The Best Horror Games Where The Main Villain Follows You

Key Takeaways

• Horror games create fear by having unseen enemies constantly stalk the player, keeping them in suspense.
• Games like Slender and Clock Tower successfully build terror through relentless pursuit by a single entity.
• In games like Outlast and Alien: Isolation, helpless players must run and hide from their relentless pursuers.

There are few things more unsettling in horror games than the idea of being constantly watched. Feeling the presence of an unseen foe, potentially lurking behind every corner, just waiting for the player to let their guard down long enough to strike. No amount of well-placed jump scares can supplant that feeling of dread.

It’s common to encounter stalker enemies, confined to certain levels or sections in horror games, but some games go a step further, building the entire experience around the premise. With one particularly persistent horror that follows the player throughout the entire playthrough, ensuring nowhere is safe. Below are the best such experiences that keep the player in a permanent state of unease.

10 Slender: The Eight Pages

Night In The Woods

Slender: The Eight Pages proves games don’t need a big budget or complex mechanics to provide spine-chilling scares. The simple premise sees players scouring a woodland area attempting to collect eight pages that contain hastily scribbled warnings. All while being stalked by the infamous creepypasta, the Slenderman.

Audio cues and screen distortion alert the player when the Slenderman is near, breaking up the near-silent ambiance. With each page collected, Slenderman becomes more prominent, ramping up the tension as players approach completion. The only way to stop Slenderman is to stare straight at him, making encountering the horror the only way to stop it. But stare too long and players will soon be met with immediate death.

9 P.T.

Playable Teaser

Planned as a teaser for a future Silent Hill game that would have featured the creative talents of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro, P.T. was sadly scraped for corporate reasons and remains a sore point for fans today. Although not currently playable, it’s worth a mention for the clever implementation of horror that earned the title so much hype upon release.

Essentially a tech demo, it’s a pretty bare-bones experience that sees a player traversing a looping corridor, looking for clues, and experiencing supernatural occurrences that shift the environment with each pass. The primary antagonist is Lisa, a ghostly apparition that is tethered to the player mechanically, ensuring she is with them at all times. Lisa can appear at will in various locations throughout the hallway on any given loop.

8 Hello Neighbor

Neighborhood Watch

Shifting tone slightly to the menacingly cheery setting of Hello Neighbor. Upon suspecting the neighbor is up to no good, the player is tasked with entering their home and attempting to obtain access to the basement, to see what horrors he hides.

The neighbor is constantly patrolling his home and players will have to be careful to avoid him. What sets Hello Neighbor aside is how the villain learns from a player’s actions. Once caught, players are thrown from the house and must break in again. Only this time the neighbor will remember the player’s previous ingression, adapting his movements to stalk them more efficiently and laying traps where they’re likely to go.

7 Bendy And The Ink Machine

Cel Shaded Terror

Ink Bendy may not be as present as some others in this category, but he’ll feel like he’s everywhere all at once with his eerie grinning disposition plastered all over the environment. The creature is capable of changing the landscape by drenching it with ink as the story evolves. Something the player will become accustomed to until he first emerges from it and attacks.

With the Ink flooding the stages and attacks becoming more frequent, Ink Bendy will feel like he could emerge at any moment. Later entries in the episodic horror series turn him into an even more ever-present threat. In Bendy: Secrets of the Machine, he will even emerge and kill the player if they spend too long on the pause screen.

6 Clock Tower

For Whom The Bell Tolls

A real progenitor in the idea of being constantly stalked through a video game, Clock Tower is a 1995 point-and-click adventure that sees orphan Jennifer’s new home quickly turn to horror as she finds herself being persistently harassed by Scissorman. With no defense against the creep and his colossal shears, the player must run and hide, while attempting to escape the manor.

When Jennifer encounters Scissorman, she enters a ‘panic’ mode which will drain her stamina and make her more likely to trip in classic horror fashion ensuring each encounter is a pulse-racing affair. Clock Tower received a remaster in 2024 with the addition of some excellently animated cutscenes, to enhance the experience for anyone looking to try this one out.

5 F.E.A.R.

Bullet Time Hell

F.E.A.R. is a strange combination of an action-heavy FPS game and Japanese-style spiritual horror. Whilst the game was mainly praised for its bullet time mechanics and intelligent AI presenting a good challenge in combat, the game does see the player hunted by the vengeful spirit of a young girl, Alma.

Alma does not attack the player directly, offering more of a physiological threat that often breaks the game’s frenetic pacing, grounding the player in the horror elements. She will appear numerous times throughout the game, constantly lingering as a menacing antagonist and a threat of what could be to come.

4 Amnesia: The Bunker

Keeping The Beast At Bay

The fourth installment in the iconic Amnesia series took a more minimalist approach than its predecessors, focusing on a smaller environment and one persistent beast, fittingly referred to as the stalker. The beast lurks in the tunnels of a WW1 bunker and is alerted to any noise the player makes; something that is frequently unavoidable with creaky doors and crank handle torches.

The well-lit corridors offer a reprieve from the beast so long as the generator is fueled up. Players can set their watch by the amount of fuel left and will have to rush to find more fuel in time as things become a lot more dangerous when the lights go out. The contradiction of moving slowly to avoid detection and the time pressure of losing the light make for a tense push and pull that keeps the player on an agonizing tightrope of emotion.

3 Outlast

Asylum Inmate

Players will find themselves continuously pursued by many inmates through the halls of Mount Massive Asylum, but one hulking monstrosity in particular, Chris Walker, will stalk the player relentlessly. Players are completely helpless in Outlast, unable to employ any of the tricks from the above games to slow their pursuer.

No amount of light, obstacles, or weaponry will protect protagonist Miles Upshur, meaning the only option to avoid Walker is to run and hide. This invulnerability ensures he remains just as much of a threat throughout the game’s runtime, making for a frantic encounter every time.

2 Alien: Isolation

Terror On Sevastopol Station

Alien: Isolation returns to the series’ horror roots as opposed to the more action-oriented pace that has been common in the franchise since the hugely popular sequel Aliens. In doing so it rediscovers the claustrophobic terror of the original film and produces the best video game adaptation to bear the IP.

The Xenomorph’s actions are almost entirely unscripted, meaning the alien is completely unpredictable. There is no way of knowing when it’s about to drop from the vents or sever the player from behind. Like the Neighbor, the Xenomorph also responds to a player’s past actions, ensuring they can never get comfortable relying on a particular hiding strategy.

1 Resident Evil 2

Mr X.

Resident Evil is one of the most decorated horror franchises and Capcom has pulled the persistent foe trick on more than one occasion. For ballast, honorary shout-outs to Resident Evil 3‘s Nemesis and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard’s Jack Baker but Mr X. takes the cake as the series’ most menacing stalking foe, particularly in the 2019 remake.

Perfectly embodying the characteristics of a classic slasher villain, the enormous brute thunders around the hallways with unstoppable momentum. Hearing his rapturous footsteps getting closer and closer is enough to fill even seasoned horror fans with dread.