10 Best Horror Games On The Nintendo Switch

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10 Best Horror Games On The Nintendo Switch

The Switch has slowly started to fill up with great horror titles. Here are 10 of the best available now. Sometimes you just need a good way to scare yourself. What's Halloween without a little fright in your life? You might have exhausted your scary movie queue on Netflix, but there's still a whole world of horror available to you through the Nintendo eShop. The Switch is one of Nintendo's most versatile consoles. Not only does it have its eponymous gimmick, being able to switch from home console to handheld and back, but it also has the widest selection of games available on any Nintendo console. The Switch isn't just for playing the newest Mario or Zelda title. Let's see what dark and scary horror games we can dig up out of the Switch catalog. THEGAMER VIDEO OF THE DAY

10 Outlast

Red Barrels' Outlast quickly became a horror classic after it's release on PC in 2013, and the game hit the Switch just last year. If you weren't able to play it before, it's well worth your time. The plot follows investigative journalist Miles Upshur following up on a tip about Mount Massive Asylum, where he quickly becomes embroiled in a dangerous situation way above his pay grade. The game was praised for its visceral first-person horror experience where Miles is completely unable to fight off the people pursuing him. Like most of us, his only real options are to run, hide, or die.

9 Darkwood

Darkwood is a 2017 top-down survival horror game that focuses heavily on defending your meager fortifications from monsters who want your blood. It's set in Poland in the late 1980s, inside a forest which suddenly occupied a large amount of land and continues to expand outward. It's semi-open world and the main character can explore, gather supplies, and talk to NPCs during the day. However, it's also imperative to fortify your hideout and build traps, because you can't go outside at night—and the monsters want nothing more than to get in. The game doesn't rely on jumpscares and instead focuses on building a pervasive sense of dread to keep you scared.

8 Little Nightmares

Little Nightmares is a strange, dreamlike game with incredible atmosphere. You play Six, a tiny starving child in a yellow raincoat making her way through the bowels of a dangerous vessel called the Maw. The Maw is filled with massive, powerful beings that seem intent on killing and eating Six. She needs to find a safe way through the cluttered, labyrinthine Maw and escape. Its sometimes clumsy mechanics still don't take away from the beautifully gruesome imagery and suspenseful experience of being a tiny child in the throat of some monstrous beast.

7 Dead by Daylight

Developed as an asymmetric multiplayer survival horror game by Behavior Interactive, Dead by Daylight has attracted a devoted following of players enamored with the uniquely tense experience of being stalked by a relentless killer played by a real person. It's a five-player game where four of the players are survivors, trying desperately to escape the clutches of the final player, the killer. The killer is trying to catch and sacrifice all the survivors to an enigmatic Entity, while the survivors struggle to turn on generators to unlock a way out of the killer's hunting grounds. The game has been steadily expanding since its release, with more and more killers and survivors released, some of which come from iconic horror franchises like Saw, Evil Dead, or Stranger Things.

6 Detention

Detention is something a little different. Developed by Taiwanese game studio Red Candle Games, the game is set in 1960s Taiwan during the White Terror, a period of martial law and suppression of political dissidents that lasted 38 years. Two students, Wei and Ray, find themselves trapped in Greenwood High School and stalked by evil creatures called "the lingered." They have to hide from the monsters while making their way through the school, uncovering terrible secrets along the way. The relentless atmosphere of dread makes the game one of the scariest games we've played recently, as every step brings you closer to some incomprehensible tragedy.

5 Oxenfree

Oxenfree has received a lot of praise for its unique 2.5D art style and conversation mechanic that blends effortlessly with the mind-bending and eerie horror story at its heart. The main character, Alex, arrives on Edwards Island with some of her friends for a party. She and her new stepbrother Jonas investigate a nearby cavern and come across a dimensional rift, and everything starts to fall apart. Will Alex be able to figure out what's going on, and put a stop to it, without her group ending up at each other's throats—maybe literally? I guess you'll have to play and find out.

4 Resident Evil 4

We sure we don't have to explain what Resident Evil 4 is. If you're at all, chances are high you've played it before but you're almost certainly at least aware of it. This entry into Capcom's Resident Evil franchise has garnered so much critical acclaim and been ported to so many game systems that it's become something of an unavoidable juggernaut in the world of survival horror games. It follows the exploits of now-special agent Leon S. Kennedy as he's tasked with rescuing the president's daughter from the hands of a parasite-controlled cult. Universally praised for its gameplay, voice-acting, and narrative, it became a gold standard for survival horror and third-person shooter genres.

3 Yomawari The Long Night Collection

This is actually two games, Yomawari: Night Alone and its sequel Yomawari: Midnight Shadows. The two titles don't feature the same characters, but have similar gameplay. They both focus on the experience of a young girl exploring a town after dark and having to avoid the many monsters and evil spirits that roam the streets at night. In the first game, you're searching for your older sister and your lost dog Poro, while in the sequel you control two characters—Yui and Haru—whose experiences differ based on the actions of the other character. The games exceed at blending heartfelt emotion with the terror of a small child pursued by a horde of nightmares.

2 Layers of Fear Legacy

Layers of Fear was a somewhat divisive experience when it was released in 2016. Some reviewers called it the scariest game they'd played in recent memory and some thought it was nothing but another cookie-cutter entry into the horror genre. Players take the role of a disturbed painter trying desperately to complete his final masterpiece while his psyche and reality begin to fracture. As you explore more of the Victorian mansion that serves as the game's setting, players learned more about the painter's grim and tragic past. The Legacy edition also include the Layers of Fear: Inheritance DLC where you play as the painter's daughter trying to come to terms with her old trauma.

1 Resident Evil 2002

from ground up of Capcom's very first entry into the Resident Evil series, this game takes all of what made the first game an engaging and harrowing experience and updates it with improved graphics, and revised puzzles and gameplay. Just as in the original, players can choose to play either Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine and their S.T.A.R.S. team explores the mysterious mansion. The "REmake" is still widely praised as one of the best and scariest entries in the entire franchise, but didn't sell as well as Capcom hoped, leading to the pivot toward more action-oriented games. But now it's available on Switch, so if you haven't played this classic yet, now's the time.