The Best Horror Games That Play On Your Fear Of Death

Key Takeaways

• Great horror games find new ways to prey on the fear of death through story and mechanics, creating tense situations.
• Games like Bloodborne, Death Stranding, & Fear, and Hunger 2 create fear through death mechanics.
• Games like Soma & Silent Hill 2 explore fear of death from unique philosophical and emotional angles.

Death is a common yet primal fear shared by almost every human being. People ultimately fear the end and everything that comes with it, so naturally, horror games have taken to playing on this fear throughout the genre’s existence. While almost every horror game (and most games for that matter) typically features death in some fashion, it’s never more than the slight inconvenience of pressing restart and losing a little bit of progress.

The truly great horror games will find new ways to prey on a player’s fear of death. This could be through a well-crafted and scary story or by some clever implementation of mechanics.

8 Bloodborne

Even The Best Hunters Will Be Undone By The Blood

Like any good Lovecraftian game, Bloodborne has a bestiary of tough, creepy enemies, from werewolves to spiders to unexplainable abominations that like to eat or curse unfortunate hunters.

If this wasn’t enough, players will also have to contend with the core mechanic of a Souls-like game; losing all your blood echoes (serving as both experience points and currency) upon death. Naturally, these are retrievable as long as the player collects them before their next death, however, the enemy that killed the player may have picked them up. This can create a tense situation where the player may have to confront the very enemy that killed them to get their precious blood echoes back.

7 Death Stranding

Avoid A BT With Bated Breath

While not overtly horror, Death Stranding has many staples of the genre, such as wondering about a creepy, barren landscape and dealing with supernatural enemies in the form of BTs, souls of the deceased who are stranded and will try and kill protagonist Sam. The player must use Sam’s Bridge Baby to detect the BTs to sneak past them, lest they be dragged into a dark inky abyss, losing their precious cargo and creating a voidout, a large explosion that persists in the world after the player dies this way.

Sam is a repatriate, meaning he can come back from death, forcing players to live with the results of their mistakes instead of reloading a checkpoint. While the story is the expected amount of craziness expected from Hideo Kojima, it also has quiet moments where the story makes the player reflect on death, not just in the context of loved ones but the context of the entire human race as a 6th extinction event threatens to wipe out humanity.

6 Darkest Dungeon

Heroes Lose Their Minds And Sometimes Their Lives

While its sequel has a lot of similar elements, the original Darkest Dungeon is a lot more brutal with death. Much like a campaign in X-COM, ill-prepared players can permanently lose party members they worked hard on to any number of eldritch horrors. To make matters worse, the stress of the dungeons can cause party members to disobey the player or even give said party members a heart attack.

To make any progress in Darkest Dungeon, the player will have to play around these circumstances and find a way to push through, even if it means leaving a party member to a horrible fate…

5 Fatal Frame

Death Seen Through A Lens

In terms of facing death, there’s not much closer to it than fighting literal ghosts. Fatal Frame has the player traversing through a Japanese mansion, encountering supernatural scares and solving puzzles, all while dealing with vengeful spirits who can only be fought by taking their picture with the Camera Obscura, requiring the players to get up close to the ghosts. Much like how other survival horror games have their own ammo types, Fatal Frame uses different types of camera film that function similarly.

The story itself is centered around a character called Miku looking for her brother, Mafuyu, but opens up into a mystery about a sacrificial ritual gone wrong and the protagonist having to confront the spirits of those who died because of it.

4 Faith: The Unholy Trinity

Memento Mori

Mortis — the Latin word for death. This is the world that appears when John Thomas Ward, the protagonist of Faith: The Unholy Trinity, dies. It’s a constant reminder for players about how vulnerable their protagonist is, especially because it only takes one hit to kill the player.

As a result, they will have to be on their A-game, playing through each boss perfectly by learning all the attack patterns. There’s even an achievement for beating the game’s marathon mode (all 3 chapters back to back in one sitting) without dying once. This is all wrapped in a compelling story about the loss of faith and regret about not saving someone from a fate worse than death.

3 Soma

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

From the creators of the Amnesia franchise, Soma is a sci-fi horror game set in an underwater facility in the far future. The game explores death interestingly and philosophically, focusing on transhumanism, consciousness, and whether preserving life by any means necessary is truly worth doing.

These aspects of Soma will truly make players think about this concept and will play on fears of death from the angle of immortality and how isolating that can be. A truly unique take on this common fear.

2 Fear & Hunger 2: Termina

Death Is Only A Coin Toss Away

There aren’t many games as unrelentingly punishing as Fear & Hunger 2: Termina, a unique cross between the survival horror and JRPG genres (with a hint of a roguelike). Not only is the combat brutally difficult, requiring careful strategy to beat enemies much stronger than the player, but every single encounter is potentially deadly, and some enemies have insta-kill attacks that require the player to correctly call a coin toss to defend against them.

Even saving is a luxury and comes with its own risk of being attacked, and it advances time, ticking down the clock on the player’s precious three-day time limit. This limited saving means that a player can lose a lot of progress upon death, however, it’s this friction that makes Fear & Hunger 2 so compelling. Death is also a big factor in the story, where fourteen people are mysteriously thrust into a battle royale where only one can leave alive.

1 Silent Hill 2

Causes Restless Dreams

Whether it’s the remake or the original, one of Silent Hill 2’s most prevalent themes is death, specifically the death of a loved one and the regret of not doing all you could for them. The game sees the protagonist, James Sunderland, journey to the titular town after receiving a letter from his wife Mary, something that should be impossible as she died three years prior.

What follows is a dive into the psychology of James, as the town reflects his inner guilt through its environments and iconic monsters such as Pyramid Head. Players will peel back the layers of intrigue in the town, such as the mystery of why Maria looks a lot like Mary and why Laura can seemingly go about the town unharmed. Silent Hill 2 is not so much about the traditional fear of death expected from the genre but more about the emotional fear of losing someone and leaving so much unsaid and undone.