It's Critter Time!

I loooove indie horror games. There's a quality to them that is substantially different than anything made by a AAA dev team that adds to its environment. I think my fav types of these are the low-poly 3D ones. Example being Fears to Fathom which is a pretty easy pick for a fav, I think!

I also love Employee of the Month which was a bit more niche than I'd like it to be. Employee of the Month is a surreal horror game about working the nightshift at a grocery store, but every time you complete it, it takes you to an alternate reality of said grocery store that adds a new mechanic to the gameplay. And the whole time, there's a puzzle you need to solve across various sub-levels. There's also some comedic elements to it too that I enjoy.

Voices of the Void is another easy pick too. I looove the sandbox feel of it tho, and would heavily enjoy making something like it when I get the experience to! There's just something about being alone and finding alll these neat little side horrors to this grand world you are in that doesn't need to be solved, but you're just too curious to not let it go.

Some other examples I enjoy are It Steals which does a good job with changing the mechanic of a simple premise; The Complex which is a neat atmospheric Backrooms exploration game; Bloodwash for its exploration vibes before the big scare and learning about what happened; Anatomy which does some good body horror stuff; No One Lives Under the Lighthouse for its eldritch horror themes and isolation; Stay Out of the House for its puzzle-solving and environment; and Rotten Flesh for its environment too.

In general, my favorite aspects of a horror game is the environment it puts you in! Things like the ambience, lighting, mood, the setting, should all mix together into a vibe that keeps you feeling alone and unsettled and on edge the whole time. Some of my fav settings are places that are isolated and lonely, such as a gas station or snowy cabin in the middle of the woods.

Anyway, these maaaay be pretty vanilla picks lol. So that's why I'm asking what is some other people's favorites! Wanna know if anyone has any good picks for this genre!

Big fan of The Exit 8 and Platform 8. They're very bite-sized experiences where you have to figure out if there are any anomalies in the segment. If there aren't, you go forward. If there are, you turn around and walk back.

The White Chamber is a really old time capsule that I remember playing back in the day, and it came out 2 years ago on Steam. Worth it if you're into 2000s deviantART "Silent Hill 2 is the best video game of all time" vibes.

Slitterhead is a bigger budget indie game (still self-published), and is headed up by one of the original creators of Silent Hill. It plays more like Forbidden Siren and it's a very strange action horror, but if you meet it on its own terms, it's essentially a PS2/PS3 era game with modern paint.

CARRION; a reverse horror game where you play a Thing™-like monster hunting humans.

The Final Station; a game about managing the citizens taking a long-distance train ride while the world ends around you.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet; where you are a spaceship on an insanely twisted shadow planet that is exploring and destroying evil things. Also a Metroidvania.

Oxenfree and Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals; two games about a strange island, strange radio signals and the groups of young adults that stumble upon them.

SIGNALIS; robot girls, robot girls in space, commensurate horrors and maybe even a little bit of love. I say any more, it's a spoiler.

Pacific Drive; the Olympic Exclusion Zone is an ever present danger. You and your trusty family wagon from the 80s must explore and survive the Zone before it kills you or worse.

I'm such a terrible judge when it comes to determining what is and isn't Indie and/or Horror anymore, I'm not sure what I'd recommend. I'm not even sure what I personally consider my favorite of the things that I feel have both adjectives apply to them.

Anyway, the white chamber is still available for free here, if someone would rather try it before they purchase it off Steam.

Maybe Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners? An RPG Maker horror game circa PC-98, not unlike the very first Corpse Party, that was translated to English by the Memories of Fear group who have very many other (mostly indie horror) games in their translated library here (you might recognize NARAKU in there as Purgatory). Peret em Heru has a lot of branching paths so there's actually quite a lot of content in comparison to some other much shorter and linear RPG Maker horror experiences. It also still somewhat embraces its original engine, though, which might be a turn-off for people used to more modern RPG Maker horror titles that try to avoid it wholesale, but I found that it uses it well by making the battle sprites and backgrounds seem more like a Visual Novel's in its fights and not really concentrating on its mechanics.

BrownSugar/Gretchen4441's games are all very unique in their presentation so they might be worth an experience, though they are more surreal and confusing rather than horrific, I feel? A Vague Story, Patty & Mr. Miles, A Bomb Called Darkipt, and Pippi have all had English translations. They all at least deal with somewhat dark themes, at the least, I feel? Again, I feel like I'm a terrible judge of the genre. They're all very pretty, though, so I recommend giving them a look for the art if nothing else. I think they're all made in Wolf RPG Editor, but I could be wrong.

bury, a horror-ish Wolf RPG Editor game that benefits from knowledge of Western(?) nursery rhymes and children's fables, got an author-approved English translation patch by YamikazeYami at some point. Since it was highly desired for a while due to its author not wanting anyone to translate (and still not wanting anyone to stream it in certain ways, from what I can gather of their guidelines post-machine-translation), it might be a bit of a let down for anyone expecting too much, but I felt like it's a pretty good puzzle exploration horror game.

