Ever since Resident Evil exploded onto the scene in 1996 and made inventory reshuffling in the face of a zombie outbreak popular, players have been regularly fighting down to their very last bullet. 30 years later, survival horror is the dominant format for those seeking video game scares, as popular now as it’s ever been. And with a fresh batch of nightmares to consider, there’s never been a better time to rank the best games of the genre.
But what qualifies a game to be considered as “survival horror”? Many games are often labelled survival horror, but lean much too heavily into action to be truly considered a genuine example of the genre. For our money, survival horror can be boiled down to four key factors, all of which are vital components of the classics that make up our list.
- There has to be a power dynamic weighted in the enemy’s favour.
- You need to explore maze-like environments while solving puzzles.
- There’s often jeopardous resource management.
- Relentless pressure inflicted by either a pursuer or an oppressive space.
So with the rules established and out of the way, here are our picks for the 10 best survival horror games of all time.
10. Clock Tower
While 1989’s Sweet Home is often considered the progenitor of survival horror, it’s Clock Tower, the 1995, 16-bit survival horror classic that was only ever released in Japan, that perhaps left a bigger mark on the genre. Its fingerprints can be easily found throughout the entirety of this list.
You play as Jennifer, a teenage orphan stranded in a Resident Evil-like manor, point-and-clicking your way through a series of impressively detailed, oppressive rooms. But Clock Tower’s defining mechanic, and why it rightfully deserves its place on this list, is its pioneering stalker gameplay. Four years before Resident Evil’s Nemesis spent an entire game shouting “STARS”, Clock Tower had us avoiding the dreaded “Scissorman”, who, much like Mr X, Pyramid Head, and Alien: Isolation’s Xenomorph, is a near-unstoppable force that’s always lurking nearby. Fast forward to today, and the stalker enemy type has become a staple of the survival horror genre. We have Scissorman to thank for all those enduring nightmares.
9. Silent Hill
While Capcom was storming the charts in the late ‘90s with Resident Evil’s campy, zombie-focused take on survival horror, Konami’s first stab at the genre saw the studio try something very different. What it created was dread. Pure, unrelenting dread.
Silent Hill stars Harry Mason, an everyman who enters a fog-filled nightmare while trying to find his missing adopted daughter in the town of Silent Hill. What follows is an oppressive tale riddled with unseemly horrors, the likes we’d never witnessed in a video game before.
Unlike its peers, Silent Hill provided a true 3D environment to explore, rather than the static, pre-rendered backdrops of Resident Evil. Due to the hardware restraints of the time, which struggled to render long draw distances, the fictional town was caked in a constant thick layer of fog that disguised the tech’s limitations. Serendipitously, this not only became the series’ signature look, but also demonstrated perhaps the greatest marriage of tech and tone we’ve ever witnessed in a video game.
Silent Hill pioneered its own psychological corner of the survival horror genre, spawning many sequels and remakes that would go on to be considered some of the most haunting video games ever made.
8. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
It seems like a distant memory now, but there was a painful period where the Resident Evil series lost touch with its survival horror roots. While Resident Evil 4 is rightly celebrated, it significantly ramped up the action, which laid the groundwork for both Resident Evil 5 and 6 to practically abandon the genre altogether.
2017 finally saw Capcom return to that classic survival horror feeling with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, but it did so from an entirely new first-person perspective and through the use of a grimier, Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like cast of characters. Our new protagonist, Ethan Winters, is forced to take on the Louisiana swamp-dwelling Baker family, who force him to endure a gauntlet of grisly challenges. Gone were roundhouse kicks, quicktime events, and off-the-charts bombast, and back was delicate resource management, a reestablished power balance in the antagonist’s favour, and the long overdue return of a stalker enemy.
It’s impossible not to think of Resident Evil when talking about survival horror, but it’s only thanks to Resident Evil 7’s genre renaissance that they’re still considered synonymous with each other, rather than survival horror being just a footnote in the history of the series.
