Visual novels are a strange beast among video games. Sometimes they require little interaction besides clicking to advance dialogue and scene, but occasionally they reveal themselves to be adventure games in all but name. In the safe-for-work world, thriller and horror visual novels are some of the most popular examples of the genre.
More often than not, a visual novel is stressful in the way that a book can be stressful. But even if they can’t always replicate the same kind of tension found in Resident Evil or Silent Hill, visual novels have a trick up their sleeve. Unlike books, they have much tighter control over the flow of dialogue, by only showing the player one line at a time or restricting their ability to skim through a scene.
7 Danganronpa, The Life-Sim/Killing Game
Danganronpa is what fans of the genre call a “killing game”. Much like the more famous Squid Game or the cult classic Battle Royale, the young protagonists of Danganronpa are kidnapped and forced to participate in a game that can only end with one survivor. The way to win the game is to kill another participant without being found out by your friends, while the player’s job is to catch the killer.
Ultimately, an over-reliance on minigames and a formulaic story stop the Danganronpa series from being really stressful or scary. Hoping that your favorite character won’t be next in line for the killing can be a tense experience, but it only happens 5 times per game, meaning once every 6 hours or so.
6 Ever 17, The Original
Back in 2002, Ever 17 was the first high-profile visual novel to receive an official English translation. The premise is simple: a group of kids is stuck inside an underwater theme park, unable to communicate with the outside, and they only have 119 hours before the structure collapses under the ocean’s pressure. Ever 17 features time looping, plenty of unexplainable phenomena and one of the most surprising endings of its genre.
This story shares a lot of similarities with the Zero Escape series, as well as some of the team behind it. Players who wish to try this classic would do well to install the unofficial fix mod, Ever 17 Himmel Edition, which makes the game more readily playable on modern computers and fixes most of the translation errors.
5 Corpse Factory, The Newcomer
A new contender for the most unnerving visual novel, Corpse Factory released in 2022 and it’s already gaining a noticeable following. Corpse Factory is also noticeable for being a non-Japanese pure visual novel, featuring little to no choices and lots of reading.
The plot is deceivingly simple, revolving around a website that promises to send anyone a picture of their dead body right before their death. The actual story follows three people as they become obsessed with the website and with each other. What makes Corpse Factory a bit special is how it recognizes the suffering of its own characters, all of which are living with mental illnesses in a world that is outright hostile to them.
4 Raging Loop, The Slightly Derivative One
At first, Raging Loop feels a bit too similar to Higurashi for comfort, but playing it reveals it to be much more original than it seems. While the remote town, time looping, and the cursed yearly rituals do make it suspiciously similar to its predecessor, Raging Loop has a fairly unique theme to it: Mafia, as in the classic impostor gameMafia.
Raging Loop drops an oblivious protagonist in a hostile town with complex rituals and unknowable forces at play. Thanks to the time-looping story, the player has the chance of changing every bad or ignorant decision with one that actually makes sense, giving this story a strong sense of constant progression.
3 Zero Escape: 999, The Time-Looping Mystery
Debuting on the Nintendo DS in 2009, the nonary-obsessed Zero Escape is a legendary name in the visual novel community. Just like the Ace Attorney and Danganronpa series, Zero Escape is a hybrid between adventure games and visual novels, alternating story scenes to escape room sequences. Unlike those two, 999 is a lot closer to the latter, involving far more reading than pointing-and-clicking.
Just like any good killing game, 999 puts a handful of strangers in a deadly game and tells them to find the exit before their time is up. Unlike the rest of the genre, the thrill doesn’t come from the fear of seeing one’s favorite character die at any moment: the draw of Zero Escape is the slowly piecing out a story that is tightly knit and constantly referenced from the beginning, but which only comes together in the end.
2 Higurashi/Umineko, The Classics
Higurashi and its sequel Humineko are some of the most popular visual novels out there, the first having recently received its second anime adaptation, and they both happen to be thrillers, often veering into all-out horror. The nomenclature of the various chapter of the game can be hard to understand at first, but new players only need to know to start with Higurashi When They Cry Hou, Chapter 1, continuing with the “Hou” arc and only then playing Higurashi Rei.
Higurashi is a time-looping story. The game takes place in a remote Japanese town afflicted by what seems to be a curse, which causes death and disappearances every year. In each chapter, the protagonist and his friends try to find the real root of those inexplicable events, only to succumb to the curse themselves and turn against each other. Higurashi and Umineko are widely considered some of the best visual novels ever written, but players should make sure they can stand the quite extreme themes and actions depicted in those games before approaching them.
1 The House In Fata Morgana, The Fan Favorite
The House in Fata Morgana is another contender for best visual novel of all time and was, at one point, the most highly rated game on the Switch. Yet The House in Fata Morgana is a weird beast for visual novels and not an especially tense game, not in the traditional sense of the word. Little in the story is "real", as the whole game is about helping a spirit to remember its past by revisiting other people's tragic lives. To make matters even more complicated, those people are often reincarnations of other characters, with no clear indication as to who that is.
The game is divided into chapters that take place in different times and spaces, each seemingly retelling the story of two lovers. The game finds its most tense moments in the predictable structure used by those chapters: players will understand soon that the peace built during the course of each of those acts won’t last long, but learning just how everything comes crashing down is a blow to the hearth, every single time.