10 Best Nintendo 3DS Horror Games

A group of teenage friends goes into an abandoned mansion to record a video for the internet, and soon they are running from a terrifying figure. You play Arisa, a Japanese exchange student, and your only attack is throwing items that stun a hostile for a moment. A stamina meter drains while you sprint, and the flashlight app on Arisa's phone uses up its battery, so you spend a lot of time hunting for chargers in a haunted house. Horror has never felt more like real life.

Nikkatsu and Mebius made it, and Aksys Games published it in the West. Reviews were mixed or average, and one critic called it "serviceable". Choices at a few key moments decide your ending. Players who recommend it for 3DS horror tend to name it in the same breath as Corpse Party.

The walk home from school turns into a monster hunt in Goosebumps: The Game, a point and click adventure where you play a boy or a girl you name yourself. The monsters have escaped from R.L. Stine's books, so werewolves prowl the woods and scarecrows walk at midnight. It is a prequel to the Goosebumps film, and WayForward Technologies developed it.

The game also came out on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. The books behind it are a giant of their own, with over 400 million copies sold, and only Harry Potter has sold more as a series. Younger players are the audience, and the game never pretends otherwise. Think of it as a first scary game for a kid who has just read the first book, Welcome to Dead House.

Gabriel Belmont, his son Trevor, his grandson Simon and Alucard all take a turn in Mirror of Fate, which MercurySteam made as an action-adventure and the direct sequel to Lords of Shadow, the game that rebooted Castlevania. You explore a labyrinthine castle and piece together the mystery of Dracula's return. The story is told out of order, so each character fills in a gap.

Critics liked the visuals and the combat more than the story and the level design. Nintendo picked the studio for Metroid: Samus Returns because of its work on this game. Players who enjoy it describe a side-scrolling action game closer to the old NES Castlevanias than to Symphony of the Night, so come for the whip, not for a giant map.

A diary that steals its readers' faces sits at the centre of Spirit Camera, a Fatal Frame spin-off from Tecmo Koei. The 3DS itself becomes the Camera Obscura, and you use its camera and augmented reality to solve puzzles and fight ghosts. Ghosts appear in your real room, and you keep each one in focus while the camera charges. Is that the best idea in the game, or a reason to move house?

It began as a plan to port an older Fatal Frame, until Satoru Iwata vetoed it because he wanted something more original. Critics were mixed to negative, pointing at the lack of content and the problems with the AR. The booklet that came in the box is needed to play, and players warn about it more than anything else; some print a copy off.

No music plays on The Starship Damrey. Its composer, Izuho Numata, decided the game would be tenser with no music at all, and outside a few event scenes it runs entirely on environmental sound effects. Kazuya Asano and Takemaru Abiko designed it as a first-person survival horror game, and it throws you in with no tutorials or hints.

It came out as part of Guild02, Level-5's set of eShop games made with outside designers, next to Keiji Inafune's Bugs vs. Tanks! and Kaz Ayabe's Attack of the Friday Monsters! Reviews were mixed. The mood is the reason to play, and the players who liked it still agree it is short, a couple of hours that end just as the story gets going. Headphones help, since the silence does most of the work.

Capcom took the Mercenaries minigames from Resident Evil 4 and 5 and turned them into a whole 3DS game, built by TOSE: a third-person shooter where you kill as many enemies as you can before the timer runs out. Eight characters are playable, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine and Albert Wesker among them, on maps from those two games.

It also carried a short demo of Resident Evil: Revelations, with Jill Valentine searching a desolate cruise liner. What people remember most is the save file. It could not be erased, which looked like an attempt to curb the used game market, and Capcom said a feature like it would probably not return. Players who love it say the score chasing never gets old, and that it shines in short sessions.

A masked figure called Zero kidnaps nine people in Zero Time Dilemma, splits them into three teams and forces them to play the Decision Game. Chime made it as the third Zero Escape, and the story sits between the first two games. Each chapter is a 90-minute fragment, and you can play them out of order. The characters lose their memory after each one, so they know about as much as you do.

Kotaro Uchikoshi started planning the story in 2012, the work was put on hold when the series failed in Japan, and it started again in 2015 because fans kept asking. Critics liked it. Players are less kind: many call it the weakest of the three, with an ending that falls flat, and they agree you should finish 999 and Virtue's Last Reward first.

Sigma is abducted and forced, with eight other people, to play the deadly Nonary Game. Virtue's Last Reward is Chunsoft's adventure game and the second Zero Escape. Half of it is escape room puzzles. The other half is the Ambidex Game, where you choose to ally with or betray the person across from you, and a flowchart lets you jump back to any choice and try the other path.

Critics praised the story and the characters but were divided on the escape sections. The game was a commercial failure in Japan, which led to the temporary cancellation of its sequel. In 2017 it was bundled with its predecessor as Zero Escape: The Nonary Games. Players rank its story among the best they have played, and they agree on one piece of advice: play 999 first.

Set shortly after Resident Evil 4, Revelations sends Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield after a bioterrorist group that plans to infect the Earth's oceans with a virus. Capcom made it as a survival horror game for the 3DS and set much of it on the Queen Zenobia, a cruise ship chosen for its claustrophobic corridors and its isolation in the middle of the ocean. It was also the first game outside Japan to support the Circle Pad Pro, because improving the controls was a priority.

Critics praised the spooky setting and the sound, and they were less happy with how uneven the episodes felt. An HD version later reached PC and the home consoles, but it started on a handheld. One player put it neatly: "It's like mixing the bests of the old RE and the new RE."

Luigi explores Evershade Valley in Dark Moon, catching its corrupted ghosts with help from Professor E. Gadd, and has to defeat King Boo to restore the Dark Moon. There are several mansions this time, and the flashlight now carries the Strobulb, which you charge for a burst of light that works like a flashbang. Luigi is terrified the whole way through, and honestly, fair.

Next Level Games, the Canadian studio behind Punch-Out!! on the Wii, made this second Luigi's Mansion with Shigeru Miyamoto supervising. Critics loved the graphics and the world but not the mission structure or the lack of checkpoints. It sold 6.44 million copies, and players put it on their lists of the system's best games, horror or not. A remaster, Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, came to Switch in 2024.