If youenjoy being scared, there’s no shortage of amazing horror games out there for you.From indiesto AAA games withmonsters that will shake youto your core, developers love finding new ways to make you feel helpless and afraid. There’s a sense of catharsis in playing games like that, but they’re not for everyone, and even those who love them probably wouldn’t want to play them all the time. Sometimes you need a change of pace where you feel a bit more powerful, ormaybe even terrifying.
Sometimes called reversehorror games, there is a small subset of titles that put you into the shoes of the monster. Rather than constantly dreading being discovered, you’re gleefully moving through the game seeking out your prey. It is a rare form of power fantasy that not enough games take advantage of. So, I wanted to highlight a handful of games that will let you experience what it is like to be a horror by playing as the monster.
I’m considering anything that can be made scary as a monster, not just fictional creatures.
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The Super Smash Bros. of horror
Dead by Daylight
The key to Dead by Daylight’s success precedes its collaboration with just about every iconic horror franchise in pop culture. Originally, the game used totally original (yet clearly inspired by classic) horror characters that one player would control to hunt down a team of four survivors. Adding monsters like the Alien, Jason, and Pyramid Head only widened the appeal of the game and added an extra layer of fantasy fulfillment. It’s one thing to play as the monster that made you too afraid to sleep without a light on, but another thing entirely to play as them while terrorizing a team of real players.
Many games have tried this asymmetrical style of hunter vs. hunted, but all have fallen away except for Dead by Daylight, and I’d suggest that a major factor in its lasting power is giving us that wish fulfillment of taking control of the thing that once scared us so badly.
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2Fall to temptation in Vampyr
Break the Hippocratic Oath
There’s always the external temptation to fall into temptation, since drinking blood is the only way to increase your power.
The vampire is one of the oldest horror monsters in all kinds of media, dating back to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. We’ve had to fight plenty of them throughout our gaming careers, but rarely play as one. Vampyr is by far the most interesting setup for a vampire tale – you play as a freshly turned vampire named Jonathan Reid during the height of the Spanish Flu ravaging London.
However, the big twist is that Jonathan is a doctor and forced to either resist or succumb to his newfound thirst for blood and go against his Hippocratic Oath of doing no harm. Morally, the choice is never so simple when some patients are doomed only to suffer for the rest of their days and a quick death might be more empathetic. Then, there’s always the external temptation to fall into temptation, since drinking blood is the only way to increase your power.
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3You are the unknown horror in the vents in Carrion
Play as the lab experiment gone wrong
Tell me if you’ve heard this horror setup before: A lab does experiments on something it really shouldn’t be messing with, and boom – it escapes. At this point in the list, I’m sure you can guess that Carrion lets you play as that mysterious and bloodthirsty creature carving a path of death on its way to the exit. Playing as an amorphous blob mass and tentacles, you will slink through vents, ambush scientists and guards, and collect pieces of your genetic code to grow in size and ability. Carrion is a 2D, pixel-art game that has light metroidvania elements but nails the feeling of being an unknown creature hiding in the walls.
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4Fear is a weapon in Batman: Arkham Knight
Scarecrow wishes he was this effective
Batman: Arkham Knight
You probably wouldn’t think of Batman as a horrific entity, but just imagine what it would be like to face him from a goon’s perspective in Arkham Knight. You’re walking your patrol, minding your own business, when you turn around and your buddy has vanished. When you go to investigate, you spot him hanging unconscious from a gargoyle. Before you can respond, a scream of pain echoes from behind. Now panicked, you scan the area with your gun ready, but fail to realize there’s a grate just below your feet hiding a man all in black who is ready to pounce. That’s exactly the way you can play with your prey in Arkham Knight, and it never gets old.
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5Jaws can’t hold a candle to Maneater
A new reason to stay out of the water
Jaws was an entirely new kind of horror monster because of the simple fact that it was a real creature that you could encounter, not some paranormal entity or alien. The odds of actually encountering a shark on the beach is nearly zero in most cases, but that didn’t stop Jaws from creating an entire generation of people afraid to set foot in the ocean. Maneater is framed as a mockumentary with genuinely hilarious writing, but its mechanics are nothing short of terrifying if you stop to think about it.
You play as a shark growing from an infant to a colossal beast by working your way up the food chain until you’re big enough to sink entire ships. When you experience how powerful you feel being the apex predator of the water and watching a helpless human struggle to swim to shore, you’ll wonder why sharks don’t hunt us down for the fun of it.
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