In fact, the genre has arguably never been in a healthier state than it has over the last twelve months; with a good mix of AAA successes, mid-budget sleeper hits, and plucky indies that punched well above their weight. When we could pry ourselves away from compulsive rounds of Balatro, we here at Bloody Disgusting even managed to play some of them!
With 2025 just around the corner, now is the perfect time to celebrate the true standouts. Of course, it was tough to whittle this list down to a top 10, and some favourites inevitably didn’t make the cut. Still, that’s a nice position for us to be in and is a testament to the incredible quality of those that did end up qualifying.
So, without further ado, here are our top 10 horror games of the year!
Editor’s Note: This article was written by Harrison Abbott and Aaron Boehm.
#10) Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The Game
It feels like asymmetrical multiplayer titles are a dime a dozen nowadays — especially when it comes to movie spin-offs — and, as such, they’re liable to blur together if you’re not well-versed in all the particulars. Sure, there might be infinitesimal differences in the character builds and strategies but, unless you’re a seasoned pro, those granular details aren’t gonna leap out at you. Instead, you’re far likelier to just settle into the very familiar routine that’s been codified by the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
To be fair, this year’s Killer Klowns From Outer Space adaptation hardly reinvents the wheel here, with all the genre staples being present and accounted for. Among other things, you’ve got the identical survivor objectives that these things are beholden to for some reason (find the fuses, repair the boat, escape by road, etc.) while the opposing team even has an equivalent of Dead by Daylight’s sacrificial hooks at their disposal. Albeit it in the more appealing form of cotton candy generators!
Scratch beneath the surface a little, though, and you’ll realise that Teravision’s offering is tonally unique. As is befitting of its zany source material — which, lest we forget, revolves around alien invaders who just so happen to resemble children’s party entertainers — Killer Klowns From Outer Space: The Game doesn’t take itself too seriously. Nor does its fun-loving community.
On that note, you’ll find that most matches here are filled with the refreshing sounds of gleeful laughter and people straight up enjoying themselves. Which is a welcome change of pace if you’ve ever been stuck in one of those bizarrely competitive DbD lobbies, where everybody’s prone to the most unhinged displays of emotional volatility.
Indeed, Killer Klowns is a far more relaxed environment; focussed less so on META tactics and complex loadout tinkering, and more on goofy visual comedy and slapstick finisher animations. Even the mechanics are quite forgiving, with survivors being afforded more second & third chances than you’d expect, as well as the opportunity to help out their teammates from beyond the grave (via some arcadey minigames). The jury’s still out on if this one’s got any real legs, but it’s certainly been a hoot while it’s lasted. – Words by Harrison Abbott
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of Killer Klowns From Outer Space here.
#9) A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead
If you play as many horror games as we do, you eventually get desensitized to the various tricks of the trade, and what were once-effective scare tactics start to lose their luster. So, when we willingly admit (as a matter of public record) that A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead made us dread our own farts, you know that’s intended as the highest praise.
The movie tie-in does a lot right — capturing the signature tension of the film franchise upon which it is based, and squeezing as much mileage as possible out of the decibel-dependent stealth — but where it really shines is in its clever use of peripherals. Stick on a pair of headphones, for instance, and you become hyperaware of every unwanted noise you are producing; whether it’s the faintest door creak or the wince-inducing crunch of a leaf beneath your feet.
Meanwhile, if you want to dial up the anxiety even further, you can also grant the title permission to listen in through your microphone feed; meaning that any sound you transmit in the real world can then be heard by the misophonic Death Angels in-game. It’s a super cool gimmick that immerses you in the Quiet Place universe like never before, and will have you stifling every inopportune cough, sneeze or, yes, bout of gas that you might otherwise have indulged. Acoustic conditions permitting, it’s definitely the optimal way to play and can lead to some memorable (but hopefully flatulence-free) anecdotes to share with your friends. – Words by Harrison Abbott.
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead here.
#8) Mouthwashing
It’s hard to capture what makes Mouthwashing so special just from a quick description. It’s a first-person narrative horror game that tells the tragic story of the crew of a crashed transport spaceship, depicting the events both before and after that fateful incident.
