There are a surprising number of subgenres amongst horror games, but as I narrowed down my options, only one choice seemed obvious.  Fighting off terrifying creatures can certainly give you an adrenaline rush, while on the flipside, I’ve become so desensitized to jumpscares that they hardly even make me flinch anymore.  There is only one genre that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get used to, and that, dear readers, is psychological horror, where the scares don’t just come from what’s out to get you, but from your own overactive imagination.

One thing that’s terrifying about psychological horror is how you typically find yourself completely helpless against your foes.  Little Nightmares is a prime example of a game where you can run, and you can hide, but you can’t fight back.  Whether you’re playing as Six or Mono, you are absolutely tiny in comparison to the monsters hunting you.  And sometimes, running or hiding doesn’t exactly work, either, because certain monsters will catch you anyway, with the janitor’s long arms being frighteningly effective for grabbing anything his keen hearing can detect, while the doctor can easily move anything you’re hiding under like a bully uncovering bugs beneath a rock.

In addition to the twisted monstrosities that seek your demise, the whole tone of Little Nightmares is incredibly eerie as we explore what appears to be a warped alternative to our own world that is never fully explained.  Instead, the details are entirely left up to the player’s interpretation, making for an experience where everyone’s mind can run wild with all sorts of unsettling possibilities.  The first game takes place on the Maw, a huge, artificial island that can change locations and submerge itself beneath the waves.  What exactly is the Maw’s true purpose?  They never really tell us, but considering there are children being kept in a location known as the Prison, and the guests seem far too eager to eat us, I think certain details are abundantly clear.

Our second adventure has us traveling through the Pale City, where people have become so obsessed with watching TV that their faces have literally melted and where one of the biggest threats is a mysterious entity who can travel through television screens known simply as the Thin Man.  While the game’s shocking ending does shed some light on the Thin Man’s identity, the revelation really only creates more questions than it answers.  Just like we never figure out why the teacher is educating children made of porcelain or why the doctor is treating people who might very well be more mannequin than flesh.

The only thing that is absolutely for certain…the world of Little Nightmares is truly a hostile place, especially for children, the only ones who don’t seem oblivious to the corruption.

Two other examples of psychological horror that I’ll briefly discuss are Limbo and Among the Sleep.  The former is most assuredly more famous and sees our protagonist journeying through a bleak, black and white landscape and avoiding such perils as a giant spider (an overdone trope that is done quite well here) and dealing with the mind-controlling grubs that sometimes like to burrow into our cranium.  Based on the title, a safe assumption is that we’ve died and have ended up in some sort of, well, limbo between life and death.  But how did we die?  And why does purgatory contain so much dangerous machinery and, well, any of the other things that we find here?  Your guess is as good as mine.

Lastly, Among the Sleep is a horror game where you play as a two-year-old who finds himself searching for his missing mother one night.  This particular game relies more on the atmosphere than monsters and frequent near-death experiences, though the few threats that we do encounter are rather unsettling indeed.  Instead, this game takes us through the mind of a child trying to piece together a situation far too complex for his young mind to handle.  This game’s story is much more straightforward than my other examples, with little of it ultimately open to interpretation, but part of the experience comes from deciphering this story bit by bit based on the clues presented to us.

For me, psychological horror is a lot more about making us think, along with scaring us just as much with what’s not shown on the screen as what is.  Sure, there are still usually threatening monsters that can hunt us down, but between these encounters, we also have a lot more quiet time to just ponder the world we’re exploring and ask ourselves how it got in the state that we see it in now or how our poor protagonist even ended up here in the first place.  Fighting off an onslaught of enemies can certainly be frightening in its own way, but giving us guns and other weapons to even the playing field means our protagonist won’t be completely helpless and doesn’t leave us with nearly as much downtime to just think about what we’re doing.  And that, dear readers, is why psychological horror will always be the genre of my choice.  Now that this post is done, I’m going to ponder the meaning of my own existence…