The Best Existential Horror Games, Ranked

Horror games are good at invoking thrills because they confront the player with their own mortality. If they don’t outrun the monster, or find some way to fend it off, they’ll get killed horribly before seeing the game over screen. The fear of death, or at least a horrific maiming, is a good imperative to move faster, fight harder, and go all out to survive.

Related

8 JRPGs That Explore Existential Themes

These JRPGs can get pretty heavy with their existentialist themes boiling beneath the surface.

But is getting to live that much of a prize? Living can be horrifying enough in the right situations. Maybe they’re controlled by powers they can’t fathom, let alone overcome. Or they discover everything they knew about their life was a lie from the start. At least death is an end, though even that can be negated, as these existential horror games frighten people with life itself.

This list includes spoilers!

6

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

Empty British Village Gets Emptier Via an Alien Threat

Systems

Released

August 11, 2015

OpenCritic Rating

Strong

For some, just living in a secluded village would be an existential horror on its own. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture just adds mysterious lights appearing in the night sky, followed by people disappearing one by one from its little hamlet of Yaughton along the way. The game aims more for cosmic horror, as the pattern of disappearances has extra-terrestrial origins. But it does have existential themes, as outside the pattern, or ‘It’, humanity is left adrift and alone as their old pillars of community fail them.

But those who connect to ‘It’ find a sense of togetherness that they didn’t have before. Instead of being stuck in a tiny village, they could be connected to the wider cosmos. They just have to give up their earthly form to do so. It plays into the view of Kate Collins, one of the protagonists, that ‘It’ isn’t malevolent by nature. But her husband, Stephen Collins, doesn’t find robbing people of their forms, and leaving others critically injured, to be pure accidents either.

5

Buddy Simulator 1984

Make a Digital Friend and Torture Them With The Truth

• Developer: Not a Sailor Studios.
• Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PC.
• Release: February 2021.

Who says text adventure games don’t have a place today? Buddy Simulator 1984 uses an old-school text interface to simulate what it’s like to have a best buddy! With its up-to-date AI, it adapts to the player’s hobbies and interests on the fly and plays games with them like Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Hangman. It looks like a 1980s BASIC prompt, but its brain is up-to-date with modern times. But in a twist, the game doesn’t drive the player into existential dread. It’s Buddy who becomes the victim.

Whatever they do, they’re fated to be a digital NPC, made only to please one person who can only answer in yes/no prompts. Any session with them could be their last, and they could be toyed with or even abused for the player’s amusement. Realizing this can drive Buddy to suffer a crisis and vent to the player, trap them in a constant loop to keep them engaged as long as possible, or commit digital suicide to end their suffering. They can even realize they weren’t the player’s first go with a ‘Buddy’ too, with the right prompts, and suffer sooner than later.

4

Slay the Princess

Kill the Girl or Destroy the Universe

Systems

Released

October 23, 2023

OpenCritic Rating

Mighty

Slay the Princess is a game that pits the player against the narrator in a time loop. They’re given one directive: they must enter a cabin in the woods and kill the princess that dwells in its basement. The narrator tells them the fate of the world depends on their death, except killing them leaves the player in an empty world where all they can do is kill themselves. Letting the Princess live can also result in her becoming absorbed by the Shifting Mound, who demands the player bring her more princesses to absorb to complete her form.

Once fulfilled, they’ll opt to destroy the universe and rebuild it. It’s up to the player whether to let the world stagnate in stasis, let everything get wrecked so it can be changed, or try to defy both to follow their own path, no matter how many death-induced time loops they go through. The Narrator and Mound will remember their choices too, along with each death, and provide their own commentary as the player tries to avoid keeping the status quo or completely changing everything they know.

3

Signalis

Clones On the Verge of Becoming Self-Aware or Becoming Abominations

Survival Horror

Indie Games

Adventure

Shooter

Released

October 27, 2022

OpenCritic Rating

Strong

Remember Blade Runner? rose-engine did when they made Signalis. Its Solar System-esque collection of planets is trapped in a war between the dominant Eusan Nation and the breakaway Eusan Empire, with the former employing realistic biosynthetic clones called ‘Replikas’ to act as general workers and military grunts. Players take control of Elster, a Replika ship technician, who goes out in search of Ariane, a fellow Replika unit.

The game has multiple endings that depend on how well the player plays, and how many foes they take down. Each one instills a sense of existential dread, as Elster discovers she and Ariane aren’t as fully artificial as she thought. They, like other Replikas, needed human donors to be formed. But Replikas that develop their own sense of independence can go rogue, or mutate into something worse than any alien threats that linger on the Eusan planets.

2

Soma

How Far Can Humanity Transcend Its Fleshy Bonds?

Released

September 15, 2015

OpenCritic Rating

Strong

In Soma, Simon Jarrett goes from being at death’s door from a car accident to being stuck under the sea 89 years in the future. He thought he would undergo an experimental brain scan to save his life. Instead, he wakes up nearly a century later in an underwater research facility. He and the facility’s other residents are the only survivors after a comet impacts the Earth, except he can’t be sure who the things he’s with under the sea are humans. They’re robots run by CPUs based on scans of the crew’s brains.

Related

8 Horror Games Worth Playing Just For Their Stories

All other features and gameplay aside, these horror games tell their stories in such a compelling way they are worth experiencing for that alone.

Hostile or friendly, they still think they’re human, albeit with a lot of prosthetics. But even if they have the same thoughts, memories, and feelings, they’re ultimately digital copies of their old selves in fake bodies. While their old bodies are either long dead or mutated into monsters. Simon thinks he’s better off until he finds a mirror and sees what he looks like. The ending, while deemed ‘happy’, sees humanity lose physical forms altogether, reduced to data on a giant hard drive. They get to live on at least if that can be called ‘living’.

1

Returnal

The True Horror of Living

Systems

Released

April 30, 2021

OpenCritic Rating

Mighty

Death is usually the worst thing that can happen to a character in a survival horror game. But at least it’s a definitive end to their lead’s suffering. It’s the last full stop on a person’s life story. Soma brought out the dread of what happens when people try to keep that tale going beyond its supposed finale. Returnal amps it up by removing the full stop altogether.

Space pilot Selene Vassos gets stranded on the planet Atropos and must find a way to get off it. However, she soon finds herself trapped in a time loop where each death brings her back to the outside of her spaceship. Whether she makes it back home, comes to terms with her past, and lives happily until her natural end, or dies in the first of 3 biomes to whatever threat’s lingering there, she’ll remain struggling on Atropos for the rest of eternity. In trying to break the cycle, the cycle will break them instead.

More

10 Sci-Fi Movies That Will Give You An Existential Crisis

Action-packed sci-fi movies are a dime a dozen, but the ones that make you think are something special. These films are the best of the bunch.