This setup could describe all sorts of sci-fi horror stories, but the twists and turns it takes towards its nail biting ending consistently surprise, thanks to captivating characters and a thrilling structure that keeps you on your toes. Each of the crew members feels like a fully realized character, and their interactions create a perfect powder keg of tension as things get more and more dire.
You’re often doing simple adventure game-style puzzles, interacting with people and exploring the ship, but the game shines when it starts veering into more surreal P.T.-like dream logic. Its beautiful low poly-art style captures the nightmare perfectly, creating some truly striking images throughout.
Mouthwashing runs about two and a half hours, so you can finish it in a long sitting, giving you one of the most memorable narrative experiences of the year, in any medium. – Words by Aaron Boehm.
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of Mouthwashing here.
#7) The Outlast Trials
When it was first announced that Outlast was going to be making the jump to online multiplayer, it raised eyebrows amongst some incredulous fans. After all, it was hard to envision how this series — known for its tightly scripted frights, exhilarating one-on-one stalker chases, and general emphasis on disempowerment — could ever make that transition without also losing a key piece of itself in the process. Yet, low and behold, the unlikely spin-off somehow emerged as the franchise’s finest hour to date.
After an auspicious debut in Early Access last year, The Outlast Trials has continued to go from strength to strength. Taking inspiration from movies like Saw and Cube, it puts you in the shoes (well, technically, the bare feet) of a hapless vagrant who’s been abducted by the sinister Murkoff corporation, and forced to participate in a gauntlet of inhumane tests.
With the ultimate aim of stripping away your basic decency, these psychological conditioning trials will have you plunging the absolute depths of human depravity. One minute you’ll be wheeling a prison snitch to his execution, the next you’ll be serving bleach to a cafeteria full of starving orphans, organising a blood rave for a bunch of weirdly amorous nuns, or dissolving severed heads in a huge vat of acid.
To return to our earlier point, what’s so impressive is that it still all feels uniquely Outlast, despite that unexpected pivot to co-op. In fact, the addition of other players — who may or may not have your best interests at heart — actually adds an unpredictable spice to proceedings, while the villains remain every bit as colorful as they were over at Mount Massive Asylum and the chases retain their ability to get your pulse racing. More importantly, though, none of the franchise’s signature obscenity has been watered down here to accommodate the multiplayer structure. If anything, those edges are sharper than ever before, and we couldn’t be happier about it. – Words by Harrison Abbott.
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of The Outlast Trials here.
#6) Crow Country
It’s been a good year for old-school survival horror games, and Crow Country stands near the top of the heap.
While it doesn’t have fixed camera angles, instead allowing you to freely rotate your view to better see environments, all the other tropes are deployed successfully, in a way that clearly understands why they work. The game has clever puzzles, combat that focuses on resource management, and wonderful level design that allows you to slowly unlock new areas and shortcuts in its densely packed environments.
Crow Country drops you in the titular amusement park, which was abandoned two years prior for mysterious reasons. This setting perfectly sets the tone, creating a mix of menace and whimsy, twisting a traditionally joyful location into something more horrifying.
The visual variety in the areas prevents you from getting lost, giving you plenty of landmarks to help you familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the park. This is perfect comfort gaming for me, using all the elements I loved from the PS1 classics I love, but doing so with a clear creative vision that’s wholly its own. – Words by Aaron Boehm.
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of Crow Country here.
#5) Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
One of the biggest surprises of the year for me was Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, a brand-new IP from Capcom that feels like a throwback to an older era of game design.
You play as Soh, the protector of the maiden Yoshiro, tasked with helping cleanse Mount Kafuku of a horrifying force known as the Seethe. This narrative isn’t the focus of the game, but it does set up a gorgeous setting steeped in Japanese mythology and a compelling gameplay loop that takes familiar elements from different genres and remixes them in fresh new ways.
