When playing a modern or classic horror game, there are always a few places that developers default to when making a spooky and horrifying story. Many of these settings are set in mansions, asylums, abandoned or hidden villages, forests, onboard alien ships, or simply inside an ordinary house.
Although these places are used often, they provide genuinely scary experiences when done correctly. However, some horror games like to break away from the usual and try something new. They often offer just as much of a horrifying experience, if not more, due to the unlikely places they’re set in.
10 Iron Lung
Plenty of horror games have been set in the ocean like Bioshock, SOMA, Barotrauma, and even Subnautica. The ocean is an unknown place with some of the largest and weirdest creatures on Earth, which is why it is perfect for a horror game where your main fear is being trapped underwater.
However, Iron Lung goes a step further and asks: what if we’re not only trapped in the ocean, but also inside a submarine that was sealed around you? This unlikely horror setting is even scarier when you realize you’re on an impossible mission with a limited lifespan to find an unknown entity lurking within the depths.
9 Grounded
Grounded is a survival game that is often classified as horror by many fans because of how the game’s setting is in your backyard. If that doesn’t sound horrifying, you should also know that you’ve shrunk down and are now smaller than the bugs around you.
This survival-horror experience features multiplayer, allowing you to be scared with your friends as you try to uncover how you were shrunk and how to get back. It’s a great game that combines the horror aspects of Subnautica and the survival aspects of The Forest to make an exhilarating experience.
8 Nun Massacre
Puppet Combo has been making retro horror games since 2013 with their release of Babysitter Bloodbath, inspired by the movie Halloween. In the years that followed, they released plenty of great titles. Still, Nun Massacre certainly has to be their most exciting and unique one.
Nun Massacre is set in a boarding school on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. You’ll often see schools, houses, and mansions in horror games, but a boarding school is rare. Your objective is to survive a bloodthirsty Nun roaming the school after you were called there to pick up your sick daughter, who is now missing.
7 Bendy And The Ink Machine
When Bendy and the Ink Machine first launched, it was released in episodic chapters. Finally, however, the game has an entire release. We now get to see this beautiful early cartoon-inspired horror game come to life for a reasonable price.
Everything about Bendy and the Ink Machine is unique: it’s set inside an animation studio where cartoon characters have come to life, the art style resembles early 1940s animation, and the inspiration from Bioshock and Amnesia is apparent. This game is a perfect horror experience with a unique setting unlike any other.
6 Subway Midnight
More often than not, in horror games, you’ll go through a subway station or get on a haunted abandoned train to get to a location. But there aren’t any games that focus entirely on this area, except for Subway Midnight.
As you’re getting onto the train, you look to your right to see a figure shrouded in darkness staring back at you. And, once you’re on, you see missing person posters in each train car, signaling that many people have died here in the past. When going forward, prevent yourself from becoming the next victim by learning about the ghosts who stayed behind.
5 S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
There isn’t a horror fan out there that doesn’t know of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games set in and around the devastating nuclear accident, Chernobyl. And while it seems like an area that would be obvious for settings to use, nuclear fallout-type games are usually more survival or RPG-like, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does the opposite.
Despite many of the games being old, the series is still worth playing, especially if you can get your hands on some mods to enhance and bug-fix the game. All in all, the series is a fantastic monster-killing experience with a rich story.
4 Mundaun
Mundaun is a game that rarely comes around with its hand-drawn pencil art style, a unique setting in the alps, and an oppressive suffocating atmosphere that only genuinely great horror games can accomplish. The best thing about Mundaun, though, isn’t just that it’s scary, but it combines the beauty of the alps with a horror-like twist.
On top of all this, the puzzles are well made, and inspiration from the developer’s life and popular media such as The Shining is apparent. Overall, it’s a fantastic indie game that deserves to be more well-known than it is.
3 Amnesia: Rebirth
One of the most iconic series in the horror genre is none other than Amnesia. But, where the previous games took place in typical horror spots like a mansion and factory, Amnesia: Rebirth took us to the Algerian desert.
You play as Tasi, a pregnant woman whose plane crashed and was left alone on a journey to find her husband and the other companions who left her behind. And like other Amnesia titles, along this journey comes challenging puzzles and a complex story that will leave any player speechless.
2 The Mortuary Assistant
Nothing is more unnerving for the average person than preparing and embalming dead people. The Mortuary Assistant captures this and sets you in the unlikely place of a mortuary, a place where dead bodies are stored until they’ve been buried.
It sounds like the perfect place for a horror game, but there is always the risk of going too far when portraying body horror. Luckily, it bypasses this by adding the element of demons, which can possess you and the body you’re working on to make the game even more terrifying to experience.
1 Kholat
Kholat takes a special kind of patience to play through completely. It’s based on the Dyatlov Pass incident, where nine Soviet trekkers died in the Ural Mountains. It was only in 2020, almost 70 years later, that the Russian authorities revealed that they had most likely died due to an avalanche.
The game, however, was developed in 2015. It takes you through a cold journey of collecting notes and exploring notable locations to discover what’s been happening in the mountains. Instead of going down a more realistic approach to the incident, Kholat decides to rely on the supernatural to explain the mysterious dead mountain.