The 10 Best Horror Games to Play Right Now (October 2026)
CRIMENET Popularity Index: October 2026
Dead by Daylight is still murdering the competition. Left 4 Dead 2 refuses to die, The Binding of Isaac continues traumatising people from a basement, and thousands of ghost hunters are voluntarily entering houses that any functioning adult would immediately put back on the property market.
Welcome to the October 2026 CRIMENET Horror Popularity Index.
Every game here offers something different. Some want to terrify you. Others make you fight for survival, cooperate with people whose survival instincts are genuinely concerning, or descend into places where the architect should probably have been arrested.
The one thing they have in common is that horror is a meaningful part of the experience.
This isn't a ranking of which game frightened us most, or which one deserves to be called the greatest horror game ever made. It's our look at the horror games attracting players right now.
Chart Key
▲ Climbed
▼ Dropped
▬ No Change
NEW First Appearance
RE Re-entry
Popularity checked: October 2026
The October 2026 Chart
Rank | Movement | Game |
1 | NEW | Dead by Daylight |
2 | NEW | Left 4 Dead 2 |
3 | NEW | The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth |
4 | NEW | DayZ |
5 | NEW | 7 Days to Die |
6 | NEW | R.E.P.O. |
7 | NEW | Don't Starve Together |
8 | NEW | Phasmophobia |
9 | NEW | The Outlast Trials |
10 | NEW | Hunt: Showdown 1896 |
#10 Hunt: Showdown 1896
The Wild West, except the wildlife has filed a complaint against reality.
There's something deeply unreasonable about entering a Louisiana swamp with an old-fashioned rifle, a handful of equipment and the knowledge that practically everything in the vicinity wants you dead.
Yet that's precisely what Hunt: Showdown 1896 asks you to do.
You track monstrous targets, fight the horrors guarding them, collect bounties and attempt to escape before another group of hunters decides that your hard work would look much nicer in their pockets.
The monsters are frightening enough, but the real genius is how the game turns other players into a source of constant anxiety.
A distant gunshot could mean somebody has found your target. A branch snapping nearby could mean another hunter is stalking you. Or perhaps you've simply become so paranoid that you're considering shooting a tree.
The atmosphere is extraordinary. Every sound matters, every decision can become expensive, and surviving long enough to collect a reward feels like a genuine accomplishment.
It's one of those games where victory means escaping with your life.
A perfectly reasonable objective that most other games seem to take for granted.
The Verdict: A magnificent combination of monster hunting, PvP tension and swamp-based psychological deterioration.
➡️ Hunt: Showdown 1896 Review
#9 The Outlast Trials
Medical research conducted by people who should never have been allowed near a hospital.
The Outlast Trials asks a simple question.
What if a medical experiment was run by people who regarded the Geneva Conventions as an inspirational checklist?
You and your fellow test subjects are forced through grotesque trials designed to break you physically and psychologically. Instead of receiving treatment, you're subjected to murderous enemies, disturbing environments and tasks that suggest the facility has never passed a single health-and-safety inspection.
And somehow, you have to work together.
That's where things become particularly entertaining.
One person is carefully completing an objective. Another is hiding in a cupboard. A third has been chased halfway across the map, screaming into a microphone while the rest of the group quietly considers whether saving him is really worth the paperwork.
The Outlast Trials combines the vulnerability of survival horror with the chaos of cooperative play. You're not an unstoppable soldier. You're a frightened test subject who has been given equipment, terrible instructions and colleagues with increasingly questionable priorities.
The Verdict: Cooperative horror at its most sadistic, where teamwork is essential and management should be prosecuted.
➡️ The Outlast Trials Review
#8 Phasmophobia
Four amateur ghost hunters enter a house. Three return. Nobody gets paid enough.
Phasmophobia has one of gaming's greatest business models.
You voluntarily enter a haunted building, use expensive equipment to identify the ghost, and attempt to leave without dying.
For money.
Not even particularly impressive money, considering the circumstances.
The brilliance is in the investigation. You gather evidence, observe supernatural behaviour and gradually narrow down which entity is responsible for turning an otherwise respectable property into something the estate agent neglected to mention.
It sounds almost scientific.
Then somebody whispers into a microphone, a door slams shut, the lights go out and your entire team abandons scientific procedure in favour of running around screaming.
What makes Phasmophobia work is the uncertainty. You don't know exactly when the situation will turn dangerous, and even familiar locations can produce moments that send perfectly confident adults fleeing toward the nearest exit.
I've never understood why these people don't simply investigate something safer.
Tax fraud, perhaps.
The Verdict: One of the most entertaining paranormal investigations in gaming, provided your teammates can survive their own panic.
➡️ Phasmophobia Review
#7 Don't Starve Together
Survival is difficult enough without nature looking personally offended by your existence.
Don't Starve Together begins with a fairly ordinary premise: survive in the wilderness.
Find food. Gather materials. Build shelter. Avoid dying.
Simple.
Except this particular wilderness appears to have been designed by someone who considers basic human comfort a character flaw.
