Liminal Horror is more about how your character evolves closer to cosmic weirdness, but isn’t about your psychology so much as mutations.

So Unknown Armies is a horror game that does use a "sanity points" type system that's really good, but it does other stuff too.

I'd argue that most of the horror in UA isn't about what you experience, it's about what you do. I wouldn't say that unique to this game but Unknown Armies definitely leans hard into it.

Simple example is a very popular character type called an adept. Adepts are the actual wizards of UA, who can lay curses and see the future and hurt people with magical spells. There's laws that magick follows (and we love talking about them on r/unknownarmies), but what you need to know is that 1) magick comes from obsession with relatively mundane but mystically significant things like drinking, money, identity and sex, 2) In order to use your magick you have to engage with that thing in specific, inconvenient ways and 3) there's things you can't do or you lose all your magick.

A lot of the horror in being an adept comes from when you have to pick between being a wizard and being a person. Like there's adepts who are TV sorcerers and have power as long as they never miss their show. So you can have really intense scenes where things are going down and you're counting down in-game minutes until the show is over (as a personal example).

A lot of this is mechanically reinforces with the sanity-points stuff, but the real in-your-heart horror comes from the player making the choice.

There's other stuff too, like rituals that have really scary ingredients, or how if you want to be a god (but not really, but actually, yeah, basically, kind of) the universe will throw a huge-ass test at you right at the point of Ascension, or how you can make deals with demons.

It's all kind of outside the mechanics, which makes it all about choices which makes it so much better/worse.

Alien has a « panic » mechanic. Not quite sanity and really fun game to boot.

Check out Sleepaway! It's perfect for a medium length horror campaign. You play camp counselors at a summer camp that's not quite right and primed for cryptid encounters. There are even playbooks that you can only unlock after your first character has died. I think the give and take of the character interactions and the plot mechanics make it for a very fun fit for the genre of sleepaway camp horror. Mega-bonus if you're running in-person games and can have fun with the in-person ritual stuff.

Carved from Brindlewood games have a mechanic called Branches (renamed in each game; Crowns in Brindlewood Bay, Masks in The Between, Keys in Public Access...), where there's a finite list of checkbox prompts on each character sheet. These are usually split into two categories, one that slowly reveals your backstory as flashbacks and another that increasingly ensnares you in the supernatural. Players mark them to upgrade misses and partial successes on rolls.

I should also say that they're my favorite mystery/horror games on the market right now.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem introduced a 4th-wall-breaking insanity system which created some amazing scenarios. From strange flashbacks, to glitches of characters walking through floors, to the screen even saying the game was broken and so many more, this was brilliant interactivity in a horror game.

Alien Isolation has the best stalker AI. It's pretty innovative.

In the Siren games you can see through the enemies' eyes, which helps with stealth.

In Fatal Frame you can only fight by taking pictures of the ghosts.

Perception had you playing as a blind woman who had to use echolocation to find her way around a haunted house.

The Medium has a split screen where you see the real world amd the spirit world at the same time. Sometimes it is a side-by-side split, sometimes it is the top and bottom of the screen. Sometimes you can only see one or the other.

Still Wakes the Deep was an amazing (scottish) experiance. Im not sure what I liked more in that game, but everything felt so... organic.

Its The Thing and Color Out of Space on the sea.

I want to suggest Labyrinth of the Demon King!

It's a mostly melee focused dungeon crawler style game where you are a soldier who goes to kill the demon king to avenge his lord. It has a really thick atmosphere going on, the setting is cool and the music and sound from my memory really creeps in with the PS1 style visuals making everything feel off in the good way.

The only real negative I find is the combat is a bit basic and clunky to start with but once you get a hang of it the game vibes hard. I have really high praise for Labyrinth and I'm always suggesting it to people!

