When it comes to new horror games, there are times of feast and famine, and this past year we gorged until our bellies bulged and our mouths dripped with gruesome grease. In 2024, we received a rich spread of dark experiences from solo creators, indie teams, AA developers and AAA studios in a vast array of genres and visual styles. There was a fantastic Silent Hill 2 remake and beefy updates to contemporary classics like Phasmophobia, Alan Wake 2 and The Outlast Trials, and there was also a steady cadence of brand-new horror franchises expanding the genre in unexpected ways. First, let's take a moment to celebrate a sampling of the year's fresh horror universes. This is not a comprehensive list of new horror franchises in 2024, but it's a suitable demonstration of how vast and varied the offerings were this year.

This year may not have been as jam packed as 2023 was for gaming, but there were still plenty of amazing new releases. Whether you love a good indie or a big-budget production, this year had you covered. All you needed to do was look a bit deeper than you might have in 2023. The core of Animal Well isn't that structurally complicated: It's a lock-and-key Metroidvania. You go to places to unlock other places and abilities. Beating the core "story" opens up a couple layers of admirably elaborate and increasingly meta secrets, but let's be real, most people interested in those are just going to look up the answers online. And yet, you play it, and you can't help but think there isn't much like it nowadays. It's the fact that you never learn what your little blob guy is. It's giving you a map to mark up yourself instead of providing any instructions.

What I have always admired about Japanese role-playing games is their unashamed grandiosity. The likes of Final Fantasy, Persona and Shin Megami Tensei don't restrict themselves to the familiar trappings of good v evil, wizards-and-goblins, swords-and-magic; they absorb all of those things, and plenty else besides, from science fiction and mythology and comic books and psychology and classical art and whatever else interests their creators, and construct these absurdly ambitious worlds and narratives out of them. The themes are never small, the playtimes never short. Think of them as the operas of the video game world: a theatrical synthesis of different virtual arts, from storytelling and stagecraft to music and movement. And as something of an acquired taste.

As I mentioned the other week, I've been playing through a PlayStation 1-style, low-poly horror game called Crow Country. They're too intense, and full of unpleasant surprises – I even played The Last of Us with a text walkthrough to tell me when the fungal zombies were going to appear. For last year's critical darling Alan Wake 2, I recruited my partner so I could hand over the controller whenever I felt like something was about to jump out at me. Like Alan Wake 2, a section of Crow Country is set in an abandoned theme park – a well-worn horror setting (Max Payne did it too, as did Left 4 Dead), but one that still reliably freaks me out. Unlike Alan Wake 2, I didn't need my partner to shield my eyes.