10 Terrifying Horror Video Games Coming In 2016
We may not have P.T., but at least there's Allison Road...
Film buffs will be outraged, but there's a strong case to be made that the hallmarks of the horror genre - creeping dread, unbearable suspense, causing you to soil yourself - are better suited to video games than cinema.
Sure, most horror games until recent years have stuck to clichéd tropes borrowed from cinema that have already been done to death by the medium, but things are changing. Video game horror now ranges from the psychological and Lovecraftian, to the gory and absurd, and is supplemented by ever-improving technical prowess that helps pull us deeper and deeper into the experience.
The fact that we can play horror games rather than passively observe their other forms creates a unique and terrifying relationship between us and the screen, and 2016 promises to be another year of escalating unease, screams and spine-tingling dread for the genre.
Here are the most terrifying horror games that lie in wait for us in the coming year.
10. Last Year
The premise of an asymmetrical multiplayer horror - with one player the killer and the rest trying to get away - is nothing new, and has been attempted by games like Damned and The Flock in recent years. It's an awesome premise, but the execution up to this point just hasn't done it justice.
Enter Last Year, a multiplayer horror that plays on all the classic slasher film tropes, as a group of archetypal slasher movie characters - the jock, the nerd, the cheerleader and so on - start off on separate parts of a map (which could be a summer camp, high school, mall or suburbs) with no weapons, and need to join up with their fellow players to band together against the killer.
Each character has a unique ability - such as medic, lockpicker, scout - while the killer has the ability to 'unspawn', then respawn anywhere on the map that's out of sight of the other players, making for some classic "The killer was there a second ago, but now HE'S RIGHT BEHIND YOU" scenarios.
Will this be the game to finally deliver the giddy, multiplayer slasher experience we've been waiting for?