Spooky season is upon us again, and what better way to get into the spirit than by giving yourself a few cheap thrills? Thankfully, Xbox Game Pass is both cheap and thrilling, packed with spooky games of every size and style. Let’s take a look at just a few games you could use to scare the pants off your loved ones this Halloween.
Alien Isolation
The Creative Assembly’s accidental horror masterpiece, the first half of Alien Isolation is like playing through the best Alien movie 20th Century Fox forgot to make. It perfectly replicates the look and feel of Ridley Scott’s moody original film, asking the player to hustle around a derelict space station while a ravenous, predatory Xenomorph stalks the halls. These sequences are without a doubt some of the scariest moments in any licensed video game ever made. Hiding in a cupboard as the Xenomorph sweeps the room looking for you, hoping it doesn’t detect your presence, are among the most tense and thrilling moments in any survival horror game of the last decade. A must-play.
Back 4 Blood
Let’s say you’re not planning on heading out for Halloween, but are preparing to have a nice night online with friends. Back 4 Blood has you covered. The spiritual successor to the Left 4 Dead series, Back 4 Blood is a game about working with your friends to overcome rapacious zombie hordes, stay prepared for any threat, and escape your terrifying situation unscathed. Every run changes up enemy spawn locations so you never know what may be hiding right around the corner. It’s moody, atmospheric, and just a little bit dumb. Perfect for a Halloween evening of multiplayer nonsense.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
I cannot stress this enough: if you are the sort of person who suffers from audio processing issues or disorders, you should probably avoid Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. This is a game that strikes at the dark heart of untreated mental health, and the way it manifests the contortions of Senua’s mind are occasionally an assault on the senses. So, consider yourself warned. For everyone else, Senua’s Sacrifice is a dark, scary single-player voyage into the mind of a person who requires a great deal of help. It is a remarkable game, honest and unflinching about the issues it wants to draw attention to, and is unafraid to terrify you with the depth of its honesty. Turn the lights down, put on your best pair of headphones, and let it unnerve the living hell out of you. There are spooky games on the Xbox, and then there’s Hellblade.
Alice: Madness Returns
C’mon. You gotta respect the classics.
The Evil Within 1 & 2
Directed by Mr. Resident Evil himself, Shinji Mikami, both The Evil Within games represent some of the very best “classical” survival horror games in recent memory. Mikami brings all of the lessons of his work on spooky games like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis to bear, with genuinely terrifying results. That Bethesda has only produced two of these games is, to me, a very strange situation. Both games are so good that I’m stunned they aren’t churning a new one out every other year. Well worth playing if you’ve never had the pleasure.
Kentucky Route Zero
Kentucky Route Zero, as anyone who has played it will attest, is not a horror game per se, but it is certainly very spooky and unnerving. The game is about a truck driver named Conway and the strange people he encounters as he attempts to cross Kentucky’s mysterious Route Zero, on his way to make one last delivery for his employer. There are no puzzles or specific gameplay challenges. Everything Kentucky Route Zero wants to do is tied to storytelling and the building of atmosphere. It is a one-of-a-kind point-and-click adventure, one you won’t be able to put down once you start, and one you will not ever forget once you finish it.
Immortality
One of the year’s biggest surprises, Immortality is the latest game from Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow. It’s a spooky full-motion video game that launched on Xbox Game Pass earlier this year. It tasks the player with scrubbing through behind-the-scenes footage from the career of an actress about whom little is known. What begins as an exercise is scratching at the surface soon gives way to a terrifying, unsettling examination of celebrity and Hollywood mythmaking. One of the year’s best games, and overlooked by a great many, it well worth diving into with a stiff drink by your side.
Scorn
For those who couldn’t get enough Giger in their diet from Alien Isolation, Scorn is the game for you. A near-silent exploratory puzzle game set in one of the grossest, weirdest, body-horror worlds ever committed to a video game. You will know right away if this game is for you. (It might also help if you like solving puzzles because Scorn does very little to help you out where solutions are concerned).
Soma
A survival horror game set on a remote underwater research facility full of machines that exhibit curiously human traits. A truly horrifying experience. Play it with friends around you for best effect.
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