The 13 Greatest Horror Game Franchises

Resident Evil first came out in 1996, but it wasn't long before sequels were being made for the incredibly popular new take on the zombie genre of horror. The games of the franchise feature an immense backstory and lore, which has helped the games to develop into one of the most successful horror video game franchises of all time. In addition to movies, there are live-action and animated films, tie-in novels, comic books, and more.

What Makes It So Creepy: Resident Evil is the reason the market eventually became flooded with zombie games, comics, films, and television series. It singlehandedly revived the genre in the late 1990s, and it blew up from there. The zombies in the first Resident Evil game are decidedly frightening, but as the franchise evolved, so too did its monsters, and each game offers up something newer and scarier than whichever title came before it.

The first game in the Silent Hill franchise was released in 1999, and since then, there have been a total of seven sequels and four spinoffs. On top of those, there are comic books, films, and more, which make the franchise one of the heavy hitters in terms of adaptations into other media. The games are all set in the town of Silent Hill, where a great deal of psychological horror is used to freak the players out as much as possible.

What Makes It So Creepy: The first game dealt with a cult that wanted to revive a god, and to make that happen, some seriously sick stuff has to go down. The player takes the role of Harry Mason as he searches for his adopted daughter in a town that has literally hone to Hell. Each subsequent game delves deeper into the nature of death and various psychological elements that lend themselves very well to the survival horror genre. Many of the enemies are disturbing perversions of humanity, and they are all more frightening than the last.

Dead Space first began with a little game by Electronic Arts that showed up on the PC and major consoles in 2008. From there, two sequels were released in 2011 and 2013, but that's not all players got a chance to play. There are three spinoff games, and the franchise has developed into novels, comic books, audiobooks, and more.

What Makes It So Creepy: The Dead Space franchise is set in the 26th century, but space exploration is full of deadly environments, and some of the scariest undead monsters in all of horror fiction. They are creepy amalgams similar to The Thing, but only after it incorporated a ton of dead and dying people into its forms. There are a lot of environmental challenges in the Dead Space series, but lurking behind any corner could be something so disturbing, you may just hit save, crawl under your bedspread, and give going to sleep a shot.

The first game in the Outlast franchise hit windows in 2013, and the following year, it found its way to the major consoles. As of 2020, there have been a total of three games in the franchise, though more are in development with expected releases sometime in 2021. The series revolves around a freelance investigative journalist named Miles Upshur, who figured it would be a good idea to investigate a remote psychiatric hospital deep in the mountains of Lake Country, Colorado.

What Makes It So Creepy: The hospital isn't what it seems, and due to the unethical experiments carried out by the Murkoff Corporation, the inmates have mutated into murderous psychopathic monsters called "Variants." These monsters love jumping out and surprising the player with their desire to eat them, and they don't go down easy. As you go deeper into what makes Outlast such a compelling horror game, the threats only intensify, as does the creep-factor!

Fatal Frame is a longstanding series that first began on the PlayStation 2 in 2001. The games are set in 1980s Japan, with each title focusing on a separate location plagued with supernatural events. The players use Camera Obscura to capture and pacify spirits, which leads to the furthering of the story and the history of the dead. Fatal Frame has released seven games and spinoffs in the franchise, with the most recent having hit the WiiU in 2014.

What Makes It So Creepy: Fatal Frame games rely heavily on traditional Japanese horror elements, which include a great deal of supernatural horror in the form of poltergeists. Capturing them and learning about them is about as creepy as a game can get, but it's not anything like Ghostbusters, so don't make that mistake. There's no comedy in a Fatal Frame game, so make sure you have a hearty constitution, or you might find yourself losing sleep out of fear of what might be lurking just out of view...

Five Nights at Freddy's is a point-and-click survival horror game that first came out back in 2014, and has since seen a total of 25 sequels, spinoffs, and updates. That's rather impressive, seeing as the game is the brainchild of one man, but popularity dictated that the market wanted more, and that's exactly what the market got! The games are centered on the players, who take control of a security guard who must keep an eye on the characters as they wander the restaurant at night. Each game in the franchise added to that format, and it continues to expand into horrifically creepy nightmare fuel the likes of which most gamers haven't seen before.

What Makes It So Creepy: If you've ever been to a Chuck E Cheese or even a ShowBiz Pizza back in the day, you likely know how creepy those animatronic creatures were. Now, imagine you were locked inside the place with those same creepy robots, only they are on the hunt for you! That's Five Nights at Freedy's in a nutshell, and it uses relatively simplistic graphics, and beautifully placed jump scares to freak the player out whenever possible.