When many players think of platformers, they picture mustachioed plumbers, tie-wearing gorillas, and anthropomorphic cups. Not exactly the stuff of nightmares. Yet another, darker breed of puzzle platformer exists, one in which a harrowing fall onto a pit of spikes might be the least of the character's worries.
Some horror puzzle platformers are outright violent, but many capitalize on softer, if no less unsettling, tricks. The flash of something hairy and hulking lumbering away, the rise of foreboding piano music, the anvil-drop of thunder — done right, these games have no limit to the ways in which they can torment players. And that's before the pressure plates and teetering platforms.
Updated on January 21, 2022 by Patrick Armstrong:Puzzle platformers can be uniquely stressful. As the hero journeys through strange and dangerous lands, they are often only a single missed jump or mistaken guess away from death and a frustrating return to the last checkpoint. Horror puzzle platformers only heighten the tension, whether through an unsettling art style, horrific themes, or waves of bloodthirsty enemies to hunt the player. Horror, puzzle games, and platformers may seem like a strange mashup to some, but the best games in this ever-growing field show why they're a natural, if terrifying, fit.
14 Black: The Fall
Black: The Fall and Limbo have more than a little in common. Both are side-scrollers. Both have protagonists trying to survive in a surreal industrial nightmare, navigating ledges and scaffolding while trying desperately to avoid a series of terrible traps. Both have a high-contrast art style that highlights the protagonist against gorgeous backdrops, selling the player on the immensity of the world, and the insignificance of the hero compared to it.
Limbo gets the accolades, and justifiably so, but for those looking elsewhere for a taste of that same magic, Black: The Fall is the game to play.
13 Albert And Otto
Albert and Otto is a dreamlike journey. At times a nightmarish one. The player is given almost no context or backstory to explain who the main character is or what he's doing. While that may be frustrating to some, deep lore and a multi-layer narrative aren't what Albert and Otto is about.
The mechanics of this puzzle platformer are deeper than one thinks at first look, forcing the player to untangle its interactive elements or see their character die. The true draw, however, may be the game's art style. Like many others in the genre, Alert and Otto favors a high-contrast, monochromatic look, and the blacks and grays of its world make it stand out, highlighting each level's geometry and giving everything an unsettling air.
12 Nihilumbra
Hand-painted environments and a lush soundtrack help set Nihilumbra apart from most games in its field. Even if many of its mechanics will feel familiar to fans of the genre, the game does an outstanding job of bringing something new and rich to the world in which those mechanics are rooted.
The game's difficulty takes a sharp turn in the second half, which may deter some that had gotten used to its more welcoming beginning, but this experience is one that's worth fighting through. Also notable is Nihilumbra's willingness to tackle serious themes in its writing, something most other puzzle platformers don't bother with.
11 Typoman
The schoolyard rhyme which claims that words can never hurt you is handily disproved by Typoman. In this game, individual letters fuse together like pieces of rusted scrap metal, becoming monsters that hunt the protagonist through a barren, eerie landscape.
Its puzzles are also composed of letters, literally spelling out instructions, warnings, and threats. No other game makes language itself sinister in quite the same way as Typoman manages to. Combine its unique premise and haunting atmosphere with the precision running and jumping that one would expect from a top-tier platformer, and the game offers something truly special.
10 Tamashii
A platformer that embraces special effects and flashing lights the way Halloween embraces pumpkins, Tamashii is horror as sensory overload. The world through which its protagonist must run and leap is grotesque, filled with hideous creatures, statues, and engravings, as warped and vile as they are strangely suggestive. It is a brief horror game, but brilliant.
Amongst the frenzied leaps and panicked sprinting, Tamashii rewards careful examination of its environments and study of its many puzzles. Cyphers and other easter eggs give players much to occupy them in this tale of witches, ancient entities, and temples in good need of a cleansing.
9 Closure
The protagonist of indie delight Closure is a spider demon, but unfortunately, it isn't the most awful thing waiting in the dark. Light and darkness are critical features of this game, in which objects outside of the light dematerialize as if they had never existed. In Closure, that the light does not touch does not exist.
This isn't the hardest puzzle game, and that's a good thing. The art looks like the illustrations in an Edward Gorey book, and the story tells the interwoven tales of three humans. The audio hammers with excitement and tension, and the central mechanic of light manipulation opens many unique avenues for gameplay.
8 DARQ
Lloyd is trapped in a nightmare, and unsurprisingly he isn't thrilled by this news. The protagonist of DARQ is a lonely, skeletal young man who would make a great addition to Grim Fandango or The Nightmare Before Christmas, two worlds the game seems to channel in the best of ways.
