Editorials
How Survival Horror Game ‘Stifled’ Uses Darkness to Pit Your Instincts Against You
Tendrils that crawl out of every pore in your skin? Stilted, faceless entities that gurgle incoherently while lurching hungrily towards you? These are some of the more nightmarish sights my mind can conjure. Yet, what could be more unnerving are sights and intangible forces that can’t be seen with the naked eye, beings unforgeable even by the most imaginative of minds.
Survival horror game Stifled is innately familiar with this tenet of horror. Not only does the game put players in environments draped in absolute darkness, but it also leaves them helpless as a child, in the presence of unseen, screeching monsters. To visualize the obstacles and boundaries in your surroundings, you’ll have to rely on echolocation, with only the outlines of objects illuminated when you murmur cautiously—or bawl unwittingly. What seals the game’s horrifying premise is this cherry on top of a very ghastly cake: these creatures are also drawn to sounds. And as a virtual reality experience, it’s impossible to avoid the creeping gloom around you: your senses are practically enveloped by it.
These may sound downright unsettling, but of course, they are: Stifled is triggering a deeply wired phobia, a biological fear. The fear of the dark is a primitive emotion from our evolutionary past, stemming from humanity’s earliest days when our ancestors are wary of the shadows. After all, that’s mostly where predatory animals—and therefore, danger—lay in wait. So this darkness in Stifled is more than just an obstacle; it’s predicated on pitting our basest instincts against us.
Playing as a man who’s plagued by a sordid past—which seems to involve a painful relationship and dead babies—Stifled takes the player through a series of eerie caves, underground passages, and other places where the sun can never reach. Since these areas are impenetrable by light, sounds become the primary means of piercing through this murkiness; the crash of waterfalls illuminates the vicinity, and the creaking of rusty valves as conspicuous as a blindingly bright spotlight. Lending a palpable sense of despair to the experience is the lack of atmospheric music, which makes the silence and your isolation even more apparent.
Interview With The Developer of VR Thriller ‘Blind’
Yet when most sounds attract unwanted attention, acting against your involuntary reflex to scream when spooked becomes crucial. This maneuver is thus tethered to a different sense of sight; we learn how to bite our tongues rather than yelp in fright or snap out of paralyzing fear when a phantom draws close, so we could navigate through the darkness safely. In a way, survival boils down to how adept you are at fighting your most primal impulses.
Stripping away your ability to see—such that we mostly rely on audio cues—as you traverse through myriad horrors is a feature some horror games have experimented with (Perception quickly comes to mind). But with Stifled, this also points to the greater juxtaposition between our instincts and actions, particularly in video game horror. In the beginning, the character is left outside an overturned car that’s aglow with fire, right in the middle of a desolate forest. The only way towards progress is to delve into an underground tunnel—a decision that goes against every grain in my body.
Illogicalities like this are plentiful in other forms of horror. Horror logic in films, for instance, can stretch to notoriously absurd standards, like the lone survivor who races upstairs to escape the danger instead of out the front door, or towards the murky shadows of a heavily wooded area. Video games thus return us a modicum of control in these situations, at least allowing us to shoulder some responsibilities of making irrational decisions in frightful scenarios. This is even more pronounced in Stifled, where players often have to leap into dark, ominous crevices. In one instance, I even had to shove aside a heavy shelf and crawl into a passage that’s deliberately concealed behind. All this trouble to squeeze into a seedy hole that is surely home to a horde of undead children.
‘The Light Keeps Us Safe’ Preview
But there’s merit in making its players actively participate in their own scares. Like crawling into a gaping hole of our own accord, it reveals our willingness to suspend our disbelief, to be shaken to our core. We temper our emotions to magnify our frights. We revel in our adrenaline rush, while repulsed by our oppressive surroundings. By forcing us against our instincts, these discrepancies lend some gravitas to these striking terrors. The scares are nerve-wracking but fleeting, becoming a thrilling unease we both loathe and crave. And when our startle response starts to kick in, you may be inclined to scream—but here in the boundless emptiness, that could just be the last thing you do.
There’s a lot of reading left to do in 2026, between the glut of summer releases and the approach of fall, when horror titles get a special push from publishers, but this has already been an incredible year for horror literature.
Some of the biggest names in the genre have turned in outstanding work, rising stars have made their mark, and we’re only halfway through the year.
To celebrate the midway point of 2026, with plenty of horror books still to come, we’re taking a look back at the best horror books we’ve read this year so far, listed alphabetically by author.
