Survival horror games: about the games
The game takes place six years after the biological disaster in Raccoon City. Leon S. Kennedy, one of its survivors, tracks the president’s kidnapped daughter to a secluded European village, where something is seriously wrong with the locals. It combines action and adventure elements in a survival horror setting, with modernized gameplay, a reimagined storyline and detailed graphics.
SILENT HILL: Townfall is a first-person psychological horror in which Simon Ordell returns to the island of St. Amelia to ‘put things right’. He finds a town blanketed in thick fog, seemingly abandoned, and gradually uncovers fragments of his past. Players must evade threats, fight with melee weapons or firearms, and tune the portable CRTV television to unstable signals that drive story-based puzzles. The game is set in Scotland in 1996.
Metro Exodus is set in 2036, roughly a quarter-century after a nuclear war. You play as Artyom, who leaves the ruins of the Moscow Metro and leads a group of Spartan Rangers eastward in search of a new life across the vast wilderness of post-apocalyptic Russia. The game offers large non-linear levels that mix action, stealth and survival horror, and you scavenge materials in the field to craft and customize your handmade weapons. The story covers an entire year, from spring and summer through autumn into the depths of nuclear winter, and your decisions determine what happens to your companions.
The Outlast Trials is an Action, Adventure and Indie game set during the Cold War. The Murkoff Corporation involuntarily recruits people as test subjects for advanced brainwashing and mind control methods. Trials can be played alone or in a team of two to four players, and the goal is to survive them and complete the therapy. Players hide from enemies and flee from them, earning and upgrading tools for stealth, escape, stunning, blinding or healing. Players can also customize their own patient character and cell.
The seventh entry in the Resident Evil series is set in present-day rural America, in an abandoned farmhouse in the south where fear and isolation are ever-present. It marks a major shift for the series to a first-person view, which its creators call ‘Isolated View’, and relies on a photorealistic style built on Capcom’s new RE Engine to make the horror feel closer and more immersive. Following the events of Resident Evil 6, the game draws on exploration and a tense atmosphere — the elements that gave rise to the term ‘survival horror’ some twenty years earlier — while fully rebuilding its gameplay systems.
A first-person action game set in an open world overrun by a mysterious virus epidemic and hordes of the infected. You roam a devastated city, climbing over obstacles to reach rooftops and remote areas, scavenging for supplies and crafting weapons, fighting gory battles in which the environment and various weapon types can be used to your advantage. At sundown the hunter becomes the hunted, and up to four players can join forces to take on the story campaign together.
An action-adventure for up to four players in co-op: explorers hunt for treasure in a cursed jungle where monstrous creatures that warp reality lurk. A madness system inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s oppressive atmosphere distorts perception, blurs the line between reality and illusion and breeds paranoia in the group. Aboard the galleon they sign a contract with the captain and get gear in exchange for treasures brought back, while abandoned forts hold logbooks that unlock new starting points. They venture deeper in search of The Mound, said to hide riches beyond imagination.
Little Nightmares is a horror adventure in which you take on the role of Six, a lone child lost aboard a massive metal vessel known as the Maw, surrounded by dangerous, distorted versions of adults. Six wakes up in a damp, dark room with a brass lighter as her only possession and no memory of how she got there. The Residents have only one use for children, so you must stay hidden, move carefully, sometimes create a distraction, and use your small stature to slip through passages too tiny for adults to reach. At other times the only option left is to run and stay alive long enough to get somewhere they cannot follow.
Dead Rising is an action horror game in which you play as photojournalist Frank West, who investigates the zombie outbreak at the Willamette Mall. After fleeing a small suburban town overrun by the undead into the shopping centre, Frank must survive endless waves of enemies by using almost anything from the stores as a weapon. Time keeps running in real time whether or not the player is active, and zombies grow stronger and faster after dark. Photographing the chaos brings rewards, and helping other survivors can reveal what caused the epidemic.
Four interwoven storylines, each with its own pair of protagonists, mix action with horror. Leon S. Kennedy, Chris Redfield and Ada Wong, joined by new characters including Jake Muller, confront the C-virus as events move between North America, the war-torn Eastern European state of Edonia and the Chinese city of Lanshiang. Play solo or in two-player co-op, offline or online; at key moments the Crossover mechanic brings up to four players together. Agent Hunt mode lets players join the enemy side inside another running session, and skill points upgrade the character.
Scorn is an atmospheric first-person horror adventure set in a nightmarish world of strange forms and a gloomy tapestry. The isolated and disoriented player explores interconnected regions in any order, each a maze of rooms and paths with its own theme, puzzles and characters. The story is told entirely in-game, without cut-scenes. Objects are picked up with the character’s hands, and machines are operated by grabbing their controls. The limited loadout and ammunition demand careful choices about when to fight and when to take cover.
James returns to Silent Hill, the town where he and his late wife shared so many memories, after a letter from her reaches him. He finds a ghost town cloaked in thick fog and prowled by disturbing monsters, and he must confront them, solve puzzles and search for traces of his wife. By the lake he meets a woman named Maria who resembles her strikingly. This remake of SILENT HILL 2 introduces an over-the-shoulder camera, an expanded map with once-inaccessible and newly added locations, and a reworked combat system with timed dodges and aiming down sights.