While horror games are available all year, it’s only in the Halloween season that everyone gets into the spooky spirit and finds different ways to get into the mood for ghosts, monsters, and candy from strangers.
Even the gaming industry sees Halloween as a time for some limited edition seasonal goods and to highlight some scary games. Though not everyone has the luxury or time to get into AAA horror games that are available for PC and console, there are some frights to be had with the high-tech rectangle in your pocket.
Here’s a list of some spooky mobile games that you can check out for the year.
Little Nightmares
The horror genre is usually caked in gory things like blood and guts, but Little Nightmares from Tarsier Studios manages to embrace the creepy horror aspect without feeling the need to be overtly bloody or violent. It's long been a beloved horror adventure, becoming of the PS4's best adventure games.
In this game, players take control of Six, a child with nothing but a lighter who has to find a way to sneak out of the Maw, a huge, underwater vessel filled with all kinds of mysterious horrors. Little Nightmares is essentially a puzzle-platformer game that has Six traversing from level to level finding ways to open doors—all the while slowly unraveling the truth of the Maw and its inhabitants.
Probably the closest other media to compare to Little Nightmares is the stop-motion classic The Nightmare Before Christmas (TNBC), which has a specific aesthetic that it seems to be emulating. It probably goes without saying that Little Nightmares is a lot creepier and darker than TNBC, and should leave players with some uneasy feelings when things start to get dark.
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
Released by Square Enix in 2023, Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo brings players into a classic Japanese horror story, filled with all kinds of puzzles to solve as well as some dramatic intrigue. The game is set in the 80s and focuses on several different characters who have found themselves cursed and must spend the majority of the game saving themselves before it’s too late.
Though the visual novel genre is best known for its use in dating sims, Paranormasight focuses mostly on the storytelling and promises a slow burn of a horror story that will manage to ramp up the horror through seven interconnected tales.
The art is pretty fantastic, and a manga sequel is set to release sometime in 2025. This should also be perfect for any Dandadan fans who want to get into some Japanese folk monsters.
Fran Bow
Released back in 2015, Fran Bow from Killmonday Games, like Little Nightmares, borrows from the familiar Tim Burton aesthetic with the large bug eyes and skinny frames.
This point-and-click horror adventure puts players in the shoes of Fran, a young girl who witnessed the brutal murder of her parents. Struggling with a mental disorder, Fran must navigate strange and terrifying visions as she finds a way to get out of Oswald Asylum.
It’s essentially a kid’s horror book come to life.
Oxenfree
Netflix may be the last place for players to look for games, but the streaming giant has managed to license interesting titles that aren’t just generic puzzle/rhythm games. Oxenfree from Night School Studio is a graphic adventure where players navigate a paranormal mystery.
In the game, players take control of Alex, a teen visiting a mysterious island with her group of friends. As usual with these horror games, Alex somehow unleashes a paranormal force on the island, and it will be up to her and her friends to find out exactly what went wrong.
This was actually the debut game for Night School Studio and was said to be heavily influenced by teen films and coming-of-age stories. Oxenfree’s gameplay encourages players to explore and uncover the mysteries on the island.
The game was originally released back in 2016, and has just gotten its sequel Oxenfree II: Lost Signals released last year. As far as awards go, the game did win “Best Narrative” at The Game Awards in the year it was released as well as “Outstanding Achievement in Story “ at the 20th Annual DICE Awards.
Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals
Also available to play on Netflix, Oxenfree 2 is a direct sequel to the first game. But, you can jump into this title completely fresh without having to play the first Oxenfree.
Focusing on a completely new story, Oxenfree 2 takes the formula of the original game and delivers a new experience. It comes complete with atmospheric horror that doesn’t rely too much on jumpscares, but rather on its new narrative and characters.
The game is relatively new and released for mobile as well as consoles just last year. Hard to believe there are seven years between the release of this game and its predecessor.
Limbo
Much like Little Nightmares, Limbo is a puzzle-platformer game that embraces its horror atmosphere and delivers a frightening experience for players despite its 2D platformer format. Unlike Nightmares though, Limbo is a completely colorless game set in a black-and-white world—but that just really amps up the unsettling vibe.
In the game, players take control of a boy who does everything a 2D platformer character can do, from jumping to moving left and right and climbing up and down ladders. The game also has some creepy giant bugs for players to tackle and run away from. Despite the lack of detail for the creatures, the fact that they’re cast in shadow almost adds to the horrific elements of Limbo.
The studio behind the game, Playdead, released a sequel in 2016 called Inside and it revisited several of the themes that had been brought up in Limbo.
Hello Neighbor
Don’t let the colorful Pixar vibe catch you off guard. Hello Neighbor from Dynamic Pixels is a survival horror stealth game that will have players sneaking around their neighbor’s home to dig up any of his dirty secrets.
The biggest hook of this game is the AI. It is said to be smart enough to recognize the player’s patterns and adjust the Neighbor’s behavior to catch the player. Pictures aren’t enough to sell the horror aspect of this game, but watching the trailer is enough to give you an idea of what to expect.
Dead by Daylight Mobile
Nothing screams 80s horror like the slasher genre. The concept has been done to death so much that Behaviour Interactive thought it would be a great premise for a video game.
Dead By Daylight (DBD) is a new genre of multiplayer games dubbed as asymmetrical horror. It puts a group of players in a match where one of them is an overpowered monster, and the rest have to find a way to escape the map before all of them die.
The game has a wide array of original monsters inspired by movie icons. DBD has managed to get licensing deals to bring in slasher icons like Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Freddy (Nightmare on Elm Street), and Ghost Face (the Scream franchise). The game has even brought in the Demogorgon from Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things, as well as Wesker from another infamous game franchise, Resident Evil.
Five Nights at Freddy’s
Though the movie may have just been released last year, Five Nights at Freddy’s (or FNAF) is a modern horror classic that came out on PC a decade ago.
Refined for mobile, FNAF puts players in the seat of an unwitting security guard tasked with watching over a run-down pizza parlor made for kids. What the guard doesn’t know though, is that the animatronic animals come to life at night and commit all kinds of ghastly crimes when nobody’s looking.
Filled with all kinds of lore over the years since it was released, this should be a great jumping-off point for anyone who wants to know what the FNAF craze is all about. It should be the right time to get into it since a sequel to the film is underway.
Alien: Isolation<
The Alien franchise just made a huge comeback this year with the successful release of Alien: Romulus. It led a lot of fans to go back and rediscover previously released Alien media, one of them the survival-horror game Alien: Isolation.
The game is set 15 years after the events of the original Alien (which makes it 5 years before the events of Romulus) and follows the story of Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen Ripley. Just like her mother, Amanda will find herself stuck on a ship with a murderous xenomorph, and she’ll have to find a way to escape with her life.
Besides evoking the look and feel of the original 1979 movie, Isolation was lauded for its adaptive AI. The alien in the game can study the player’s patterns. For one, if it notices that the player has a penchant for hiding in closets, it will start looking there whenever it enters a room—forcing the player to come up with new ways to outsmart it.
A sequel has just been recently announced for the game, and the original still manages to be considered one of the best entries in the survival-horror genre of all time.