The premise of someone trapped in a nightmare may not be novel, but DARQ makes the most of this familiar premise by letting the protagonist bend physics and the fabric of the dreamscape to his advantage. It has clever rather than impossible puzzles, and its environmental navigation is an M.C. Escher delight. DARQ is a game in which platforming adds to, rather than distracts from, the horror at hand.
7 Rain World
Is it a slug? Is it a cat? Yes, because it's slugcat, the protagonist of Rain World. This game takes the platforming, horror, and survival genres, throws them in a blender, and sprinkles a dash of pixilated monster into the corrupt slurry. As a slugcat prowling the dystopian ruins in search of prey and on the run from predators, players are given the opportunity to explore a virtual world that feels truly alien.
Despite its spear and lightning reflexes, slugcat is a fragile beast, and being hunted by the crocodilian shadows of Rain World is a terrifying experience at times. When even the rain wants the character dead, fear is only appropriate.
6 Deadlight
The new Seattle which Randall Wayne explores doesn't look much like it did before a cataclysm in the 80s all but ended the human race. Now Randall is searching for his family, and only quick climbs, precision leaps, and desperate fights will keep him in one piece until he finds them.
Unlike most horror platformers, Deadlight is 2.5D, a gorgeous landscape of urban decay the player must traverse or die. Deadlight gives new life to zombie horror by emphasizing traversal as much as combat, offering a much-needed respite to fans of the genre bored of repetitive slaying. Throw in excellent sound design, and Deadlight is a solid contender, though it could easily have been just another forgotten zombie game.
5 Shady Part Of Me
The game is as close as they come to being a living storybook, with animation and an aesthetic befitting Coraline. This brief puzzle platformer is heavy on ambiguity and creepiness. Dark, surreal, emotionally wrought, and altogether excellent, Shady Part of Me is also surprisingly heartfelt.
The protagonists of the Shady Part of Me are a little girl and her shadow, and the light and shadow mechanic allow the player to switch between 3D and 2D gameplay at will. Those who play it will likely find the game impossible to imagine without the narration by Hannah Murray (Gilly from Game of Thrones), whose voice works wonders to deepen the atmosphere of this dark fairytale.
4 Little Nightmares
A child named Six is trapped in the Maw, a strange and gigantic vessel inhabited by monsters bent on making Six their next meal. Little Nightmares and its sequel are both terrifying, but neither relies on jump scares or gore. Instead, they draw upon the innate vulnerability that one feels playing as a child in a world where everything is larger and more dangerous, adulthood and growing up personified as literal monsters.
The art, sound, level design, and worldbuilding combine to make Little Nightmares one of the best horror platformers around, and one won't soon forget a visit to its harrowing halls. Games like these are few and worth cherishing.
3 Carrion
A grotesque red mass of tentacles, teeth, and undulating flesh, the protagonist of Carrion is the game's monster. Carrion turns the horror platformer on its head by placing the player in control of a creature running riot through the lab from which it has escaped, tearing apart any soldier unfortunate enough to be caught in the creature's path.
This game isn't one that takes place in a single location, packing considerable diversity into its environments. The animations of the creature's slippery movements, lashing tentacles, and gory gobbling of its victims make Carrion a treat for fans of the genre in search of something new, and while the emphasis in this side-scroller is more on the horror than the platforming, the creature is no slouch at leaping chasms.
2 Limbo
PlayDead's Limbo may be one of the genre's most famous examples as well as its best, and from a single screenshot, it's easy to see why. Its black, white, and shades of gray style, giving players the pervasive sense that the main character has sunk deep into the murk of a terrible place and may never rise from it again.
Of course, ambiance alone is not enough to raise a game to greatness, and PlayDead honed the mechanics of Limbo to the sharpest possible edge. The puzzles are some of gaming's finest, and for those that persevere against the dark, the feelings created by this game reverberate long after the credits have rolled.
1 Inside
The spiritual successor to Limbo, this title introduces players to a world in which researchers control people. The child protagonist takes command of one of the researchers' devices and uses it to control others' actions, allowing them to complete puzzles and otherwise survive. With a playthrough time of less than four hours, Inside can be beaten in a single sitting — and should be, to maintain its atmosphere.
Inside's story is symbolic and ambiguous, leaving most of its events open for interpretation by the player. Considerable speculation and debate amongst fans has taken place amongst fans. This narrative choice is undoubtedly one of the game's strengths, as is the game's sparing use of color in an otherwise monochromatic scheme. Its ending remains one of the most talked-about in the genre.