May bw weird but From the Darkness is still perfect whwn I need a quick spooky

Yet to play narcosis. But yes these games are really good and fun

Played some of those. Indika was certainly a work of artistic expression, but it is also one of the most boring pieces of entertainment media I ever engaged with.

Song of Horror is a well-crafted game. It's small-scale survival horror with the nice twist that you get to play multiple characters. If one of your guys dies, just pick a new one. The problem is with the highly artificial difficulty. The only reason you will ever die in this game is the pure and utter jank of the controle. When you hide from a monster, you gotta do a stupid qte input to keep your character from freaking out. It works half the time at best. If you do what it says on screen, you fail. If you ignore the input instruction and go with the visual representation, you fail. And that is not to speak of idiotic scenarios in which a dead character with a gun just randomly shows up to instantly shoot your current character dead.

Aside from the well known great indie survival horror titles like Signalis, Crow Country and Conscript, I recommend:

In Sound Mind Evil Tonight Among Ashes The Excavation of Hob's Barrow Fear The Spotlight The Mute House

For something kind of similar to this concept, take a look at Who's Lila

So Deltarune it is :) 

Very good game, took me 24 hours to finish it.

I wouldn't call it a true roguelite, it's a survival-horror with some roguelite elements.

One thing i didn't like was the difficulty curve. chapter 1 is pretty hard, chapter 2 is very easy, beginning of chapter 3 is actually really hard, and after that, the game becomes very easy again.

Also, the combat feels weird, it's very hard to dodge every attack because the character is so slow, so you usually takes a lot of damage. But you have so much healing items that it's actually very hard to die.

Thanks for the nice write up, never heard of it till today but looks fairly interesting and I do like to support solo devs

This looks really well made and never heard of it until today, going to grab it on steam sale ty!

Withering Rooms is such a weird one. It becomes less and less of a rogue-like as you progress, and it becomes more of a Souls-like.

Your stats carry over between runs once you unlock the ability to level up, major quests and quest items carry over, and you can even bring all of your favorite gear between lives once you interact with enough altars to open up more permanent inventory slots.

None of this is a bad thing. It's a wonderfully weird little game that can really only exist in the indie space. Even if didn't have the rogue elements, it's doing great things like using an steadily accumulating curse bar for magic instead of your standard draining mana bar. You rarely see something this experimental in the big budget space. I'm really excited for Withering Realms later this year.

That good old looney tunes about hunting season with a twist.

There are several states player can be in, and there are several "hunting seasons" which can be known in advance (look for posters on the map) that allow hunters to kill the player in some specific states.

If the player is outside of the hunting season rules hunters will not attack. It is possible to survive being hunted, but it's hard and extremely dangerous. So the idea is to plan ahead, mark ways to change state on the map, or at least approximate initial positions of the hunters.

E.g. the player knows that current hunting season is red shirt, so has to change the shirt to blue. Next hunting season is black jeans, but other colors are nowhere to be found nearby. So the player can decide to dash back to last blue jeans quite a long way back and pray to get there in time until the season starts, risk exploring the world in black jeans and getting shot on sight, or try to hide and wait the hunting season off (probably being able to tell only one season ahead what the rules will be).

Rules may be different in different areas. E.g. an option to survive may be running away from area ES to area ET where there is a different hunting season requirement. Once the player crosses the border the chase immediately stops, but will wait on the border to prevent reentry.

The game rules are set in the way that force the player to take more and more risks nearing the end of the game.

uhh what hasn't been done before to my knowledge.... idk you are the big bad scary guy and you can only move when the player victim isn't looking at you?

I personally found the rouge-like elements to clash with the rest of the game. Easy mode made it much more enjoyable. Wonderful game that I'm very glad to have come across though!

Man, i've been thinking about trying this game but it seems a bit overwhelming. I think i need to change my mind and go for it haha

Good review, convinced me to check out gameplay and I just bought it.

I adored this game. Tragically underrated

And it's on sale on PS right now? I think I'm sold.