Each level plays out with a combination of action and tower defense-like strategy, tasking you with defending Yoshiro as you move her into position to cleanse the Torii Gates that bring forth the horrible monsters. The game alternates between two phases: day and night. In the day phase, you’ll run around and free villagers, assigning them different roles, and setup defenses to prepare for the incoming hordes. When night falls, the Seethe comes through the gates, and you and the villagers — the latter of whom can be repositioned during battle — must keep them from killing Yoshiro.
As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock additional villager classes, allowing for new defense strategies, and new skills for Soh, making your moment-to-moment actions more dynamic and compelling. The strategy and action layers combine together into something more than the sum of its parts, and there’s a neat base building mechanic that gives you a compelling way to advance progression between levels.
Kunitsu-Gami is definitely one of the most unique action games I’ve played in a long time, with great monster design and tight mechanics that evolve in satisfying ways over its 18-hour runtime. – Words by Aaron Boehm.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is available on Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series.
#4) Fear the Spotlight
By sheer coincidence, October 2024 brought us not one but two horror titles in which we were charged with ensuring the welfare of asthmatic protagonists. The first of these kindred experiences was the aforementioned Road Ahead — propped up by a major Hollywood license and a development team of over 100 people — while the other was far humbler in origins.
A modest passion project for husband-and-wife duo Bryan Singh & Crista Castro, Fear the Spotlight might not have been the year’s flashiest offering. Yet what it lacked in big-budget presentation it more than made up for in smart level design, creepy atmosphere, and a surprisingly heartfelt romance.
Relatively intimate in scope, it follows a pair of adorable high schoolers — Amy & Vivian — who are crushing hard on one another and will go to extraordinary lengths to protect their puppy love. Such devotion proves to be entirely necessary, by the way, when shenanigans involving a spirit board go calamitously wrong for the would-be couple, and they find themselves trapped in a strange elseworld. One that is governed by pure nightmare logic and that pits them against literal ghosts from the past (with some serious unfinished business to attend to).
It’s an engaging story with quite a few hidden layers, all of which feel satisfying over the course of a brisk 4-hours. Beyond the compelling mystery and sweet central relationship, there’s also a witty use of the ’90s period setting — most notably in an extended sequence that has you trying to evade detection while a floppy disc takes an inordinate amount of time to load — and some intricate puzzles to solve.
The best bits, however, are reserved for the second B scenario that goes even further down the rabbit hole and significantly ramps up the scare factor. Alas, to reveal any more about that here would be a huge disservice to the unexpected twists & turns that the developers have in store. Suffice it to say, Blumhouse backed a real winner with their first foray into the world of video game publishing. – Words by Harrison Abbott
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of Fear the Spotlight here.
#3) Silent Hill 2
I’m still in shock that they pulled this off. As much as conventional wisdom might encourage remaking the most popular entry in a franchise, Silent Hill 2 is such a beloved game by so many that Bloober Team was playing with fire by touching this one.
It was a massive risk that paid off in spades, creating a thoroughly modern version of the original that’s reverent to what came before while still providing new elements to surprise longtime fans. Classic locations have been lovingly rendered and expanded upon, adding new twists on environments that I’ve explored over and over. What many considered a weak point of the series, the combat, has now been made one of its highlights, with great mechanics that make for tense encounters that always feel fraught with danger.
This game is scary in a different way than the original, creating a terrifying atmosphere that rarely lets up. While the density of combat may get a bit exhausting by the end of the 16-hour story, exploring the town of Silent Hill is more engrossing than it’s been in decades.
With new endings to discover, there’s plenty of reason to return to this game over and over, even if you’ve been experiencing this story for decades. It’s an outstanding remake that will please both old fans and newcomers to the series. If the upcoming Silent Hill: Townfall and Silent Hill f are up to this standard, series fans will finally have something to be excited about again. – Words by Aaron Boehm.
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of the Silent Hill 2 remake here.
#2) Still Wakes the Deep
Walking simulators often get a bad rap, and not necessarily without justification. After all, the worst examples can be quite tedious; lazily using the genre’s constraints as an excuse to do very little on-screen storytelling and to put minimal effort into thinking of engaging ways for players to interact with their virtual worlds.
