Are you dressing up as the Scooby gang with your friends for Halloween this year? (I know I am!) Do you like decorating your home with pumpkin candles and animatronic skeletons? Or do you love getting your pals round with popcorn and spooky cocktails to watch an old horror favourite together?
All perfectly acceptable Halloween activities. At Zatu, we love exploring creepy-themed video games and board games, so with Halloween just around the corner, we’ve got a bunch of us together to look at the scariest video game worlds. Whether they traumatised us with relentless jump scares or wormed their ways into our brains with psychological, insidious themes and atmospheres, there are plenty to explore.
Get into the spooky spirit with these wonderful video games and scare yourself senseless.
Pathologic 2 – Lauren Skinner
I have never felt more intensely terrified – or captivated – than in the Town-on-Gorkhon.
Let’s set the scene. The Town is located in the bleak Russian steppe. Some would say lost in the steppe, and for good reason. Its remote setting means it’s cut off from most civilisation, and as such, the town has its own delicate balance it must maintain. There’s a tense ideological conflict between the Utopians, who want to bring the Town into modern times (and beyond!), the rationalist yet brutal industrial leaders, who take advantage of the workers for profit, and the Kin, who both commune and are one with the earth. In this place, you’re just as likely to wander off into the high, swaying grasses and find a mythical creature than you are to find nothing at all. You meet both hardened criminals and creepy members of the Kin that give you major uncanny valley vibes, like you’re out of place and will be killed for it.
It’s not just the endless steppe plains that make you feel like you’re out of your depth. You need to save the town from a deadly plague, but the layout of the Town itself makes this feel impossible. It’s arranged in perhaps the most hostile way imaginable: pathways that should connect, don’t; barriers that should be marked on the map, aren’t; major landmarks and homes of interest are as far away from each other as they could be, meaning you’re walking, walking forever, with an oppressive time limit and dodging angry civilians and criminals alike. It doesn’t matter which: either way, you’re dead. Some of the scariest moments I had in Pathologic 2 involved sneaking through the night and hearing a bandit growl ‘Come here, you,’ as they come at you with a knife. The almost inevitability of death at these bandits’ hands alone made any nighttime stroll a heart-thumping experience.
Ultimately, the Town is its own character, both as a roadblock (literally), preventing you from curing the plague with its endless, confusing labyrinthian streets, and as a victim of it. You are meant to feel harried, exhausted, and use these arduous walks to plan, not zone out. You can never rest. You will never feel safe.
But this is all child’s play compared to the main point of the game. You know how I said you must stop the plague before it decimates the Town? Once the plague has arrived, you only have 12 days to find a cure, and time marches on, no matter what you do, shortening with each day that passes. And the confusing layout of the Town? It quickly becomes less a frustration and more an abject panic: those difficult-to-navigate spaces are now congealed with infectious clouds that you need to avoid or succumb to the plague. For death in this game is more than a reloaded save: even if you save-scum, your penalties, like a quickening thirst or hunger bar, remain. You feel the despair as much as the Town’s pixelated inhabitants, and that despair keeps you on the edge of terror the entire time.
And don’t get me started on the plague itself. It’s also its own character, worming into your mind and taunting you from within even while it physically chases you.
I could speak on Pathologic 2 for hours, but just know that the horror of this video game world is in both its bleakness and its pressure; in its creepy characters and overwhelming feeling that the world both deserves to be saved but is fighting back against it with all its might; and in its atmosphere, with the eerie twang of the steppe, the crackling voice of the plague, the characters’ faces, too close and drawn in pain and exhaustion, chilling music.
If you want a terrifying time this Halloween, and don’t mind a brutal challenge, look no further than this.
Alan Wake 2 / Control (Remedy Universe) – Sophie Jones
There are plenty of scary video game worlds out there, but one that comes to mind is the universe Remedy has so carefully created. Even though this universe dates back to Max Payne, the scary really arrived with Alan Wake.