If you missed any of these books earlier in the year, consider this your reminder to catch up.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
A student running from a crime he may or may not have committed escapes to his father’s country home in Japan, only to find himself haunted by strange apparitions, while in the past, a young samurai tries to find salvation for her family and finds a door to the future instead. Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic begins with this dialogue between past and present, and then blossoms into so much more, a cross-time ghost story about old wounds and what it really takes to finally heal them. I got so happily lost in this one that I would have read at least 200 more pages.
Persona by Aoife Josie Clements
In this tale of shut-ins, sex workers, artists, and the horrors they both summon and recoil from, Aoife Josie Clements weaves something that feels less like a story to be experienced and more like a psychic wound to be endured, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Evocative in its prose and nightmarish in its imagery, Persona is a story of the masks we wear, and the understanding that not all of our masks are particularly pretty or even easy to breathe through. It’s a dense, literary, unnervingly vicious book, and while it’s already attracted an audience, it deserves a much bigger one.
Dead First by Johnny Compton
Johnny Compton’s latest novel opens with a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sequence that made me instantly think “How on Earth is he going to top this?” It’s a story that begins with a billionaire hiring a private investigator to determine why, despite trying in many brutal ways, he cannot die. That premise, and the scene which sets it all off, is so alluring and delightfully gruesome that you almost can’t believe it’s the way a book begins, and then Compton just keeps going, delivering a supernatural mystery that I could not put down.
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
A woman grieving for the life she wanted visits a mysterious island renowned for the healing salt its residents harvest and sell, seeking renewal and relief. What she finds instead is a strange cult with a twisted history with surprising resonance in her own life, and a people who are more than willing to grant the relief she wants, for a price. Laced with beautiful prose and moments of profound realization alongside folk and even cosmic horror, this is vintage Sarah Gailey.
Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus
If you love horror film history and analysis, Partially Devoured is an essential. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus, the book is a deep dive into his favorite movie of all time, George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, complete with exhaustive research into the making of the film and passages of deeply moving memoir woven in. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the eerie music that opens the film is called while also bursting into tears at how horror movies can save your life, this is a must-read.
Wretch by Eric LaRocca
Our reigning King of Extreme Horror, Eric LaRocca weaves books of uncommon beauty out of the most nightmarish parts of humanity, and Wretch is no exception. The story of a grieving man who longs for relief and searches for it amid a strange support group that might be a cult, Wretch is a brutal journey into the darkest part of us all, and explores what salvation we might find when we get to the rotten core of the world and peel back its layers. LaRocca’s on a tear of great work right now that few other genre writers can match.
Headlights by CJ Leede
A mystery, a serial killer horror show, a tribute to Stephen King‘s The Shining. All of these things describe CJ Leede’s Headlights, and yet they don’t begin to cover the full breadth of horror awaiting you in this novel. The story of a former FBI agent drawn back into the cold case that haunts him most, it’s a shocker brimming over with vivid moments that’ll live behind your eyes. CJ Leede has now published three novels, and they’re all bangers, so it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already.
It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo has been one of our finest genre writers for years now, but It Came From Neverland is my favorite thing she’s written, and it’s not even close. A dark take on Peter Pan from the perspective of an adult Wendy Darling living in World War I-era London, Pelayo’s book works as both a satisfying horror narrative and a rich exploration of what it really means to never grow up. The horror never loses its potency, but it’s the search for the meaning behind the Peter Pan phenomenon in our own lives, and what we can do about it, that sticks with me most.
Filth Eaters by Ito Romo
Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters is a slim volume, one you can read in just a couple of hours if you’ve got the inclination, but it has the feel of a generation-spanning epic. The story of a breed of vampires born in Central America, the European vampires who encounter them, and the offspring they eventually produced, it spans centuries and packs loads of juicy lore into its pages while never losing its grip on character and narrative drive. I would read hundreds more pages of this world, but I’ll settle for this uncommonly grand-scale novella for now.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
A former pro gamer gets a job at a tech company to pilot a brain-dead human body across the country, and so Paul Tremblay’s sci-fi-horror juggernaut begins. Indebted to Philip K. Dick, the primal snarl of Harlan Ellison, and the quirky comedy of The Big Lebowski, and yet wholly original, this is a towering and ambitious novel by one of horror’s most respected voices. What starts as a high-concept tech thriller soon becomes a startling meditation on the value of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when we cede too much control to machines we don’t understand. It’s a stunner.
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