The world is full of strange creatures, dangerous seasons, unsettling discoveries and an art style that makes even harmless-looking objects feel as though they know something you don't.
Then there's the darkness.
In most games, night is an opportunity to admire the stars. Here, failing to prepare for it can become a very short and unpleasant lesson about why light sources were invented.
Adding friends doesn't necessarily improve your chances.
One person is gathering food. Another is constructing shelter. Someone else has wandered into the wilderness to investigate a suspicious noise and has now introduced an entirely new emergency to the group.
It's survival horror dressed as a peculiar illustrated storybook, and the contrast makes it wonderfully distinctive.
The Verdict: A charming, unsettling cooperative survival nightmare in which even the weather seems disappointed in you.
➡️ Don't Starve Together Review
#6 R.E.P.O.
The supernatural equivalent of being employed by a removal company with absolutely no insurance.
R.E.P.O. understands that horror becomes considerably funnier when you add workplace responsibilities.
You and your fellow unfortunate employees are sent into dangerous locations to retrieve valuable objects while avoiding terrifying entities.
The trouble is that objects have weight, physics and an unfortunate habit of becoming extremely difficult to handle when everybody starts panicking.
Moving a valuable item through a hostile environment is already challenging.
Now imagine doing it with three colleagues, one of whom is screaming, another is carrying something incorrectly, and the third has just spotted a monster and abandoned the entire business operation.
It's a brilliant recipe for disaster.
R.E.P.O. turns ordinary physical interactions into comedy, then interrupts the comedy with something genuinely frightening.
The combination works because the danger is real within the game. You need to cooperate and protect the valuables, but the moment a creature appears, professionalism leaves the building through whichever exit is currently available.
The Verdict: An excellent marriage of physical comedy and cooperative horror, where the real monster may be your team's complete inability to move furniture.
➡️ R.E.P.O. Review
#5 7 Days to Die
Home improvement has never been this bloody stressful.
In 7 Days to Die, the zombie apocalypse doesn't merely threaten your survival.
It creates a weekly appointment.
You spend your time scavenging resources, crafting equipment, exploring dangerous buildings and constructing a base capable of surviving increasingly serious attacks.
Then the Blood Moon arrives.
Suddenly, every design decision you've made becomes subject to the most aggressive building inspection imaginable.
That staircase you thought was clever? Zombies.
The wall you forgot to reinforce? Zombies.
The entrance you assumed nobody would notice? An entire committee of zombies has arrived to discuss it, and they've brought several dozen colleagues.
What I particularly enjoy about this premise is the relationship between planning and consequences. Your base isn't merely somewhere to store things. It's the difference between surviving the night and becoming a cautionary example in somebody else's construction guide.
And after every disaster, you rebuild.
Not because the zombies have learned their lesson.
Because apparently you haven't.
The Verdict: A compelling survival sandbox where engineering, preparation and panic meet once a week for a deeply unpleasant performance review.
➡️ 7 Days to Die Review
#4 DayZ
The apocalypse is terrible. Other people are worse.
Most zombie games make the undead the principal threat.
DayZ has a different approach.
The zombies are dangerous, certainly. So are hunger, illness, exposure, injuries and the general inconvenience of trying to survive without modern civilisation.
But another human being?
That is where things become genuinely uncomfortable.
You're exploring an abandoned settlement when you encounter another survivor. They might be friendly. They might want to trade. They might even help you.
Or they might shoot you for the contents of a tin can.
And because survival is difficult and resources matter, every meeting carries a degree of uncertainty that more scripted horror experiences struggle to reproduce.
DayZ's horror comes from vulnerability. You've spent hours finding equipment and keeping yourself alive. Losing everything because you trusted the wrong stranger is not a particularly pleasant prospect.
The interesting thing is how quickly the game can change your behaviour.
At first, you want to meet people.
Eventually, you hear footsteps in a nearby building and decide that human civilisation was a terrible experiment.
The Verdict: Survival horror driven as much by human behaviour as the undead. Trust is optional. Consequences aren't.
➡️ DayZ Review
#3 The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
A childhood nightmare that somehow became one of gaming's most enduring addictions.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth takes players into a grotesque basement filled with monsters, bodily fluids, disturbing religious imagery and creatures that look as though somebody has drawn their worst childhood memories during a particularly difficult therapy session.
And then it asks you to do it again.
And again.
And again.
At its heart, Isaac is a roguelike built around dangerous rooms, unpredictable upgrades, boss fights and runs that can transform your character into something increasingly unrecognisable.
One moment you're a frightened child firing tears at monsters.
A little later you've acquired enough grotesque mutations to make yourself the most disturbing thing in the basement.
That's part of the appeal. Every run can develop differently, with item combinations creating wildly different possibilities.
The unsettling imagery becomes familiar, but it never entirely loses its character. Isaac remains one of those rare games where the mechanics and disturbing presentation feel inseparable.
It's horrible.
It's brilliant.
And apparently, leaving that basement is simply not an option anybody considers seriously.