Sally Face

Slay the Princess

OMORI (forgot that there is one chase scene in the main route and another in the alternate route)

Cooking Companions

Scarlet Hollow

https://store.steampowered.com/app/698670/Scorn/

I've seen a friend play and didn't see any "chase" gameplay but it might be in there somewhere.

There's also the entire series of https://www.thedarkpictures.com/ which may have a chase segment somewhere in them but it's not the a primary element.

I did not see much chase sequences in https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6817/Frictional_Collection/ gameplay but I haven't followed these extensively.

Are you ok with games that are more story based/less gameplay? If that's not your cup of tea, ignore this post. I tend to like the subject matter horror games explore, but I dislike most horror games mechanics.

You may have some luck asking r/horrorgames, it's a small community but it is active and passionate.

The Letter (steam) is a choices-and-consequences horror/drama visual novel with some QuickTime events. Technically has a chase scene, but you're clicking choices under a decently generous time limit instead of literally running away.

Donor (play store) is a text only one about being a vulnerable woman who ends up kidnapped by vampires. No, they are not sexy vampires. However, they're something adjacent to human, albeit pretty unstable. You have to find a way to convince them to let you live another day, every single day. I am not totally sure this one is fully horror, but it is pretty tense and unique.

Paranormasight (steam) is a horror/drama VN about cursed relics finding their way back into the hands of unwitting humans. The last surviving relic-bearing human gets one wish granted, and several of the cast have nothing to lose. This one has gloomy vibes, great art, and fun characters, though I found the "true end" logic kinda trite.

Who Is Mike (steam) is a free thriller. You wake up and realize there are two of you...can you convince everyone that you're the real Mike? (Has some quick time events, I don't think there's a chase scene but there is a shooting mini game.)

Tiny Bunny and Scarlett Hollow are unfinished but undoubtedly have some pretty scary/brutal moments. Scarlett Hollow has a great demo, and is backed by a reliable dev team, so I do recommend you try it. It also has humor/downtime but shit does get real in it, albeit the driving force of the story is the mystery and likable cast. On the other hand, Tiny Bunny goes* very* hard into horror, quite possibly overboard (child death).

Edit to add: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors gets intense but is not a horror. However, if you like the premise of being stuck in a death game with escape the room mechanics, it's a good high-stakes thriller with some detailed horror-esk descriptions/outcomes. On steam, it's listed as Zero Escape Series.

Alan Wake isn’t a horror game technically, but definitely has the jump scares and creepy vibe you’d want.

Oh nice, haven't heard of this one before. Thanks.

It's been a while, but I remember Cubivore for the Gamecube having a mechanic where your cube evolved based on what kinds of other cubes you ate and I think also who you mated with

The best mechanic ever is petting the dog/cat in any game. Next question please.

Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns is a fantasy sci-fi apocalypse RPG with no experience, no level ups, plays like Majora's Mask as an Action RPG with no rewind.

It was one of the best games I've ever experienced. I highly recommend all the settings on Hard.

I really like the way Factorio handles enemy activity, because it leads to an adaptive difficulty that doesn't break with the game's narrative.

1. The player's factory generates pollution while it runs.
2. The enemy spawners consume the pollution and turn it into enemies.
3. The enemies seek out the source of the pollution and try to destroy it.

The result is that the better the player is at building a productive factory, the more fierce the attacks become. But if the player fails to defend all parts of their factory, their supply chains will get interrupted, their productivity will suffer and the enemy attacks cease, giving the player time to breath.

Outer Wilds features no conventional progression system; progress is made solely by understanding new things.

Before Your Eyes uses a webcam and blinking to play, which takes on an entirely new dynamic if the plot happens to make you cry (it did for me).

Obviously games like Stanley Parable, Manifold Garden, Superliminal etc have a slightly unique genre even if they're fundamentally puzzlers/narrative games.

The Witness has a very elegant perspective shift mechanic I won't spoil for you.