When it comes to horror games, certain titles just spring up to mind due to their engrossing narratives, deep lore, and remarkably horrifying game worlds. Titles such as zombie-filled Resident Evil and psychological-thriller Silent Hill remain some of the hallmarks of the horror genre. Still, more horror titles deliver various kinds of terror to a player’s screen. In fact, some horror titles have vastly unique experiences that they can get hilarious at the wrong times.
Players looking for horror games with an unexpected dash of comedy may look no further, as some scary games have mechanics that can make both single-player and multiplayer experiences into comedy gold.
8 Silent Hill
In contrast to the pressure players have when trying to escape Resident Evil’s environment is the sheer terror in facing one’s demons that manifest in the horrors of Silent Hill. Set in the eponymous fog-filled town, Silent Hill usually follows the tale of various protagonists as they pursue signs of life from dead loved ones, look for missing relatives, or escape an otherwise tormented everyday life. Throughout the game, players need to navigate and solve puzzles scattered around the foggy Silent Hill proper and the twisted regions of the Otherworld, where vicious supernatural creatures are out to get the player.
Where things make a turn for the bizarre is when players realize that the creatures and events in Silent Hill are often a reflection of one’s innermost terrors. Such was the case of the deadly Pyramid Head, who actually represents the inner guilt of James Sutherland after ending the life of his suffering wife. Thing is, applying this logic does make other monsters rather funnily sketchy, such as voluptuous nurses, meaning Sigmund Freud would probably get a run for his money in the town.
7 SOMA
One of the most interesting sci-fi horror games to have come out of the last decade would probably be SOMA, as it’s more of a psychological-survival horror experience than an outright scare-fest. In SOMA, players take control of Simon Jarrett as he wakes up safe and sound in 2104 after sustaining critical injuries at a lethal car accident in 2015. The SOMA protagonist finds himself in the mysterious Site Upsilon of the PATHOS-II power center, supposedly the last bastion of humanity after a post-apocalypse.
Throughout the game, players have to explore Site Upsilon to gather various clues such as audio tapes and notes that reveal the sinister nature of the location. Not only that, but players have to evade various hostile robots, cyborgs, and weird creatures in their pursuit of truth. While SOMA meets the job in terms of building tension in its atmosphere, it’s by the time it gets full philosophical on players that can ruin the suspension of disbelief. After all, when players have to think about the nature of AI while trying to survive a horde of monsters, the brain could only focus on so much.
6 Clive Barker’s Jericho
It’s not often that an actual horror author would help in the production of a horror game, and this is exactly what happened with Clive Barker’s Jericho. Stemming from the mind of Clive Barker (Hellraiser) himself, Jericho talks of the Jericho squad of the clandestine Department of Occult Warfare, whose mission is to stop supernatural threats across the globe. Their mission this time proves to be their most difficult: stopping the anomaly known as the Firstborn - quite literally God’s first creation - from wreaking havoc across all realities. In turn, the 7-man Jericho Squad has to travel in various eras of time to stop the Firstborn from undoing God’s work.
In terms of overall atmosphere and sheer presence, Jericho works well in establishing its rather desolate setting that goes straight into uncanny valley - from its monsters to even the supernatural abilities of the Squad. However, the hilarity here comes as soon as players realize that one Jericho operative, Cpl. Simone Cole, has limited reality-warping powers specifically to “explain” why players are able to save the game or even upgrade their characters.
5 Resident Evil 3
While the entire Resident Evil franchise is scary in general, fans of the classic games would undoubtedly consider Resident Evil 3 as one of the scariest games in the franchise. Similar to its Remake counterpart, Resident Evil 3 puts players in control of Jill Valentine, one of the last surviving STARS operative unfortunate enough to stumble upon Raccoon City. During its outbreak, Umbrella Corporation used this as a time to test their most advanced Bio-Organic Weapon yet, the Nemesis T-Type, designed to specifically follow orders. His directive? Eliminate all surviving STARS members. And in the game, this translates into Nemesis going on an unhinged pursuit of Jill Valentine.
