Horror games come in all shapes and sizes, which means their central threats come from all over the place. Some games focus on pathogens such as the T-Virus of Resident Evil or the cordyceps fungus of The Last of Us. Some focus on serial killers, such as Clock Tower or Haunting Ground. Others are centered around curses.
Curses are one of the hardest horror tropes to escape, especially with how many different ways someone can be cursed. Whether your family is doomed for eternity or someone is horribly transformed, these games all present a brand of horror that’s unseen and relentless.
6 Until Dawn
On the surface, Until Dawn has the story of a standard slasher flick. A bunch of teenagers head to an isolated cabin in the mountains. Someone is stalking around outside. Someone, possibly everyone, is likely to meet a gruesome death along the way. However, this is all a ruse behind the real horror here, one that involves a curse.
The real threat on the mountain comes from the wendigo. These creatures are humans who indulged in cannibalism and have now been cursed to adopt new monstrous forms. One of these now stalks the teens, a much more dangerous prospect than the serial killer the audience was expecting.
5 Eternal Darkness
Eternal Darkness tells multiple stories across time, all of them linked together in the Tome of Darkness. This book, bound by human flesh, collects all these stories to warn of a great threat to humanity. However, the Tome itself is cursed due to its connection to fearsome Elder Gods planning disaster behind the scenes. Everyone described in the Tome tends to meet a grim fate.
The game details how the protagonist, Alex Roivas, is able to use to the Tome to her advantage to defeat the terrible Elder Gods at the heart of all the suffering and bring an end to the Tome’s curse.
4 Silent Hill
Silent Hill is a series best known for its titular setting. A town shrouded in fog and populated by monsters, Silent Hill is a grim place. It's a location so scary that it helped inspire a ton of other horror games. However, the first game explains how the town ended up in this state, and the simple answer is that it’s cursed.
Seven years prior to the game’s events, a cultist named Dahlia Gillespie attempted to use her daughter Alessa to birth a deity. However, the ritual failed, leaving Alessa in a charred and broken body, undying. The torture she was subjected to led to her cursing the town with her psychic powers, turning it into the ghost town players see it as throughout the game.
3 Amnesia: The Dark Descent
As its title indicates, Amnesia: The Dark Descent doesn’t open with a lot of information. The protagonist, Daniel, has lost his memory and has found himself trapped in a dark castle somewhere in Germany. What’s worse is that he appears to be being stalked by a mysterious force he knows only as “the Shadow”.
As Daniel learns more of what happened to him, he learns that he is the victim of a curse. He had retrieved a mysterious orb from a tomb in Algeria, and quickly realized that this was a mistake. The orb was cursed, leading anyone coming into contact with it to become the victim of the Shadow, which relentlessly pursues them until its victim is dead. The game follows Daniel as he tries to find a way to rectify the terrible things he’s done and lift the curse.
2 Siren: Blood Curse
Siren: Blood Curse is set in a remote Japanese village named Hanuda that disappeared in the 1970s under mysterious circumstances. Due to this, the village has become the source of urban legends. As the protagonists of the game explore the village, they uncover some terrible truths about what happened to the place.
As the name of the game suggests, Hanuda is cursed with water tainted with blood. It has replaced all the normal water, causing the residents of the area to become zombies. This curse was the result of a failed ritual in both 1976 and 2003, causing the two periods of time to merge with the underworld.
1 Fatal Frame Series
The entire Fatal Frame series is built on the concept of cursed locations. Every game revolves around a failed ritual, usually involving a young sacrificial maiden who absorbed the horrors of the underworld and became a powerful ghost. Each of these maidens then spreads her curse to everyone who ventures into the area.
The first game had Himuro Mansion, cursed by the Malice that emerged when the rope shrine ritual failed to stop the gates to hell. The second saw a strangling ritual involving twins fail, causing a whole village to be cursed with malice. The third game saw multiple people affected by a curse that invaded their dreams. The fourth game featured a condition known as Moonlight Syndrome, which slowly eroded each sufferer’s memories and personality. Finally, the fifth game featured a mountain cursed with black water, pouring out of hell.