There are a lot of different ways to make a player scared. Most horror games will present an obvious threat. Whether it's a monster, a killer, a haunted house, or things that defy categorizing, they all bring stress and anxiety by threatening the protagonist's life.
Then you have games that like to do things the hard way. There are horror games where, in theory, nothing is hunting you. You might not be entirely safe, but nothing wants to kill you. That doesn't mean they're not utterly chilling, and some hit in a way that is worse than a jump scare.
10 Scratches
Sometimes atmosphere and isolation do enough. The point-and-click adventure game Scratches puts you in the shoes of Micheal, a writer with an output problem who has been sent to stay in an old, isolated mansion to get some peace and focus on his work.
As your stay continues, you're awoken at night by the sounds of scratching in the house. Exploring the old place begins to reveal the story of the previous residents and some of the dark secrets they tried to bury. While you don't have to deal with enemies, the game goes out of its way to make you feel watched and unsafe on the property.
9 Anatomy
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Anatomy is a narrative-focused horror that slowly fills you full of dread. The gameplay is quite simple. You wander around a dark house, finding audio tapes that you place into a tape player in the kitchen.
It is not initially clear who the narrator of the tapes is. They talk about how each room of the house corresponds to an organ in the body. As you realize what it means, you start to feel threatened. When the bedroom is described as a mouth, and you see the walls lined with pictures of jaws and fangs, you start to get an inkling of what the voice wants.
8 Layers Of Fear
Sometimes the most frightening thing to face is yourself and the things you've done. Layers Of Fear is a horror puzzle game where you play as an artist, struggling to finish his magnum opus. However, many things go wrong in the man's life, and as his mental state begins to fall apart, and frightening hallucinations populate the home.
Progress involves fighting through fear to complete puzzles around the house. Eventually, you will understand the full scope of the artist's story, and the deeds that are driving him mad.
7 The Security Booth
Working security does come with a degree of risk associated with it. There's always some potential for harm when trying to prevent unwanted entry. The night that unfolds in The Security Booth might still be a little beyond the pay grade.
You take the role of a security guard, working the front gates of your company HQ. You check the number plates of cars and make sure they're actual employees. Why are so many people showing up in the middle of the night? Who are these fake employees trying to sneak in? What are the ominous sounds coming from the building? You'll have time to ponder all these questions while sitting in the booth.
6 Stories Untold
Stories Untold is a game where you interact with terminals, and sometimes the terminals interact with you right back. The game spans four wildly different situations. A text-based adventure game, a scientist at a terminal, a radio operator at a Greenland monitoring base, and an interview session in a hospital. All these scenarios tie together in ways that will reveal themselves as you play.
The game makes the most of the limited perspective to leave you feeling vulnerable and likes to make you fear what may be just out of view.
5 Year Walk
Year Walk is a game about folklore and treading where you're probably not supposed to. Facing uncertainty about the woman you love, you take part in the ritualistic activity of the Year Walk. You venture into the Swedish woodlands at midnight on New Year's Eve, hoping the spirits of the woods will impart some knowledge of the future to you.
The journey will certainly see you coming face to face with monsters from legend, but these entities are not here to hunt you; they want to make deals with you and will provide what you are looking for if you can offer the payment. Beware though, what you want might not be what's good for you.
4 Near Death
In some cases, nature is all you need to create a sense of doom. In Near Death, your plane has crashed just short of an Antarctic station. Fortunately, you are relatively unharmed, but unfortunately, the station is abandoned. To make things worse, a blizzard is rolling in.
Your one big threat is the cold, slowly killing you every moment you explore. Switching on your heater can buy you some time, but its fuel is limited, and you have to keep pressing forward; anything else is a slow death by hypothermia.
3 Fingerbones
People can be far worse monsters than ghouls or ghosts. Fingerbones sees you exploring a dilapidated building, unlocking doors, and reading notes. Paying attention to what has been written down will give clues to passwords that help you advance further into the place. They also inform you of the effective end of the world and one man's slide from detachment and arrogance into outright depravity.
Anticipation of how much further he fell makes picking up every note an exercise in anxiety and makes you fear what you'll see behind the next door.
2 SOMA - Safe Mode
SOMA, in its original form, is a terrifying game. An update introduced the Safe Mode playthrough, which took the survival horror off the table. It is no less terrifying for the option.
You come around from a brain scan to find yourself mysteriously transported to the underwater complex of Pathos II, where half-human, half-machine abominations roam. These previously hostile creatures are made neutral in Safe Mode, but the true horror of the game lies in the emotionally harrowing and existential crisis-inducing storyline you will find there.
1 Liquidators
Ghosts are not the only things that are deadly and invisible. There are things that are very real that silently destroy human life. Liquidators has no monsters or ghosts, only the deadly mistakes of humankind. You take control of one of a team of liquidators dispatched by the Soviet Union to the burning Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Your job is to venture into the tunnels below the station and try to operate valves to drain tanks and prevent an explosion.
The place is full of intensely radioactive material, which will begin to kill you if you draw close, sometimes if you even enter visual contact with it. The game doesn't need anything more than that to make you panic, though the radio calls from your family, who want to talk to you one last time, only make it worse. No pressure.