The 10 Best Survival Horror Games
Ever since Resident Evil exploded onto the scene in 1996 and made inventory reshuffling in the face of a zombie outbreak popular, players have been regularly fighting down to their very last bullet. 30 years later, survival horror is the dominant format for those seeking video game scares, as popular now as it’s ever been. And with a fresh batch of nightmares to consider, there’s never been a better time to rank the best games of the genre.
But what qualifies a game to be considered as "survival horror"? Many games are often labelled survival horror, but lean much too heavily into action to be truly considered a genuine example of the genre. For our money, survival horror can be boiled down to four key factors, all of which are vital components of the classics that make up our list.
- There has to be a power dynamic weighted in the enemy's favour.
- You need to explore maze-like environments while solving puzzles.
- There’s often jeopardous resource management.
- Relentless pressure inflicted by either a pursuer or an oppressive space.
So with the rules established and out of the way, here are our picks for the 10 best survival horror games of all time.
10. Clock Tower
While 1989’s Sweet Home is often considered the progenitor of survival horror, it’s Clock Tower, the 1995, 16-bit survival horror classic that was only ever released in Japan, that perhaps left a bigger mark on the genre. Its fingerprints can be easily found throughout the entirety of this list.
You play as Jennifer, a teenage orphan stranded in a Resident Evil-like manor, point-and-clicking your way through a series of impressively detailed, oppressive rooms. But Clock Tower's defining mechanic, and why it rightfully deserves its place on this list, is its pioneering stalker gameplay. Four years before Resident Evil’s Nemesis spent an entire game shouting “STARS”, Clock Tower had us avoiding the dreaded “Scissorman”, who, much like Mr X, Pyramid Head, and Alien: Isolation’s Xenomorph, is a near-unstoppable force that’s always lurking nearby. Fast forward to today, and the stalker enemy type has become a staple of the survival horror genre. We have Scissorman to thank for all those enduring nightmares.
9. Silent Hill
While Capcom was storming the charts in the late ‘90s with Resident Evil’s campy, zombie-focused take on survival horror, Konami’s first stab at the genre saw the studio try something very different. What it created was dread. Pure, unrelenting dread.
Silent Hill stars Harry Mason, an everyman who enters a fog-filled nightmare while trying to find his missing adopted daughter in the town of Silent Hill. What follows is an oppressive tale riddled with unseemly horrors, the likes we’d never witnessed in a video game before.
Unlike its peers, Silent Hill provided a true 3D environment to explore, rather than the static, pre-rendered backdrops of Resident Evil. Due to the hardware restraints of the time, which struggled to render long draw distances, the fictional town was caked in a constant thick layer of fog that disguised the tech’s limitations. Serendipitously, this not only became the series’ signature look, but also demonstrated perhaps the greatest marriage of tech and tone we’ve ever witnessed in a video game.
Silent Hill pioneered its own psychological corner of the survival horror genre, spawning many sequels and remakes that would go on to be considered some of the most haunting video games ever made.
8. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
It seems like a distant memory now, but there was a painful period where the Resident Evil series lost touch with its survival horror roots. While Resident Evil 4 is rightly celebrated, it significantly ramped up the action, which laid the groundwork for both Resident Evil 5 and 6 to practically abandon the genre altogether.
2017 finally saw Capcom return to that classic survival horror feeling with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, but it did so from an entirely new first-person perspective and through the use of a grimier, Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like cast of characters. Our new protagonist, Ethan Winters, is forced to take on the Louisiana swamp-dwelling Baker family, who force him to endure a gauntlet of grisly challenges. Gone were roundhouse kicks, quicktime events, and off-the-charts bombast, and back was delicate resource management, a reestablished power balance in the antagonist's favour, and the long overdue return of a stalker enemy.
It’s impossible not to think of Resident Evil when talking about survival horror, but it’s only thanks to Resident Evil 7’s genre renaissance that they’re still considered synonymous with each other, rather than survival horror being just a footnote in the history of the series.
