The Best Horror Game of 2023

With both Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 launching within the first quarter, it was clear that 2023 was going to be a strong year for horror remakes. But what we perhaps wouldn’t have counted on as the year began was that this was going to be a stellar 12 months for the horror genre as a whole. It’s been such a good year for it, in fact, that we had to give it its own award category.

There have been so many great horror games this year, spanning numerous different sub-genres and studio sizes. As previously mentioned, it’s been a fantastic year for remakes, proving the classics can be as relevant today in their revitalised forms as they were when they first arrived in the 2000s. But it’s also been a period of wonderfully experimental indies that have found brand new ways to shake us up. World of Horror fueled our nightmares with images drawn in Microsoft Paint (seriously!), while Dredge had us desperately wishing for a bigger boat as a Lovecraftian nightmare unspooled its tentacles beneath our hull. Meanwhile, we finally got a worthy spiritual successor to Alien: Isolation in Frictional’s terrifying Amnesia: The Bunker.

But what did the IGN team think was the very best horror game of 2023? Here’s how the voting panned out.

Runners-Up: Sons of the Forest and World of Horror

Tied with 2.4% of the vote each are Sons of the Forest and World of Horror. Both are from smaller studios (the latter is actually largely the work of a single developer), but that didn’t stop them from taking Steam by storm.

The long-awaited sequel to one of the most respected survival games of all time, Sons of the Forest builds on its predecessors strengths to create a chilling journey into a cannibal-infested woodland. The crafting core of the original has been overhauled with much more realistic building animations that enhance the immersion; for instance, you now must snap branches in two to create firewood, or physically cut windows out of wooden walls using an axe. But it’s the adaptive AI that really makes Sons of the Forest what it is; the freaky cannibals of the island react to your presence in believable ways. Every enemy has their own wants and needs, and so their behaviour is unique to them. That makes every interaction unpredictable – will the mutant peering from the undergrowth run in fear, or be the very last thing you see as it tears you limb from limb?

The worlds of Junji Ito and H.P. Lovecraft combine in World of Horror, perhaps the most unsettling of all the horror games released this year. A roguelite RPG with turn-based combat, it’s instantly recognisable thanks to its distinctive black-and-white ‘1-bit’ art that depicts stomach-turning monstrosities. The apocalypse looms, so you must explore a fictitious version of Shiokawa, Japan in the 1980s and attempt to halt the old gods’ plans. You’ll see that journey through the eyes of 14 different characters, with each of their stories having multiple endings based on your decisions. Despite its simple, manga-influenced 2D design, this is a sprawling, multi-layered nightmare. It’s all the work of just a handful of people – developer Paweł Koźmiński, writer Cassandra Khaw, and musicians ArcOfDream and Qwesta. And with its art entirely put together in MS Paint, it’s a perfect example of how greatness can bloom from even the most humble tools.

Runner-Up: Dead Space

Claiming 7.1% of the vote is EA Motive’s accomplished remake of Dead Space, which took us back to the blood-drenched steel corridors of the USG Ishimura. One of the most technically impressive games of the year, it combines intricately detailed environments, astonishing lighting, and terrifying sound design to create a sci-fi haunted house that drips with oppressive atmosphere.

While the moment-to-moment of Dead Space is largely unchanged from the original, Motive’s subtle changes help not just modernise the game, but enhance its greatest achievements. That’s true of many of the game’s mechanical elements – the way your weapons ‘peel’ enemies apart is a splatterhouse triumph – but we’d be remiss to forget the adjustments to Isaac Clarke himself. Previously a silent protagonist, the remake gives Isaac a voice and personality. This helps anchor the stranded engineer in the world and make his story of survival against all odds even more traumatic. I guess it’s only in the horror genre where we can say that’s actually a good thing.

Runner-Up: Resident Evil 4

When 2019’s Resident Evil 2 remake proved an essential horror masterpiece, fans unsurprisingly started asking for Leon Kennedy’s adventures in Spain to get the same treatment. They didn’t have to wait long, and this year’s Resident Evil 4 remake is every bit the lush recreation that people hoped for.

While the contrast between original and remake isn’t quite as drastic for Resident Evil 4 as its predecessors, there’s still a huge upgrade here; this is a grotesquely beautiful, atmospheric adventure with snappy combat and smooth exploration. It embraces the winding level design of the original and provides all sorts of alleyways, corridors, and stairways to poke around for secrets, treasures, and scares in. And, of course, it gleefully plays around with the original game’s esoteric roster of villains, from the doll-like Salazar to the intensity of cult leader Saddler.

It did abandon some of the 2005 original’s goofy charms, though, and leaned more on the gory chills of the series’ modern output. That makes for a scarier interpretation of the story, but one that’s not quite as off-the-wall as its source material. Perhaps that’s the reason behind Resi 4 coming in second place, with 23.8% of the vote. Our winner, though, is packed with its own brand of comedy that makes it the most out-there horror we’ve played in years…

Winner: Alan Wake 2

IGN’s staff overwhelmingly chose Alan Wake 2 as their best horror game of the year, with Remedy’s Lynchian survival horror taking 64.3% of the vote. It is a wild ride, laced with laugh-aloud Finnish humour, astonishing musical numbers, and a proverb-quoting janitor. But, as you’d imagine from its winning status, it’s also an astonishingly scary journey into the clutches of murderous cults and the depths of a supernatural, New York-shaped prison. In fact, it’s probably the closest any studio has come to capturing the terror of Silent Hill in quite some time.

On the surface, Alan Wake 2 looks like Resident Evil, but beyond that familiar over-the-shoulder perspective is a game with unmatched vision. Its confident direction, using all manner of visual and audio tricks, drags you into a creepy world that offers unexpected surprises in every chapter. Its parallel stories, chronicling the lives of FBI agent Saga Anderson and haunted novelist Alan Wake, is both pulpy and literary, relishing in genre tropes as it tells a genuinely emotional, thought-provoking tale. We waited 13 years for Remedy to get a second chance and continue Alan’s story, and it was worth every second of patience. It’s the studio’s most creative, artful work to date, and the best horror game of 2023.

Honourable Mentions

• Dredge, Amnesia
• The Bunker
• Killer Frequency