GIZORAMA’s Horror Game Picks!

As October comes to a close, Halloween is right at our door step. If you are the kind of person who wants to sit back this 31st and play a game that will scare the bejesus out of you, this is your list. The staff at GIZORAMA has assembled a list of our favorite horror games to play this Halloween!

Condemned: Criminal Origins – James Parkin

I’ve never really been huge on horror games, but when Condemned: Criminal Origins released in 2005, I was beyond excited to play. It was the first horror game I’d play on my Xbox 360, and boy did it deliver. Everything was so dark and eerie; walking around was clunky, but at the same time realistic, weapons felt like they had weight, and bullets had very effective stopping power. The majority of the game has you navigating through a jumble of run-down, criminal infested corridors where you stumble upon crime-scenes and must investigate their surroundings to gain an idea of what the hell is going on. I still remember creeping around corners, frantically trying to conserve my ammo as a gaggle of psychopaths or monstrous creatures charged my way with blood-lust in their eyes.

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare – Bevon Lewis

Zombies in the Wild West. ’nuff said!

Outlast – LJ Liffengren

A first-person survival horror game where you play as Miles Upshur, a journalist investigating Mount Massive Asylum. There he finds the patients have been experimented on and are now not only insane, but incredibly dangerous. The atmosphere is intense even when nothing is going on. The action is as terrifying as it is exciting. It’s freaking scary!

Resident Evil – Alex Ferri

A game like this is more than just jump scares, it is about atmosphere. Quite honestly, even 17 years later, it still holds up!

Bioshock – Nick Marcantonio

It probably doesn’t fit the typical mold for horror games, but it definitely can be scary. Whether it is the atmosphere from the abandoned city of Rapture, or the physiological elements of the narrative, Bioshock will delight and torment you!

Alan Wake – Matthew Ahern

Unless you count Luigi’s Mansion for the GameCube (Which is fantastic!), this was my first horror game. I never cared too much for the genre, whether in film or games, but something about this was different. It felt so incredibly real, and at the same time, like a work of fiction. The foretelling manuscript pages littered throughout the game gave you the sense that there was something out there that knew more than you, far more in fact. A page would predict a character’s death before it happened and you were forced to proceed, knowing it would be the end for that person. You began to feel responsible for this mess of a situation. Like many great works of fiction, Alan Wake never truly ends. Countless adventures and horrors await this tragic character if Remedy decides to continue his tale. There may be no grotesque deaths, or buckets of blood, but within Alan Wake is a psychological thriller so deep and satisfying, you may just need to play it to believe it.

What’s your favorite Horror game to play on Halloween?