9 Best Nintendo DS Horror Games

Touch the Dead is a rail shooter, and the stylus is your gun. Players use the stylus to point at oncoming zombies on the bottom screen, and shots can land on the head, arms, legs or stomach. Reloading is the clever part. You grab a clip icon in one corner of the touch screen and drag it to the picture of a magazine in the other, which gets frantic fast when the dead are close. Spanish publisher Virgin Play acquired worldwide publishing rights in March 2006.

Eidos put it out under its Secret Stash Games label in North America, with box art by Arthur Suydam, the artist behind the Marvel Zombies comics. A week after its US release, it reached the Top 10 in DS game sales. Players file it with the DS's arcade action games and the stylus games you play to switch your brain off, and that is the right spirit for it.

Nanashi no Game: Me is the sequel to the cursed game further up this list, released in Japan on August 27, 2009. Epics developed it and Square Enix published it. This time an anthropology student from Nanto University discovers two cursed games, an RPG and a platformer, so the trick of a deadly old game hidden inside the real one comes back with a second genre. Like the first one, it was a Japanese exclusive.

Players who finished the first game tend to go straight on to this one, and English fan translations exist for both. It sits lower than the original mostly because fewer people have found it. If the first one got under your skin, this is more of the same in the best way, with one extra cursed cartridge to worry about.

Lux-Pain is set in Kisaragi City, a town plagued by mysteries from small mishaps to murders with no logical explanation. The cause is Silent, a worm born through hate and sadness that infects people and forces them to commit atrocious crimes. Atsuki's parents were victims of those crimes, and to avenge them he goes through a dangerous operation to put the power called Lux-Pain in his left arm. You dig into people's feelings with the stylus to find the worms, and if you dig too long without erasing them, the person's mind becomes corrupt and the game is over.

It came out in Japan on March 27, 2008, and Ignition Entertainment published it in North America a year later. Players put it with the DS's other detective visual novels, next to Time Hollow and Jake Hunter. It is more mystery than jump scare, with a whole uneasy town to dig through.

Dementium II is the sequel to Dementium: The Ward, and it fixes most of what people complained about the first time. You can jump and crouch now, and you can hold the flashlight and gun at the same time. Save points replace the old system, enemies stop respawning, and health items are saved in the inventory to use whenever you need them. The story goes deeper into William's head too. A doctor tells him the demented world only began to appear after surgery on his brain.

A remastered version made without Renegade Kid came out on PC and Mac on December 17, 2013 to negative reviews, which leaves the DS cartridge as the one to play. Players say the sequel is a step up from the first game, and some call it one of the best shooters on the system. Bring a flashlight anyway. You get to hold it this time.

Theresia is a horror and visual novel hybrid split into two campaigns, Dear Emile and Dear Martel. In the first, a young woman called Leanne finds herself in a deadly labyrinth with no memories of her past. The only clue is the word Theresia scribbled upon a piece of paper. The building is riddled with hidden traps, so looking carefully at every room is how you stay alive. Dear Martel follows a doctor whose treatment for a fever at his orphanage gives rise to something far more evil.

WorkJam, the company best known for the Jake Hunter series, developed it. Theresia was released on September 11, 2008, in Japan and on October 30, 2008, in North America. Players who want something spooky on the DS still bring it up, and it is the slow, quiet kind of horror that stays with you after the lights go off.

A rumor goes around about a nameless, cursed role-playing game for a handheld called the Twin Screen. Anyone who starts it dies in seven days, and you are the university student who just started it. You hold the DS sideways and explore in first person. The cursed game plays on the top screen as a 2D 8-bit RPG, and it gives you clues about what is happening around you. Partway in, zombie-like spirits called Regrets start roaming the places you have to search.

It was released on July 3, 2008, in Japan. It stayed in Japan, and players point to its English fan translation whenever DS horror comes up. A horror story about a cursed handheld game, played on a handheld, is a very good joke on the player, and it is still one of the creepiest things the DS can run.

Deadly Silence is the first Resident Evil, ported to the DS. The original was created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara for PlayStation and released in 1996, and it is credited with defining the survival horror genre. The DS version has two ways to play. Classic Mode is the original game with minimal enhancements and touch-screen support. Rebirth Mode has more enemies and a series of new puzzles that use the console's own features, so even people who know the mansion by heart get caught out.

You can also shake off enemies with a melee attack on the touch screen, which feels great the first time a zombie grabs you. Players list it among their favourite DS games, right beside the Mario and Zelda titles. Of everything here, it is the most traditional survival horror game, with the locked doors and the scarce ammo that made the series.

Dementium: The Ward was the first game from Renegade Kid, and it was originally planned as a Silent Hill game for the Nintendo DS. Konami turned their pitch down, so the team made an original game instead, and Gamecock published it in North America on October 31, 2007, which is the right day for it. You are William, who wakes in an abandoned hospital crawling with creatures. You start with only a nightstick and a flashlight, and you can jot down clues in a notebook with the stylus.

Reviews criticized it most for its short length and its save system, and because most enemies respawn when you go back into a room. Renegade Kid later developed a Nintendo 3DS remaster to fix problems with the original release, out in North America on December 3, 2015. Players still rank it among the best first-person shooters on the DS.

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a murder mystery visual novel with puzzle rooms, and it takes more than one playthrough to work out what is going on. Kotaro Uchikoshi wrote it for Chunsoft and suggested adding puzzle elements that are integrated with the story. The rules of its Nonary Game are vicious. Everyone who goes through a numbered door has to scan their bracelet inside the room behind it, or the bombs of everyone who entered explode. The music is by Shinji Hosoe and the characters were designed by Kinu Nishimura.

It came out in Japan in December 2009 and in North America in November 2010. Aksys turned it down at first, and the Japanese release was a commercial failure, but in the United States it sold better than expected for the genre. That success led to Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma. Players name it more than twice as often as any other DS horror game, and plenty call it the best DS game ever made.