10 Survival Horror Video Games You Must Play Before Halloween

Although survival horror tailed off in the latter half of the 2000s, the genre has fortunately enjoyed something of a revival in recent years. Thanks to indie darlings like Amnesia and Outlast proving that there's still a healthy market for horror, the industry big-wigs who constantly said that there was no chance of the genre finding success once again were forced to eat their own words at the beginning of the decade.

Indeed, the classic staples of survival horror have remained timeless, but modern iterations have succeeded by keeping things unpredictable, taking these tried-and-tested elements and applying their own contemporary spin.

The fear that comes from cautiously walking down a poorly-lit hallway with only three bullets to your name or gripping a half-broken pipe as the world morphs around you is entirely unique to these games, and conjures up a particular brand of horror that can't be found in any other medium.

A lot has changed since the original Resident Evil hit shelves back in the 1990s, and the industry has seen some excellent horror titles over the past few years that give the classics a run for their money.

Although its sequel has a more impressive sense of visual presentation and a more ambitious story, the original Outlast boasts a much tighter horror experience. Trapping players in the terrifying walls of the Mount Massive asylum and tasking them with uncovering its shady secrets, Outlast was brimming with classic horror tropes and cliches, but boy did it know how to use them.

While run-and-hide horror games were getting old even at the time of its release back in 2013, the title had one thing those other games didn't have: a killer gimmick. Casting you as a journalist, your only line of defence was a video camcorder, which could record key moments and allow you to see in the dark thanks to its night vision capabilities.

Consequently Outlast played like an amazing found-footage movie, brilliantly riffing on elements of a sub-genre that had tragically never made its way over to the gaming world before.

Make sure to pick up the game's one DLC expansion, Whistleblower, too. It's short, but it packs in some grotesque moments and ridiculously memorable horror scenarios that give anything from the main game a run for its money.