Horror Games Fans Liked What 2024 Brought

Gamers have always been drawn to horror games. There are are times when they feast and famine, but this paat year, they gorged until their bellies bulged and our mouths dripped with gruesome grease.

In 2024, the industtry saw a rich spread of dark experiences from solo creators, indie teams, AA developers and AAA studios in a vast array of genres and visual styles. There was a fantastic "Silent Hill 2" remake and beefy updates to contemporary classics like "Phasmophobia", "Alan Wake 2" and "The Outlast Trials", and there was also a steady cadence of brand-new horror franchises expanding the genre in unexpected ways.

This past couple of months, gamers took a moment to celebrate a sampling of the year’s fresh horror universes, which include the following:

• Crow Country from brothers Adam Vian and Tom Vian at SFB Games
• Fear the Spotlight from husband-and-wife team Cozy Game Pals
• Hollowbody by solo dev Nathan Hamley at Headware Games
• Home Safety Hotline by Utah studio Night Signal Entertainment
• INDIKA from Spain- and Kazakhstan-based studio Odd Meter
• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess from Capcom
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes by the high-strangeness experts at Simogo
• Mouthwashing from Swedish indie team Wrong Organ
• Slitterhead by Silent Hill and Gravity Rush creator Keiichirō Toyama at Bokeh Game Studios
• Still Wakes the Deep from horror veterans The Chinese Room

This is not a comprehensive list of new horror franchises in 2024, but it’s a suitable demonstration of how vast and varied the offerings were this year.

Indie studios are leading the charge when it comes to fresh ideas and original mechanics, of course, but there are also plenty of references to early-2000s graphics and PS1- or PS2-era survival horror on this list.

The combination of innovation and nostalgia is particularly potent in titles like "Fear the Spotlight", "Crow Country", "Mouthwashing" and "Hollowbody". These games infuse blocky 3D worlds with modern sensibilities and smooth animations, resulting in experiences that illuminate the staticky memories of "Resident Evil and "Silent Hill" that lurk in everyone's heads. This is how gamers wanted those games to feel, fixed camera angles be damned — or, in the case of Hollowbody, lovingly embraced.