Practically everything vgperson has translated is heavily steeped in horror (including some of the games not on her Horror-style section, in my opinion) and most of the games she's worked on have gotten re-released on Steam. Stand-out amongst these, and I might be heavily biased in favor of (I voiced a character in the latest), are Uri's The Strange Men series made in RPG Maker. They're all pretty much self-contained little surreal stories somehow revolving around their titular Man in some shape, way, or form, and feature lots of bad endings and outcomes on their way to their proper one(s). That series aside, Uri's other works such as Paranoiac and Mermaid Swamp are also great, though I haven't played the remakes vgperson's currently hosting yet and have no idea how to get the translated original anymore, so your mileage may vary. Steam releases are here (I opted out of getting paid for the voice acting I did, if I remember right).

Unlike vgperson, Tosiaki7 of WindyFall fame does not make sure their RPG Maker translated titles are free of Japanese text and dependencies internally and therefore will require either changing or emulating Japanese locale as well as obtaining the relevant engine versions' Japanese RunTimePackages. Still, their translations for the Paranormal Syndrome series are good. The games in question feature pretty modern Japanese urban myths and horror stories as their elements, and are relatively long in my opinion.

The rest of each translation groups or translators' libraries are all also good, though they might either be shorter games or didn't stand out to me as much as the rest when I thought about recommending them. I strongly recommend peeking and giving each of them a try, though, since I still feel there's no better judge for what entertains someone than themselves and their own experiences.

Translations aside, there's also games like Lily's Well and Close Your Eyes that I'd encourage giving a try. Lots of things to discover in the former, and a relatively interesting and relatively linear experience in the latter, which gets expanded upon in the still-being-updated-remake from its author (who has three other free titles on Steam- I feel DuskGolem/AestheticGamer's work is less horrific and more bizarre, surreal, and grotesque, though).

Further, top-down-ish third person horror games aside: IMSCARED and Mirror Layers are real good . The free original of the former is still hosted on GameJolt here, and the latter here as the Asylum Jam 2016 version.

I should probably mention that Mirror Layers expects people to collaborate , so it's sort of an asynchronous co-op experience.

Lone Survivor is a 2d horror game that I've had languishing in my library since school, its inspired by Silent Hill and its endings depends on if you kill any of the monsters, if you sleep a lot, and if you use the mirrors for fast travel for some examples of what affects the story.

It's pretty light as far as horror goes, but I was really captivated by last year's Crow Country.

The game is a love letter to the early 3D survival horror of the late 1990s, and wears its inspiration (from the Resident Evil series) on its sleeve. What stands out about the game, particularly at first glance, is the visual style. You could describe it as "what if they made an entire survival horror game in the style of the FFVII overworld?", and it really works to invoke the spirit of the PSX era they're shooting for.
The puzzles are pretty solid, though I will confess that there are a couple that border on "early 90s adventure game logic). That being said, there's also a good mystery to get to the bottom of, with more than a few twists in the plot! The setting of "abandoned amusement park" is pretty neat, too.

I had a really good time with this one, and I highly recommend Crow Country if you have the inclination for some throwback survival horror.

Phorm The Vixdjinn wrote: Sat Jul 19, 2025 1:52 pm It's pretty light as far as horror goes, but I was really captivated by last year's Crow Country.

Oh!! I forgot to look into Crow Country when it came out! It looks interested from what I could tell, guess I should find time to check it out then :3

I would like to recommend The Uncle Who Works At Nintendo, a text-based physiological/cosmic horror and my favourite twine game ever. It's the late 90s and you're eleven years old. You're having a sleepover at your best friend's house. They own lots of different games and consoles that you've never seen before, and they know all sorts of cool tricks and secrets. They also claim to have a mysterious Uncle Who Works At Nintendo, and he's coming home to visit at midnight. Perhaps you'll meet him!

There's this sense of unease that grows throughout the evening as you slowly realise that something feels wrong, the sound-design and visual effects are excellent, and unlocking the True Ending involves some incredibly clever mechanics and a hugely satisfying resolution. But what really makes this game special is how it works as an allegory for toxic gamer culture and how it will harm the people you care about unless we can find a way to break the cycle (context: this game was released in late 2014)

World of Horror: My favorite indie horror game by far. A roguelike where you investigate dozens of original horror scenarios, many inspired by Junji Ito and H.P. Lovecraft. Striking art style and creepy, memorable stories throughout its many hours of content.

Teocida: Precision/puzzle platformer with an unsettling body horror aesthetic. The plot is every bit as thought provoking as the puzzles, discussing the deep philosophical implications of what it means to live authentically while facing the threats of authoritarianism.

No-Skin: After a long day at work, some guy without skin appears in your apartment, and he's going to punish you by showing you what your friends really think of you until you return his skin to him. Similar to World of Horror's RPG-meets-visual-novel style gameplay, with lots of mindbending meta secrets.

Proximate: What if the cast of Sealab 2021 were extremely queer, and also mad scientists? Unsurprisingly, the results of this hypothetical scenario are catastrophic, and the employers of this crew have sent you to figure out what happened to the valuable assets they were working on when they lost contact. The catch is that your only means of navigation is an experimental visor that can only tell you its best guess of what's in front of you and how far away that object is, and you are otherwise blind throughout your forensic analysis of the facility and the events that transpired therein.