Top 10 Scariest Horror Games From the 2010s That Are Still Terrifying

The 2010s gave horror games plenty of ways to scare you, from hiding in lockers while something hunts you to questioning whether anything around you is even real. Some relied on helplessness, others on atmosphere, and a few were perfectly happy making you regret opening the next door.

The best part is that many of these games haven’t aged out of their scares. Here are 10 horror games from the decade that can still make a perfectly reasonable person reconsider playing with the lights off.

10 SOMA (2015)

Frictional Games followed Amnesia: The Dark Descent with something considerably more interested in existential dread. Set in the underwater PATHOS-II research facility, SOMA surrounds you with machines, monsters and questions about consciousness that become increasingly uncomfortable. Its horror is less about constant pursuit and more about the things you keep thinking about after you stop playing.

9 INSIDE (2016)

Playdead’s INSIDE isn’t technically a horror game, but calling it a puzzle platformer and leaving it there would undersell how disturbing it becomes. Without spoiling anything: you guide a young boy through an oppressive world filled with unsettling experiments, strange machinery and some wonderfully grim surprises. Its sparse storytelling gives the disturbing imagery plenty of room to linger.

8 Until Dawn (2015)

Supermassive Games took the classic teen slasher formula and made you responsible for deciding who gets to see sunrise. Until Dawn uses branching decisions and its Butterfly Effect system to make even seemingly harmless choices matter later. The result is a horror game where knowing the rules doesn’t help much when your own decisions can get someone killed.

7 Blair Witch (2019)

Bloober Team’s Blair Witch puts you in the Black Hills Forest searching for a missing boy, which is already a terrible place to be if you’ve seen the film. The game leans into disorientation, paranoia and the forest’s oppressive atmosphere, with Bullet, your dog companion, providing a rare source of comfort. It isn’t flawless, but getting lost among those trees still works.

6 Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017)

Through Biohazard, Capcom took Resident Evil back toward survival horror with a first person perspective, limited resources and one extremely unpleasant Louisiana household. The Baker family remains the star attraction, but the claustrophobic setting and constant uncertainty make something as ordinary as exploration feel stressful. It also proved that the series could successfully reinvent its perspective without losing the elements that made it famous.

5 Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010)

Frictional Games helped redefine modern survival horror with Amnesia, where fighting back isn’t your default solution and darkness itself becomes a problem. Daniel’s journey through Castle Brennenburg turns hiding, running and conserving resources into survival skills. More importantly, the game’s influence can still be felt across the first person horror games that followed it.

4 The Evil Within Series (2014, 2017)

Shinji Mikami’s return to survival horror produced a series that isn’t particularly interested in letting you feel comfortable. The Evil Within throws Sebastian Castellanos through grotesque enemies, traps and constantly shifting environments, while The Evil Within 2 expands the formula with more freedom to explore. The games can be messy, but their creature design remains seriously unpleasant.

3 Dead Space 2 (2011)

Dead Space 2 gives Isaac Clarke more weapons and considerably more confidence than the original, but that doesn’t make the Sprawl any safer. Visceral Games doubled down on body horror, disturbing sound design and enemies that can turn a routine encounter into chaos. It is more action-heavy than several games here, yet its best moments still know exactly when to make you uncomfortable.

2 Outlast Series (2013, 2017)

Red Barrels designed Outlast around one particularly cruel idea: you have a camera, but not a weapon. Miles Upshur’s investigation of Mount Massive quickly turns into a desperate exercise in running, hiding and hoping whatever is chasing you chooses somewhere else to look. Outlast 2 changed the setting and expanded the formula, but the original (along with its DLC, Whistleblower) remains the series’ defining nightmare.

1 Alien: Isolation (2014)

Creative Assembly somehow made a game from 2014 that still feels like it arrived several years ahead of everything else. Alien: Isolation understood that the Xenomorph didn’t need scripted jump scares when an unpredictable, constantly hunting creature could create its own. Sevastopol Station remains one of the best horror settings in games, with every vent, locker and distant metallic clang enough to make you rethink your next move.

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— Alien: Isolation 2 (@AlienIsolation) April 26, 2026

And after more than a decade, the developer has earned another chance to show everyone how it’s done. Alien: Isolation 2 was officially revealed at Summer Game Fest on June 5, 2026, with Creative Assembly returning and Unreal Engine 5 powering the sequel. Few horror games have aged this well, so seeing the studio take another shot at that formula is a particularly exciting prospect.

Which game from the 2010s still scares you the most, and is there another horror classic you think deserved a spot here? Let us know in the comments below!