7. Outlast
Often the best survival horror tropes are reflections of the movies that inspired them, and there’s no better illustration of this than 2013’s Outlast, a first-person descent into a remote psychiatric hospital that took the found footage movie genre and expertly turned it into a five-hour interactive nightmare.
Outlast is relentless, and in traditional survival horror fashion, gives you very little to defend yourself with. It does, however, effectively turn vision into a resource; with the majority of the gloomy hospital only visible through the green, grainy lens of your camera's night vision, it's vital you build a stockpile of batteries to keep it powered up. AAs are as important in Outlast as bullets are in Resident Evil, and without them, you’re completely blind to horrors that lurk in the dark.
When you can see what’s chasing you, Outlast is as scary as any game on this list. When the lights go out, it stands nearly in a league of its own.
6. Alan Wake 2
Much like Outlast, Alan Wake 2 also commodifies light, although unlike its more action-led predecessor, it strikes a perfect balance of tense survival horror gameplay and a cinematic, surreal nightmare.
Developer Remedy’s unsettling story follows the intertwined journeys of titular writer Alan Wake and FBI agent Saga Anderson. As Alan, you’ll blast ghostly figures and solve Resident Evil-esque puzzles in a nightmare version of New York City. But the further you venture, the stranger things get; you’ll write new pathways through reality, witness a bizarre Finnish horror movie, endure an anxiety-inducing chat show, and take part in the best rock opera you’ve ever gunned your way through.
Saga’s chapters, meanwhile, see the story transform into a blend of Hannibal and Zodiac, with Silent Hill-like exploration and combat sitting neatly next to police procedural work. As you investigate a chilling chain of ritual murders, you’ll need to arrange clues on your evidence board and drill deeper into the minds of your many suspects.
Alan Wake 2 finds a unique way to combine familiar survival horror gameplay with Lynchian cinematic flair, resulting in a deeply ambitious, frequently disturbing experience that both feels true to the genre and something completely fresh.
5. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Thanks to its gameplay innovations that helped course-correct and spur a rebirth of a genre that had drifted too far into action-game territory, almost all modern survival horror games are indebted to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, at least to some degree.
In Frictional Games’ landmark 2010 first-person horror, you play as Daniel, who wakes up alone in the dark castle of Brennenburg with no memory of how he got there. As you explore, you learn of a shadow that’s stalking you, and encounter other creatures that will give chase if they spot you. Armed with nothing but a lantern, your only form of defence is to run and hide, often in the dark. This cat-and-mouse experience is a common survival horror trait today, but back in 2010, it was a stark contrast against more action-oriented horror games like Resident Evil 5, which was released just one year earlier.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent isn’t just a game of hide and seek, though: it has an extra wrinkle, one that forces you to always be on the move. Stay in the dark too long and you’ll gradually lose your mind. This forces you into maintaining a delicate balancing act, avoiding the darkness that’s driving you insane but frequently using it to hide from your pursuer.
Amnesia’s multiple sequels all build upon The Dark Descent’s mechanics in smart ways, but perhaps more important to its legacy is how other developers took notice, with Resident Evil 7’s decision to switch to a first-person perspective owing a lot to Amnesia’s success.
The Dark Descent still holds up today, and its influence runs deep, paving the way for the first-person playstyle to receive equal attention next to the genre’s traditional third-person camera.
4. Resident Evil
It’s hard to imagine what horror in video games would look like without the arrival of Resident Evil. The first in the long-running (and extremely successful) series arrived in 1996, inviting players to explore the zombie-infested, puzzle-riddled Spencer Mansion, and it’s fair to say the survival horror genre hasn’t looked back since.
Although primitive by today’s standards, Resident Evil set the mold for everything that followed. The isolation, the limited resources, the relentless sense of dread, and the jump scares. Resident Evil pioneered the way for the genre, and without it, modern survival horror simply wouldn’t exist. Yes, Sweet Home outlined the blueprint, but Resident Evil masterfully executed the ideas and propelled survival horror to the masses.
