With Halloween just around the corner, a lot of people are excited to get their fright on! If you’re nerdy like me and can’t dress up and go trick or treating anymore, but still want to celebrate in some way, you’re probably gonna want to play some nice horror games.
While, there’s a lot of great titles to choose from, I think there’s a few horror games out there that are severely overrated. So, if you plan on staying up all night playing games, here’s a short list of some of the most overrated horror games that you should probably stay away from if you truly want to be terrified this Hallow’s Eve!
Five Nights at Freddy’s
A lot of people think that Five Nights at Freddy’s is one of the scariest games ever; up there with AAA horror games, such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. But, I simply don’t see the appeal in FNAF at all. The game completely runs off of jumpscares and, while the first couple of jumpscares, might get you if you’re caught off guard, it can get pretty stale fast.
I think FNAF capitalizes on only a small part of what makes a horror game gripping and terrifying for players through its use of jumpscares. Sure a well placed jumpscare can really spike up your adrenaline and invoke some serious horror and fright and a lot of great horror games know how to do that well. However, there’s a lot more that goes into a horror game besides a few jumpscares.
Great horror games like Resident Evil and Until Dawn do a phenomenal job on establishing a very uncomfortable world that the player is thrust into. The creepy isolated setting, the disturbing and grotesque enemies on the hunt for you, the limited mechanics that make you feel helpless or cautious for every move you make. All these elements pushed to their utmost limit, help create a truly terrifying experience for the player. Five Nights at Freddy’s just seems lacking in these areas.
You control a security guard whose job is to keep watch over a bootleg Chuck E Cheese. You pretty much just sit there watching cameras making sure the animatronics don’t sneak up and attack you by closing doors to your control room all while making sure you don’t run out of electricity by the night’s end. There’s no sense of dire survival implemented into the game’s mechanics. You’re not attacking or running away from the animatronics. You’re just simply closing doors on them, which doesn’t really invoke a lot of immediacy from the player. To me, FNAF just seems like a cheap, redundant, and mediocre horror experience not worth picking up.
Dead Space Series
Dead Space has the potential of being a great horror game series, but it fails in certain areas to become one of the greats. Now I really enjoyed the first Dead Space game. The game takes place in space (hence the name Dead Space) where you control Issac Clarke, a ship system engineer who travels with a crew on the USG Ishimura to investigate a distress signal coming from a nearby ship. Once you get there, however, most of your crew is killed and you have to fight for survival against horrible monstrosities, known as “Necromorphs”, which are actually humans transformed by an unknown alien genetic virus.
Instead of bluntly shooting enemies like in other horror titles, the key to defeating them is to use mining weapons you find on the ship to dismember the Necromorph’s limbs, opening themselves up for a brutal killing. It forces you to strategically tackle different enemies and adapt to changing situations.
It has a great premise with a cool blend of sci-fi/survival horror and the combat forces you to think while terrifying, grotesque monsters charge at you adding to the intensity and horror to the overall experience. So, I know what you’re thinking. “Dean this game sounds awesome and doesn’t seem overrated at all, why is it even on this list?” Well, while this game is great, it’s sequels really hurt the franchise making it seem very sub-par in the horror genre.
The first game is great, but Dead Space 2 and 3 don’t really do anything different to add onto the suspense of the first game. In fact, it’s very repetitive and repetition is what destroys the heart pounding, edge of your seat experience that makes horror games great. The settings are different in the sequels and there’s a couple new weapons added to the mix, but the game more or less plays the same. You have the same Necromorphs coming after you, with the same loadout, and with the same outcomes.
Really the only things that have significantly changed in future titles are the graphics and the overarching storyline that gets to the root of where this virus comes from and what it means for humanity. These are all great things, but it’s hard to really appreciate them when the gameplay has been beaten to death with little to no change in the formula.
It became so uninteresting to me that by the time the 3rd game came around I only played about 20 minutes of it before I got bored and decided to play something else because by that point I knew what to expect. Any games, but especially horror games, that have that level of predictability to them become less and less interesting and really takes away from the immersion you have in the game.
Bloodborne
I don’t know why people have thrown this game into the horror genre because it is NOT a horror game. Bloodborne is basically Dark Souls set in a Lovecraftian world. While H.P Lovecraft did write a lot of disturbing horror fiction novels and the game definitely takes inspiration from the mind of Lovecraft, I don’t really consider this a horror game.
There’s no scary ambient music, no dark areas, no survival mechanics, nothing that really makes a horror game frightening. I will admit, however, the overall look and feel of the world and enemies can give you chills. There have been many times when I’ve look at an enemy or a boss and I had a “What the Hell is that?” moment where I’m just staring at this abomination in front me wondering how in the world did this character get like this. But, I’ve never really been scared or had great jolts of horror while playing this game.
I think people focus so much on the disturbing Lovecraftian visuals that they toss Bloodborne into the horror genre. However, just because something looks disturbing and crippled, doesn’t necessarily make it horrifying. Like FNAF with jumpscares, the visual and overall look of the world is just a piece of what makes a horror game gripping. I think players have been putting too much emphasis on Bloodbrone’s graphics, mistaking it for a true horror game.
I was more disturbed playing Bloodborne than actually scared and I’m not sure where people are coming from when they say this is a genuine horror game. Bloodborne doesn’t come anywhere close to big shot horror game titles like Resident Evil or Alien: Isolation because, at its core, it's a game based on skill and exploration and doesn’t belong in the horror genre.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood
Rush of Blood is a virtual reality experience that is praised as a crazy and terrifying VR thrill ride. In the game you strap on a Playstation VR headset and are taken on a rollercoaster ride through a disturbing theme park shooting targets and dodging projectiles thrown at you by the environment or enemies.
Many critics laud this game as an intense thrill ride that “will strike fear into the hearts of every trigger happy shoot-em up arcade fan. While the game is fun, I wouldn’t really push the “horror” aspect of the game as much as these critics do in their reviews.
Horror is definitely something Rush of Blood tries to accomplish in this game, but really, at it’s heart, it’s just an arcade shoot-em up. There’s not a lot of scary elements into this game that makes my heart pound in fear in any way. There’s also no survival elements put into the game to make you feel like your in danger in any way and the environment itself isn’t all that terrifying.
I believe where this game gets its thrills from is not so much the world it’s set in, but the VR functionality and the effects it has on the player. When you feel like you are being thrust around in a metal cart shooting zombies and masked serial killers it’s easy to get rattled by jumpscares and charging enemies. However, once you get used to the disorientating motion of the VR, the game kinda loses some of that intensity.
Now if you’re someone who gets really turned around by VR games this might be a great horror game for you. However, if you’re like me and not too bothered by VR, the game loses its horror-ness.
In my time playing this game, I’ve been so focused on shooting targets and getting a decent score that the jumpscares and thrilling moments that were supposed to scare me didn’t have much of an affect.
The game is disturbing though, I’ll give it that. There’s zombies trying to eat you and pigs being butchered right in front of your eyes, but those moments made me go more “Ewww” than “Ahhhh!” if you get what I’m saying.
I think out of all the games on this list, this one is defintely up for interpretation. It all kinda depends on who you are and your own personal experience playing through it, but I do think this game gets a little too much hype for being a horror game, especially when there are scarier VR titles out there like Resident Evil 7.
That’s about it for me. I’m gonna collect some of my favorite horror titles and prepare for my night of fight. Which horror game do you think is overrated? What’s your favorite horror game to play? Comment below and I’ll see you next time!
Dean Willms
~Gamer. Designer. Friend
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