This results in some of the scariest and at the same time funniest interactions in the game. Nemesis can pop out and surprise players at any point in the game except in Safe Rooms, resulting in an unnecessary cat-and-mouse chase that may span the entirety of the available map. And while these moments can become inherently scary, players just in it to play for fun can find Nemesis jumpscares quite hilarious.
4 Five Nights At Freddy’s
With the original Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) being a huge success to horror fans, this otherwise-ordinary horror game of a night-shift employee stuck in Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza became a horror franchise sensation. At its core, players take the role of a staffer in the pizza parlor tasked to surviving their shift while using various electronics and tools in the restaurant at their disposal, including lights and cameras, doors and vents, and even engage in minigames to ensure their protection against various animatronic threats.
However, its various games soon reveal that there’s more to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza outside Freddy Fazbear the animatronic. What perhaps makes the game unintentionally hilarious is the dedication to create lore for lethal mascots that span across nine (9) current main titles, and around 10 spinoffs. It doesn’t help that players, at the end of the day, may have to reminisce the fact that their character has died at the hands of a mascot.
3 Inside The Backrooms
One of the more niche horror subgenres to come out of modern meme culture is that of the “Backrooms,” which comes from the 4chan thread that talks about walking inside an immense office space, characterized primarily with a deadpan yellow hue with rooms that have no end in sight. And of the games to have come out of this genre, Inside the Backrooms does a good job of reflecting the existential dread such a premise could get.
In Inside the Backrooms, players are tasked to find their way out of the dreaded space through solving various puzzles in a randomly-generated mega office floor. Thing is, Inside the Backrooms has its fair share of horrors - all based on Creepypastas - stalking players wherever they go, complete with jumpscares. While evidently scary, Inside the Backrooms transports players from sheer terror to comedic annoyance when a constantly-chasing predator meets a ridiculously-expansive interior space with no clue how to solve a lot of its puzzles.
2 Phasmophobia
It’s one thing for players to outrun a supernatural being and another thing entirely to venture deep fourth into a haunted location in order to hunt them. The latter is exactly what Phasmophobia does, serving us a unique twist on the ghost hunting genre by allowing teams of four to embark on cases that would have them search for ghosts using a white variety of equipment and all the while trying to escape the ghosts wrath when provoked. As expected, Phasmophobia has its share of atmospheric and ambient horrors, from old and bloodied environments to objects that the ghosts can interact with.
However, where Phasmophobia becomes unintentionally funny is when players inevitably become incompetent ghost hunters. Since finding the coveted ghost type involves identifying “clues” the ghosts provide, players inevitably resort to bickering amongst themselves as to who should pursue certain objectives or even accidentally coming face to face with a ghost while doing random investigations. And with the Spirit Box allowing players to actually “talk” to the ghost, the game provides hilarious moments where even famed Phasmophobia streamer Insym can ask, “Are you pizza?”, much to the ghost’s irritation.
1 SCP: Containment Breach Multiplayer
Fans of creepypasta and other forms of horror flash fiction would likely know the SCP series. In this creepypasta subgenre, storytellers talk of various “entities” documented and categorized by an organization called by the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) Foundation. Formatted to appear like confidential documents, SCPs appeal to readers by introducing them to rather bizarre fictional creatures and forcing them to read between the lines on “redacted” portions to induce terror. And SCP: Containment Breach Multiplayer in Steam transforms some of the most popular SCPs in a playable format.
In Containment Breach Multiplayer, players venture into a place called Site-19 that contain various SCPs. However, when a containment breach happens, players now have to solve puzzles and find their way to escape the facility, lest risk getting killed by said SCP. While inherently scary, the fact that players can become both SCP Foundation staff and the SCPs themselves pave the way for hilarious gameplay moments. These include players panicking hilariously to their deaths, or a local multiplayer session leading to funny chase sessions with friends.