This world is terrifying. When night descends, shadowy monsters emerge from the darkness ready to hunt, but what really makes it scary is how difficult it is to distinguish what is real from what isn't. Even though Alan has weapons and ammunition, resources are tight and his flashlight is his only real source of protection. The first game scared me with possessed machinery, evil birds and enemies appearing out of the darkness, but as we moved into Alan Wake 2, this world really evolved. The idea of the Dark Place and Alan's writing bleeding into reality made everything feel much less predictable.
And shadow monsters aside, the truly scary part of this universe is that Alan has the power to drag anybody into his nightmare. Take Saga, for instance. Her whole life starts to be rewritten, along with the lives of the townspeople, and that is genuinely terrifying. Imagine having everything you have ever known erased simply because a writer said so!
Then there is the wider universe of Control. That game is less scary as you are armed to the teeth, but the idea of a world where the Hiss exists is enough to make me uncomfortable. A strange force that can possess people, distort reality and take over an entire building? It's probably best not to think about it too much!
That is what makes Remedy’s universe so scary to me. It's not just the monsters. It's the idea that reality itself is something you cannot trust.
Still Wakes The Deep – Ian Pazcek
Still Wakes the Deep is a single player horror game, perfect for scaring yourself silly on Halloween. The game is survival horror with at least a nod towards Lovecraft and comes from the British game development studio The Chinese Room.
You play as Cameron McLeary, an electrician working on an oil rig in the North Sea in the 1970s. The oil platform drills into something that awakens a cosmic horror. There is no combat in the game, so everything is puzzles and stealth. The story is very immersive as you are trying to survive and escape the rig. The game involves lots of navigating tricky environments – balancing on shaky gantries, jumping from one exposed platform to another, but take care because you don’t want to fall into the sea – did you see those tentacles? The weather is a major factor too, with lashing rain and high winds in exposed areas of the drilling platform. There are puzzles to solve and a story to unearth.
The game has two modes – standard and story with standard mode having more challenge, more risk of death and story mode focusing on the story and the full immersive experience. The voice actors are excellent and most are Scottish, such as Alec Newman, Neve McIntosh, Clive Russell and Karen Dunbar. The main criticism is that the gameplay is rather linear, but the game resulted in three BAFTA award wins for the studio.
Inscryption – Chris Ridley
A roguelike deck builder would have been one of the least likely genres to appear on this list. Then Inscryption stalked into the conversation.
Inscryption blurs the lines between deck builder, escape-room puzzle and psychological horror. From the moment you begin, you’re locked in a dark log cabin, sitting opposite the mysterious Leshy with little explanation of who you are, where you are or what exactly is waiting for you, all while his ever-watching gaze falls upon you.
Even the card game itself feels wrong and depraved.
To win the lane-based battler, you need to deal enough damage to tip a set of scales in your favour. Except those scales are loaded with teeth. Cards are played by sacrificing creatures, bodies are stitched together to improve your deck and, if you’re desperate, you can quite literally pull out one of your own teeth to give the scales a little extra persuasion.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I found myself squirming every time those pliers came out.
But Inscryption gets under your skin the longer you play. Cards begin speaking to you. Between battles you can stand up from the table and creep around the cabin, uncovering puzzles to solve to gain small advantages, as you try and piece together the mystery around Inscryption. Slowly realising that there is far more lurking beneath the surface than a simple game of cards.
But when - not if - you lose a battle, everything changes.
Leshy’s unnaturally long arms suddenly stretch across the table towards you.You black out, only to wake beneath a cold, flickering light as he looms over you and forces you to create a new card from the remains of your failed run.
There’s something almost sadistic about it. You’re made to pick apart the cards that carried you this far, choosing cards to sacrifice to create a grotesque amalgamation for your next run.
Inscryption’s oppressive cabin, visceral rituals and eerie music kept me constantly on the edge of my seat and glued to the screen. But what makes it truly unsettling is the nagging feeling that there’s something else going on.
And that feeling never quite leaves you.
Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle – Sorby Clynes
I was twelve when my cousins introduced me to Day of the Tentacle in the late 90s. It was the scariest of the gems we grew up with. Playing it at night was a mistake. We were so scared we saved and quit immediately, and we made a pact to only play in broad daylight. Such cowards we were, and even as grownups, I think the experience still haunts us.
