Horror Games
Dark corridors, a torch with a battery, and something that is definitely behind you.
36 games · hand-picked, then filled from the catalogue
Horror is the genre that survives being small best, which is why browser horror is better than it has any right to be.
How this list is put together
A big-budget shooter loses badly when you strip out the graphics budget. A horror game barely notices. What frightens people is not detail, it is not knowing: a corridor that goes further than the torch reaches, a sound with no source, the thirty seconds between hearing the thing and seeing it. All of that is cheap to build and none of it needs a graphics card.
Two shapes dominate the list. First-person survival, where you are in a house looking for keys while something else is also in the house — the flashlight is the real mechanic, because it defines exactly how much you are allowed to know. And top-down or side-on chase games, which trade atmosphere for pure panic and are usually over in three minutes.
Straightforwardly: this is not a collection for young children. Jump scares and chases are the point of it, not an accident. If that is what you came for, the safe games for kids list is built on the opposite rule and excludes everything on this page.
Questions people ask
Are these suitable for children?
No, and this is the one collection on the site where we say that outright. Jump scares, darkness and chase sequences are the entire mechanic. If you are looking for something for a young child, use our safe games for kids collection instead.
Do I need headphones?
Not required, but horror is largely an audio genre. Most of the tension in these games is built out of footsteps, breathing and silence, and playing them muted removes most of what they are doing.
Will these run on an old laptop?
The 2D and top-down ones will. The first-person 3D ones lean on dynamic lighting — a torch beam in a dark room is expensive to draw — so on a weak machine expect the frame rate to drop exactly when things get busy.