In many respects, The Chinese Room is one of our chief culprits here. Their calling card release, Dear Esther, was at the vanguard of the walking sim trend in the early 2010s, and didn’t give you much to do beyond “hold down the thumbstick until you hit the credits.” And then — depending on your tolerance for titles that make you slowly amble around while disembodied voices prattle on incessantly — Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was either a profound exploration of mortality & faith, or a profound bore.
Regardless of how you felt about their past work, however, The Chinese Room really outdid themselves with Still Wakes the Deep. For starters, the developer affords you far greater agency than they’ve ever done before, incorporating vertiginous platforming sections, simple-but-effective stealth encounters, tense set pieces, and tangible consequences for messing up during any of the above. In short, it’s a proper game.
Yet even if it were more of a traditional walking sim, nestled within the studio’s comfort zone, it’d still be their crowning achievement. That’s because Still Wakes the Deep has a rich world that is captivating to just, well, walk around! Indeed, the Beira D drilling platform is one of the most characterful settings we’ve ever explored in recent memory, authentically capturing a very specific time & place (the Scottish oil industry, circa 1975) with microscopic details that make it feel truly lived in. This commitment to authenticity extends to every other facet of the title as well, whether it’s the thoroughly researched operating procedures of the rig or the believable dialect used by those working-class heroes who keep it running.
Even if you have no frame of reference for that way of life, you quickly become attached to the relatable roughnecks here and are invested in their terrible plight. Speaking of which, the elevator pitch for Still Wakes the Deep was reportedly “Annihilation meets The Poseidon Adventure” and boy does it live up to that tantalizing premise.
When the crew of the Bierra D accidentally disturb something in the abyssal waters that should have been left alone, all hell breaks loose. What follows is a cosmic horror bloodbath that is equal parts haunting and visceral, but it’s actually the disaster movie side of the equation that really wigged us out.
You see, in order to navigate the deteriorating rig, you’ll have to squeeze through tight spaces, crawl along slippery girders, tiptoe across precarious walkways and — in one excruciating sequence — swim through flooding chambers in near-pitch black darkness. It’d be terrifying enough without the added paranormal complications but, with them, it’s easily one of the best horror games of the decade so far – Words by Harrison Abbott
Read Bloody Disgusting’s full review of Still Wakes the Deep here.
#1) Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
For the past two years, my GOTY have been ones about art and the creative process. Alan Wake II and Immortality both examined that in completely unique ways, coming up with different things to say about how fiction affects the world and vice versa.
This year Simogo released Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, a surrealist puzzler with a hypnotic art style and a mysterious story that completely captivated me. You’re dropped into a gorgeous European hotel with level design like Resident Evil’s Spencer Manor, forcing you to solve puzzles as you figure out what exactly happened to the seemingly mad artist that owns Hotel Letztes Jahr.
What’s stunning about the game is how little it holds your hand. With very little guidance, you poke and prod at the puzzles presented to you, not necessarily knowing if you even have the information to solve them. While this may be frustrating to some, I found it absolutely exhilarating. I filled up about 20 pages of a notebook with scribbles of clues that I needed to follow up on or ciphers that I was attempting to decode. There’s even little sketches of symbols or scenes that will make no sense to anyone but me, but flipping through it takes me right back.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is like a 20-hour video game escape room, with a narrative that needs as much decoding as any of the puzzles. The black-and-white (with splashes of pink) art style sets a creepy tone, and many of the turns taken by the story go to some chilling directions, without ever losing a magician-like sense of wonder.
Figuring out a puzzle or discovering a story beat feels just as thrilling as beating an Elden Ring boss, making for one of the most cerebrally satisfying games I’ve ever played. It’s a deeply strange and challenging experience, but it’s one that will stick with me forever. – Words by Aaron Boehm.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and the Nintendo Switch.
Honorable Mentions: The flawed-but-interesting Alone in the Dark, Dredge’s excellent Iron Rig expansion, the joyous retro throwback that is Sorry We’re Closed, Helldivers 2, Hollowbody, and that one mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 where it inexplicably turns into a level from Control.