Of course, the formula has since been regularly improved upon, and many of those games are featured in this list, but every entry in Capcom’s enduring series owes a debt to the first. Resident Evil is arguably weaker than most of its sequels, its own remake included, but none of them would have existed without the progenitor, and its importance to the genre (and this list) is unquestionable.
3. Alien: Isolation
1979’s Alien is a masterclass in fear, building uneasy tension and suspense with the threat of its single, deadly Xenomorph. On paper, the film’s concept is not easily translated into video game form, and there certainly were many failed attempts until Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation arrived in 2014.
Alien: Isolation abandons pulse rifles, gung-ho Colonial Marines, and gallons of acid blood in favour of survival horror trappings, asking you to outwit an indestructible stalker that hunts you around the sprawling Sevastopol space station.
Powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence, the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation lives up to its silver screen relative, accurately creating a terrifying gameplay experience based on everything we saw in Ridley Scott’s classic. The beast quite literally has a mind of its own, capable of learning your tactics and finding new ways to hunt you. In a list full of games with stalker enemies, it’s still hard to look past the perfect organism as the greatest hunter of them all.
With only stealth, guts, and a few select tools to help you survive, Alien: Isolation is a terrifying horror simulator that not only instantly became the best Alien video game of all time, but also one of the very best examples of the survival horror genre.
2. Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 is an increasingly disturbing, psychological journey into the repressed thoughts of its unassuming protagonist and the tortured souls he meets along the way. Emotional tragedy, guilt, anger, abuse, and the horrible ways the resulting trauma manifests are handled with grace and maturity rarely seen in the genre.
Silent Hill 2 is everything a good survival horror game should be, perfectly balancing a relentless sense of hopelessness with just enough to keep you in the fight. James is a tortured soul, but one driven by the desire to continue his path, despite how unlikely success seems, and although this isn’t the first Silent Hill on this list, it is unquestionably the best.
The original Silent Hill 2, developed by Konami’s Team Silent back at the dawn of the millennium, is perhaps the bleakest, most sombre game ever made. 23 years later, Bloober Team successfully recreated its miserable magic, crafting a remake that is a deeply effective descent into genuinely uncomfortable terror. With this 2024 remake, Team Silent’s nightmarish vision is preserved. It’s a modern reminder not just of an era when Konami was a master of survival horror, but also of the significant power of Silent Hill 2’s timeless misery.
1. Resident Evil 2
When you think of survival horror, you think of Resident Evil, and although there are many contenders for best entry in the series, our vote, emphatically, goes to the 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2.
The original Resident Evil 2 took everything successful about the survival horror formula established by the first game and refined it. The locations were creepier, the enemies more menacing – this was the introduction of the infamous Licker and Mr. X, the stalker enemy that set the bar for the genre – and the scares were bigger and badder. The adventures of Leon and Claire in Raccoon City not only became a benchmark for Resident Evil but for the genre as a whole.
Every way 1998’s Resident Evil 2 improved on its predecessor, the 2019 remake replicated in kind, becoming not only a prime example of how to take an older game and reanimate it for a new generation of players, but also how the original rules of survival horror still stand strong to this day.
Resident Evil 2 is everything you want survival horror to be: a game of carefully balancing your resources while always feeling like you don’t quite have enough, enduring relentless pursuits through maze-like environments, obtuse puzzles to solve, and a constant state of unease that makes it feel like you won’t quite survive through the whole ordeal.
Resident Evil 2 influenced not one, but two generations of survival horror, and despite being often imitated, it’s rarely equalled. In our eyes, Resident Evil 2 is not only the very best of survival horror’s most famous series, but it also sits atop the genre itself.
If you liked this list and are eager for more survival horror, why not check out the 25 best horror games of all time, or our Art of the Level episode on Resident Evil 2, discussing how Capcom perfected the RPD Police Station twice.
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