Even in daylight, we were terrified. The mansion looked wrong: crooked doors, long shadows, a house that seemed to be watching us click through it. The Purple Tentacle's distorted laugh came through the speakers and sent chills down our spines. Turning the volume down didn't help. We carried on out of morbid curiosity, and playing it took bravery we had to muster, one room at a time.
The mechanics were simple enough: point, click, pick a verb, combine objects. We got to control three characters across different periods in time. Something left in the past would turn up in the future, changing the story. When the future showed humanity caged by tentacles, we felt doomed. The game gave our young minds an existential crisis.
We often rang each other up: "Where are you stuck?" "Did you fix the future yet?" "What do I drop in the past?" None of us wanted to face the next scene without the others. We needed to make it out together somehow.
Jump to the present day: the cousins bought the remastered edition, hoping to brave it again with better rigs and renewed bravado, but none of us has installed it yet. We're the kind of cousins who power through the houses in Phasmophobia together but can't bring ourselves to revisit the mansion in Day of the Tentacle Remastered. It sits in our libraries, owned but untouched, and I think we all know why. Turns out you can outgrow a game but not the childhood dread.
Reanimal – Dan Street-Phillips
Ten years ago, a small Swedish game studio, Tarsier, launched Little Nightmares, a horror platform puzzle game seeing children work through nightmarish fantasies. This series has since become hugely popular trilogy because of its atmospheric soundtrack and uniquely creepy design especially with inappropriately young players.
In 2026, their newest world was published in Reanimal. The story follows a brother and sister duo, as they survive a flooded, hellish version of their home island, which has become inhabited by hostile creatures, while attempting to save their three friends. This is the studio’s first time creating a local cooperative game, allowing each player to take on a sibling, which is what got me interested.
This world, maybe because it is meant to be set in a ‘real’ world, is truly haunting. The characters and creatures create a tortured hellscape which, with its skin crawling soundtrack, give me the goosebumps that I have not experienced since staying up to play the original Resident Evil in the dark back in the late 90s! One such character is a ‘slender-man’-like creature called Sniffer who can teleport through corpses and the army of slug like human skins that chase you. Yes, you read that right! I don’t think anything in the game tops those first few scenes as far as haunting horror but trust me when I say, this is not a game to play before bed!
Inside – Lauren Skinner
I love it when video games give you very little information, allowing you to unravel the mystery of the world you’ve been thrust into. This approach is particularly effective within the horror genre, and Inside is a masterclass in creating psychological dread through its unsettling, mysterious world.
The world of Inside feels empty at first, yet intensely watchful. There’s almost no music. Instead, the audio is filled with the boy’s heavy breathing, the wet thud of footsteps on concrete or branches, and the distant, mechanical clanking of industrial machinery. Whenever a sound does break the silence – like the sudden, aggressive bark of a guard dog, or the boom of a door slamming shut – it triggers a visceral spike of panic. And for good reason: to be detected is almost certain death, so you know you have to move fast.
The horror of this world lies not just in the dangers you have to avoid, but in the psychological horror of mass compliance. As you move from the initial outside sections into the city and eventually into the facility, you witness crowds of mindless, grey-skinned humans shuffling in perfect, robotic unison. They are being catalogued, tested, and moved like cattle. These sequences are very tense. To survive, you need to blend in, mimicking their movements perfectly under the gaze of surveillance cameras. The dread this time isn’t about being chased, but about the terrifying implication that you are the only thing out of step in a world where humanity has lost its free will.
The most insidious horror of this world is the twist. I won’t spoil it here, especially as part of the brilliance of the game is in its unravelling, but the dichotomy of running away versus being unwittingly drawn in is chilling.
There’s something worse about playing as a child in these games that make the world 10x scarier. You’re alone and defenceless. As a child, you should be looked after and shielded from these horrors, not forced to survive in a terrifying, unforgiving world. And that makes the world of Inside so much worse for me.
Wrap up
And there you have it! Which terrifying video game world will you explore this Halloween? Just make sure you don’t get too lost within them, or you might find yourself going mad with terror…
Whatever your preference, we Zatu bloggers wish you all an exciting spooky season!
