Editorials
5 of the Best 2D Horror Games of the Past Decade
Indie horror was a big part of the genre in the past decade (as you may have noticed in our horror games of the decade list). While AAA developers often were hesitant to fund big-budget horror games, independent developers not only embraced the genre, but found ways to evolve the genre. Amnesia, Outlast, and Layers of Fear found success and resonated with fans, despite their smaller scale. Though most of the well-known games from the decade were first person, there was a wealth of 2D horror games that did some amazing things in the genre. We decided to champion five of the best examples.
THE LAST DOOR (The Game Kitchen)
Most of the games I chose for this list are side-scrolling puzzle platformers, but The Last Door deserves a shoutout creating a chilling point-and-click adventure in a mostly 2D realm. Taking heavy inspiration from the works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, The Last Door tells the story of an ancient evil being summoned into Victorian England. Told episodically over two seasons, the plot revolves around your character being called by the last words of his childhood friend, putting him on a collision course with a mysterious supernatural force.
Instead of directly adapting Lovecraft mythology, like so many games tend to do, The Last Door keeps the themes that Lovecraft explored rather than the iconography, replacing tentacled monsters with creepy bird imagery. Its heavy pixel-art style does a great job of being suggestive of things without explicitly showing you the horrors, allowing your mind to fill in the gaps. I’m not always a huge fan of point-and-click adventures, but this one ticked all the boxes, making one of the most memorable horror experiences of the decade.
KNOCK-KNOCK (Ice Pick Lodge)
While it’s one of my favorite gaming experiences, sometimes I find it hard to recommend Knock-Knock to people. Much like Ice-Pick Lodge’s other famous series, Pathologic, the game defies easy description with its distinct and surreal mood. The gameplay somewhat resembles playing hide and seek with surreal monsters in an old, ever-expanding house while trying to figure out the proper ritual-like actions needed to move on to the next night.
Perfectly capturing the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and trying to figure out what the hell is going on while still groggy, Knock-Knock creates a strange dreamlike tone, embracing repetition to give the player a feeling of anxiety and madness. It doesn’t do anything particularly innovative gameplay-wise, but it manages to evoke a feeling in the player like no other.
INSIDE (Playdead)
Playdead studios struck a chord with their excellent 2D puzzle-platformer Limbo at the beginning of the decade, but their follow-up Inside improved on everything their debut did and then some. Once again, they created a tale of a child wandering through increasingly strange and hostile circumstances, giving the player plenty of interesting puzzles to try to solve as they progress.
While not black-and-white like Limbo, the game still has a striking art style, using color sparingly to highlight specific elements on screen. Inside continually adds interesting and surprising mechanics while presenting a beautifully surreal story that never fully explains itself, but doesn’t confuse the player. The ending of the game is one of the most strange and satisfying sequences in a 2D game since the end of Braid. You can sit down and beat this game in one four-hour sitting, so you’ve got no excuse not to try it.
LONE SURVIVOR (Jasper Byrne)
Do you miss Silent Hill? Well then Lone Survivor may be the next game you need to try. Developer Jasper Byrne did an excellent demake of Silent Hill 2 called Soundless Mountain II, and it’s clear that he carried over the mood of that project into Lone Survivor. You control an unnamed protagonist who believes he may be the last survivor of an infection that has turned people into horrifying mutants. Forced to leave your apartment by a shortage of resources, you explore your complex trying to escape the madness going on around you.
Much of the game is focused on keeping your character well-fed and rested, while also trying to manage his fragile mental state. It’s unclear what is real and what is a hallucination as you scrounge for supplies and hide from the horrors wandering the halls. Much like The Last Door, the pixelated art style of Lone Survivor also does wonders in showing just enough to get your fear centers working without giving you all the gory details. The game lasts about five hours, but with five different endings to uncover, there’s always a reason to go back.
DARKEST DUNGEON (Red Hook Studios)
Another one on this list that’s not a puzzle-platformer, Darkest Dungeon provides one of the deepest and most expansive turn-based RPG experiences I’ve ever played. The game is notorious for its brutal difficulty, but this challenge is perfectly in line with the tone and world presented. You select a party of adventurers from your pool of characters and send them into terrifying dungeons in an attempt to cleanse your estate and the surrounding areas of unspeakable evils.
These evils not only physically threaten your characters, but can also threaten their mental state, making them a danger to themselves and their party. Characters lost in battle are lost permanently, making you question how far you push each venture into the dungeon. Each section of the dungeon is explored on a 2D plane, forcing you to pay close attention for traps you might walk into. Combat also makes interesting use of the 2D environment, putting a heavy focus on positioning for both who you can hit and what attacks you have available to you. Even without the excellent DLC, there’s so much to do in Darkest Dungeon that it could really be your forever game, always offering one more run to challenge yourself.
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
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