PlayStation has brought us some best horror game over five generations. The selection of scary stories is so diverse that it’s hard to narrow down the scariest game on PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, and PS5. In all of the picks below, I slept with the lights on at one point. We’d love to hear your choices in the comments below.
Scariest PS1 Game: Silent Hill
Video game horror blossomed on the 5th generation of consoles, and the PS1 is packed with experiences designed to terrify unsuspecting players. Konami’s Silent Hill is still chilling, but when it was released in 1999 it delivered an unprecedented psychological horror experience.
The scene where Harry Mason searches for his missing daughter remains a masterpiece of lighting and sound. Dark hallways and slanted camera angles obscure the player, disorienting him like a crescendo shriek of a broken radio. It’s been hard to come by since Sony changed how the PS3 store works last year, but it’s still a game worth playing today.
Runner-up: Planet Laika
There is a point where the surreal and the weird mix and become a unique form of terror. Planet Laika demonstrates this with the bizarre but compelling story of a team of astronauts sent to investigate the problems of a Martian colony. The weird part is that all the “humans” have dog heads because of the war with the Martians, also the main character Laika has dissociative identity disorder and Ernest, Yolanda, You must use Spacer’s three personalities to solve puzzles and survive the absolute eccentricity you’ll encounter in this game.
Planet Laika is one of hundreds of imaginative and unique PS1 games. Luckily, a team of fans came together to create an English patch that was released earlier this year.
Scariest PS2 Game: Silent Hill 4: The Room
Silent Hill 4: The Room departs from the formula found in the first three games by making a single room the focal point of the game. Sure, you’ll be visiting quite a few locations through the weird hole in the bathroom, but Henry’s apartment is the heart of the game. Kudos to Team Silent for successfully making a small space like this unsettling for hours.
Runner-up: Resident Evil Outbreak (and File #2)
It’s strange that Capcom struggles to make a decent Resident Evil multiplayer game. This game and its standalone expansion, File #2, completely transformed the classic RE experience into a multiplayer setting that can be enjoyed by up to four players.
Outbreaks are exhilarating because everyone is free to do whatever they want. It can be grouped or each player can do it alone. You don’t have to work together. This means that every playthrough will be a different experience. If one of the survivors is out just for herself, zombies may be of little concern.
Scariest PS3 Game: Dead Space
We don’t have much time to wait for the Dead Space remake, but the original is still worth playing. A perfect blend of action and mystery-solving, he’s one of the few games that offers players plenty of tools to protect themselves while still managing to scare them.
Runner-up: Evil Within
Directed by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, The Evil Within is reminiscent of Silent Hill. Makes you feel helpless. This is his one of his PS3 swan songs, giving us a great taste of survival horror at a time when the genre was having an identity crisis.
Scariest PS4 Game: PT
Silent Hills’ Playable Teaser is scarier than most full games. It’s a self-contained tale of the murder of a pregnant woman by her husband, unraveling through a surreal journey through the same corridors over and over again.
When Konami canceled Silent Hill, they also left PT off the list. Luckily, if you’ve downloaded it before, there’s a workaround to reacquire it.
Runner-up: The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan
The Dark Pictures Anthology was a different bag, but the first entry was Horror Gold. Exploring the Man of Medan, an abandoned freighter, offers many chilling sights. The many possible permutations of the story make this much more replayable than most horror games.
Scariest PS5 Game: Visage
PT has inspired many developers. His one of the most successful spiritual successors is Visage. It also takes cues from Eternal Darkness with its Sanity meter. The main rule of the game is to avoid darkness. Being in the dark for too long will lower your sanity and cause paranormal activity. If you lose too much of your sanity, an entity can appear and gain enough power to kill you. Changing light bulbs and finding lighters and candles to keep the darkness at bay is a constant battle.
Runner-up: Observer: System Redux
It’s not the murders you’re investigating that make The Observer terrifying, but the environment itself. Krakow, Poland in 2084 is a desolate place, and the dilapidated tenements you explore are full of sad stories. Body horror abounds here, and you’ll be in constant dread as you wander from apartment to apartment looking for your missing son.