The Verdict: Grotesque, unpredictable and enormously replayable. One of gaming's strangest long-term obsessions.
➡️ The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth Review
#2 Left 4 Dead 2
Seventeen years later, the zombies still haven't finished their shift.
Left 4 Dead 2 is one of those games that should probably have faded into history by now.
It launched in 2009.
Since then we've had new consoles, new engines, countless zombie games and enough attempts to reinvent cooperative survival to fill an entire graveyard of failed live-service ambitions.
And Left 4 Dead 2 is still here.
Why?
Because the fundamental idea is so bloody good.
Four survivors attempt to cross environments packed with infected enemies, cooperating to escape increasingly dangerous situations.
Simple enough to explain in ten seconds.
Difficult enough to produce spectacular disasters for years.
The special infected ensure that nobody gets too comfortable. A perfectly coordinated group can fall apart because one player gets separated, another is incapacitated and the last person standing has suddenly discovered that heroic speeches are considerably harder when you're being attacked by half the county.
There is something magnificent about how efficiently the game creates drama.
No elaborate criminal economy. No complicated managerial systems. No requirement to complete seventeen weekly challenges before unlocking the privilege of enjoying yourself.
Just four survivors, a terrifying number of zombies and the eternal question of who is supposed to be watching the rear.
The Verdict: Cooperative zombie survival distilled to its essentials, and still extraordinarily difficult to replace.
➡️ Left 4 Dead 2 Review
#1 Dead by Daylight
The only workplace where being murdered is part of the job description.
Dead by Daylight takes a premise that really ought to have resulted in a very short business meeting and turns it into an ongoing multiplayer phenomenon.
Four survivors are trapped in a deadly trial.
One killer hunts them.
The survivors repair generators and attempt to escape. The killer tries to ensure that they don't.
That's the arrangement.
No reasonable person would sign the contract, but thousands continue showing up for work.
The genius is the asymmetry. The killer and survivors are playing fundamentally different games in the same environment.
Survivors rely on cooperation, stealth, awareness and occasionally the astonishing optimism of assuming somebody else will come back to rescue them.
The killer gets to be the monster.
Not merely watch the monster. Not fight the monster. Actually inhabit the role, with different powers and tactics that change how a match unfolds.
And somehow, the developers have turned this into a long-running competitive game where people discuss perks, builds and strategy with the seriousness normally reserved for international banking regulations.
Imagine explaining that to someone unfamiliar with video games.
'What do you do in your spare time?'
'I chase people around an abandoned building and hang them on hooks.'
'And this is recreational?'
'Yes. Sometimes I dress as a famous horror character.'
Dead by Daylight works because both sides create the tension. A clever survivor can embarrass a killer. A skilled killer can turn four confident players into a collection of terrible decisions.
The horror changes depending on which side of the hunt you're standing
.
The Verdict: The dominant game in our October Horror Popularity Index, and one of the strongest examples of horror becoming an endlessly replayable contest between predator and prey.
➡️ Dead by Daylight Review
Biggest Story This Edition
What fascinates me about this chart isn't simply that Dead by Daylight is leading.
It's how many different things people want from horror.
Some want to be hunted. Others want to fight back. Some prefer carefully investigating paranormal activity. Others apparently find the prospect of carrying a valuable vase through a haunted building an irresistible Saturday-night activity.
And then there's DayZ, where the entire experience can be ruined by another human being deciding your backpack would suit them better.
The genre has become wonderfully broad.
Horror no longer needs to mean walking down a dark corridor until something jumps out of a cupboard.
Sometimes it's surviving the night.
Sometimes it's trying to keep your friends alive.
Sometimes you're the monster.
And occasionally, the monster is simply the idiot who volunteered to carry the expensive object and dropped it down the stairs.
Outside the Morgue
Several other horror games deserve attention.
Resident Evil 4 remains one of the finest combinations of action and survival horror. Resident Evil Requiem and Resident Evil 2 are also attracting substantial audiences, while Sons of the Forest continues to offer its own particularly unpleasant approach to wilderness survival.
Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, Silver Pines and Tenebris Somnia show that newer horror releases can still find an audience alongside the giants.
And Lethal Company remains one of the funniest and most frightening cooperative experiences around. Few games have done more to prove that sending underqualified workers into hostile environments is an endlessly renewable source of entertainment.
These games don't need to be in the Top 10 to be worth playing. Popularity doesn't automatically make something good, and a small audience doesn't make a monster any less terrifying.
The Verdict
Dead by Daylight holds the crown. Left 4 Dead 2 continues its extraordinary refusal to become obsolete, and The Binding of Isaac remains one of the strangest games ever to acquire a devoted long-term audience.
But the real winner is the sheer variety of horror experiences people are playing.
You can hunt survivors, survive zombies, investigate ghosts, fight your way through a grotesque basement or attempt to carry household objects past monsters without getting everybody killed.
And if none of those activities sounds appealing, there's always the option of staying home, locking the doors and playing something relaxing.
Although given the existence of Don't Starve Together, even that may not be entirely safe.
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