Every good horror game needs a good setting to truly set the atmosphere. Some horror games take place in settings that are unknown to people like space or the deep ocean. And others take place in unsettling familiar settings like a town or city.
Part of what makes horror games that are set in towns creepy is that all the horrible things happen to innocent people that were just minding their own business. It plays on the fear that bad things can happen to anyone, anywhere, and that sometimes the people that pose the most danger are the ones that are closest.
8 Little Hope - The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope
The second of The Dark Pictures Anthology, Little Hope takes place in a ghost town of the same name. Four students and one teacher find themselves stranded in the abandoned town after their bus crashes. While they look for a way out of town, several members of the group experience visions of Little Hope in the past, with people that look like them being tried and convicted of being witches.
After each vision, they are hunted by their doppelgangers and killed gruesomely if they make the wrong move. Even without the doppelgangers the eerie emptiness of the town and its dark hidden history make Little Hope one of the last places to get stranded in.
7 The Pale City - Little Nightmares 2
The Pale City is where the majority of Little Nightmares 2 takes place. Mono and Six traverse through different areas of the fog-filled and dilapidated town as they make their way to The Signal Tower.
Not only is it an ominous and looming dark structure in the background, but its signals seem to have distorted the town and its residents into mindless and nightmarish creatures. With Mono and Six's size, the Pale City seems even more massive and oppressive. It doesn't help that every inhabitant is hostile to Mono and Six and every area is filled with deadly traps.
6 Tall Oaks - Resident Evil 6
Tall Oaks was a town in Resident Evil 6 that suffered the same fate as Raccoon City, nearly fifteen years ago. Due to President Adam Benford's decision to reveal what really happened at Raccoon City, an assassination plan was made to both silence the president and cover up the US government's involvement in Umbrella.
Using B.O.W.s called Lepoticas, just about the entire population of Tall Oaks was quickly infected and turned into zombies. Zombies aren't the only things that present a danger in Tall Oaks. There are two new enemy types to the series, one called the Shrieker that will stun the player and draw zombies toward them, and a large and powerful enemy called the Whopper.
5 Raccoon City - Resident Evil
Anyone that knows the Resident Evil game series should be familiar with the town of Raccoon City, the site of the first outbreak of Umbrella's bioweapon, the T-virus. Several games in the series take place in Raccoon City or cover what happened.
A seemingly normal place, it was used as a cover for Umbrella to carry out their experiments. The events of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 saw the town destroyed by the T-virus outbreak, turning most of the town into dangerous zombies.
4 Old Town - Dying Light
In Dying Light, just about the entirety of Harran is swarming with Infected as the place has been quarantined from the rest of the world. The first area in the game is the Slums, which was a place already in disarray before the outbreak. The Slums are creepy in their own right but, Old Town is the creepier of the two locations in the game.
Old Town has all the Infected types and introduces truly terrifying ones like the Demolisher who are huge, strong, and can fling walls and cars at the player. There are also Screamers, who aren't violent but can stun the player and call swarms of Infected to the area they are in if they're allowed to scream.
3 Oakmont City - The Sinking City
Eldritch horrors and small towns seem to go hand in hand, especially in The Sinking City. Set in the 1920s, players follow along with private investigator Charles Reed as he goes to the town of Oakmont to solve the mystery behind the major flooding that submerged most of the town and the strange hysteria that grips many of Oakmont's residents.
There are terrifying creatures called Wylebeasts that Reed has to fight against that deal physical and psychic damage that drains his sanity. Even the residents are unfriendly, as Reed is seen as an outsider.
2 Yahar'gul The Unseen Village - Bloodborne
Every location in the gothic eldritch horror game Bloodborne is terrifying in its unique way. Even the Hunter's Dream has its terrors that lurk within. But no place quite beats just how creepy Yahar'gul the Unseen Village is. The place is unlocked later in the game, once Rom, The Vacuous Spider is defeated.
The scenery alone looks like it was born out of a nightmare as the twisted petrified corpses of the town's population can be found melded into walls throughout the place, or left cowering in corners. After the Blood Moon rises, whether the player has collected enough Insight or not, the Lesser Amygdala that had been roaming around the place can be seen, and there are a lot of them.
1 Silent Hill - Silent Hill Series
Silent Hill is both the name of the game series and the town in which most of the games take place. On the surface, it appears to be the quintessential New England town, but it is anything but that. Those that are drawn to the town find themselves trapped in their own personalized nightmare worlds.
Even the thick fog covering the whole town is creepy and that's not even considering all the different types of monsters that lurk in the fog. Even without all the monsters, Silent Hill is home to a dark and fanatical cult known as the Order whose devotion to their god has led to numerous horrific acts.