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.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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