Horror Games With The Best Ambiance

Key Takeaways

• The ambiance in horror games is crucial for creating a terrifying atmosphere.
• Crafting monsters is vital, but atmosphere and tension elevate scares.
• Horror games like Penumbra: Requiem thrive on ambiance over physical threats.

All games are carefully crafted to elicit different reactions and feelings from their players. Open-world games offer true freedom for players to experience at their leisure, RPGs place them into an in-depth fantasy world and make their impact in the game meaningful, and horror games delight their fans with true terror, from monster design to the ambiance.

Crafting terrifying monsters is a fool-proof way to pump up the fear factor, but without the right atmosphere, the encounters with them might fall short. Fortunately for the fans of this genre, there is no shortage of games that nail the atmosphere.

1 Penumbra: Requiem

Relies Fully On Atmosphere

• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: August 27, 2008
• Developers: Frictional Games

Before Amnesia, there was Penumbra, a horror game series that leaned more into sci-fi than history like Amnesia. Aliens were a major component of Penumbra: Black Plague especially, which involved actual alien monsters to avoid, and moral conundrums the player character was asked toward the end of the game.

It would seem that the Penumbra series was well and truly over, but an additional game that acted as something akin to a DLC for the aforementioned Black Plague was released. Given how the previous games were inhabited by terrifying monsters, one might expect a creature to appear at any given moment, creating a suspenseful atmosphere of dread. With no actual monsters and just environmental threats, Penumbra: Requiem remains frightening just from the ambiance alone.

2 Anatomy

Grows Increasingly More Disturbing As The Player Progresses

This indie horror game drew some buzz specifically from certain horror-focused content creators due to its uniqueness. Houses are often a great location for horror games, as what could be scarier than twisting the places that are normally bastions of security and comfort for many people?

This is exactly what Anatomy does without relying on jumpscares or even any tangible threat. The player walks from room to room, listening to various videotapes that compare different rooms to parts of the human body. The house itself grows increasingly distorted and creepy as the game progresses, creating an eerie ambiance that grows and grows with each room. Drenched in atmosphere, Anatomy shows that something as simple as exploring a single location can be an effective basis for a horror game.

3 Amnesia: The Bunker

The Darkness Is Spine-Chilling Frightening

Frictional’s Amnesia games are their flagship series, even if it was not close to being the first game they made. The Amnesia series takes players to different locations and past eras, usually with occult themes present. The Bunker followed on from the lukewarmly received A Machine for Pigs, with Frictional themselves handling the development of their series once again.

The Bunker takes players back to World War 1, as the player character flees from enemy forces to what they think is a sanctuary in a bunker, only to find an entirely new and heart-stopping threat. Something known only as the Beast prowls in the dark, which the bunker has in plenty. Players will want to keep the lights on not only to keep the Beast at bay but also to make their surroundings less frightening. But even with the lights on, the game remains oppressively frighting, every second of exploration fraught with tension thanks to the suspenseful ambiance.

4 The Mortuary Assistant

Race Against Time Or Succumb To The Demons

Playing as the newly hired night-shift assistant at her local morgue, Rebecca will go through the necessary motions of embalming corpses while trying to hold her nerve against the terrors that occasionally visit her during her shift. Knowing that there is an unholy threat sharing the hallways with her makes every single sound and flickering light a stomach-dropping moment of dread.

What is even more suspenseful, however, is that the player needs to find out which corpse is the one hosting a demon before time is up, or she will become possessed. Trying to find the hidden demon and knowing what is on the line creates an eerie ambiance that never lets the player breathe a sigh of relief until the long-awaited moment they are safe.

5 SOMA

The Underwater Exploration Is Suffocating

Sci-fi horror is not a subgenre that should ever be overlooked, as it does contain some truly impressive entries, one of which is SOMA. It doesn’t shy away from posing difficult questions to the player, such as what it truly means to be human, while delivering a horrifying game with some of the most unsettling atmospheres known in the history of gaming.

After Simon is left struggling with a head injury from an accident, he agrees to an experimental brain scan that uploads his consciousness into the body of a robotic construct in an underwater research facility after much of humanity has gone extinct. The player will explore through a futuristic setting that will sometimes task them with wading out onto the ocean floor. Whether indoors or outside, players will be subjected to a truly eerie experience as they wonder what might be dwelling in those rooms alongside them. After all, not all of the robots are friendly.

6 Alien: Isolation

The Moments Of Quiet Make The Scares Far More Effective

The Alien franchise established the terrifying xenomorphs, nearly indestructible creatures capable of wreaking bloody chaos. Many games have attempted to capitalize on the movies’ success, with Alien: Isolation being far and wide the scariest.

Amanda Ripley’s search for her mother leads her to Sevastopol Station where the Nostromo’s scavenged flight recorder was taken. But Amanda finds more than she bargained for when the xenomorph arrives on the scene and becomes an ominous, ever-looming threat. It will pop in and out of vents, and drop down from the ceiling with only the motion tracker as warning. Hiding from the creature is beyond tense, and the moments of quiet in between encounters create an airtight ambiance as players constantly wait to hear or see it appear before them.

7 Mouthwashing

Delves Candidly Into Hard-Hitting Themes

Mouthwashing might just be one of the greatest indie horror games of all time, and a strong contender for the best game in 2024, which proved to be a strong year for games with the likes of Silent Hill 2 remake being released.

Set aboard a spaceship that will be the crew’s final delivery, the game jumps between two timelines, before and after the crash orchestrated by co-pilot Jimmy, in an attempt to kill everyone aboard. The aftereffects of the crash mutilate ship captain Curly, and create a tense atmosphere between everyone, with tensions boiling over to almost violent effect. What makes this game so effectively eerie is that it does not shy away from dark topics, specifically the tragic story of Anya, and the reality seems to fracture and break apart in Jimmy’s mind as he lives with the guilt of his actions.

8 Resident Evil 7

The Tension Never Relents In The Baker Mansion

Since its original release back in the 90s, Capcom has continued delivering frightening Resident Evil experiences for the most part. Resident Evil 4 saw a tonal shift with a bigger focus on combat, which was amplified in subsequent sequels. Resident Evil Revelations did help bring the series back, but it was Resident Evil 7 that was praised as the return to formula.

Introducing the Winters family, Ethan arrives at the backwaters of Louisiana after receiving a message from his wife Mia, who has been missing for three years, held captive by the fungally infected Baker family that he must now escape. The Baker mansion remains one of the eeriest locations in the game thanks to its smothering atmosphere. Jack prowls the area ready to attack the player on sight, resulting in a heart-attack-inducing game of cat and mouse, where every step is heavy with tension.

9 Silent Hill 2

The Masterful Sound Design Breathes Life Into The Decrepit Locations

There was much fear and worry surrounding the remake of Silent Hill 2, as the original game is a survival horror masterpiece that has inspired countless other titles. But these fears were allayed when the remake was released, realizing Konami’s original vision with stunning graphics, improved gameplay, more content, and the same eerie atmosphere.

Silent Hill games always strive to craft an eerie atmosphere through the decrepit settings that hold evidence that there was once life thriving in these places but is now gone. Akira Yamaoka’s masterful soundtrack also drives home the oppressive feeling of every location that only grows more and more smothering. By the time players reach the Historical Society, the ambiance grows close to overwhelming, demonstrating the power of Silent Hill‘s atmosphere.