25 Best PS2 Horror Games

Obscure: The Aftermath is the sequel to Obscure, a co-op survival horror game in which you guide two of six playable characters through narrow, enemy-ridden places. Each character has a particular skill, such as moving heavy objects or acrobatics. The story starts two years after a group of teenagers survived the longest night of their lives, trapped in their school and chased by creatures their principal created.

It came out on PC, PS2 and Wii, and a PSP version followed in 2009. Hydravision, the studio behind it, made two more games on this list. The studio later closed, which ended the series, and a planned sequel and prequel never happened. Players nearly always name it right alongside the first Obscure, which sits nine places higher, at #16.

Alone in the Dark is the fifth game in the series, released in June 2008 on PC, PS2, Xbox 360 and Wii. The PS2 and Wii version is a completely different game from the others, developed separately by Hydravision. You can switch between a first and third person camera, and you can combine objects into weapons, though only some objects go together.

Critics gave it mixed reviews, but it was a financial success. Four tech demos came out before release, showing off the inventory, the fire and the enemies, and the soundtrack features the female choir The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices. Players named it exactly as often as The X-Files: Resist or Serve, one spot above it.

The X-Files: Resist or Serve is the third X-Files game, set during the show's seventh season and told as three new episodes. Mulder and Scully investigate mysterious deaths in Colorado and learn about an alien artifact used to bring the dead back. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson voice the two agents, and Mark Snow's music from the show is in the game.

The trail ends in Tunguska, Russia, at a spaceship that crashed there nearly 100 years earlier. It was meant to come out alongside the seventh season on DVD, and it missed by about a year. Critics compared it to Resident Evil for the similar gameplay and praised the story and the voice acting, but they did not like the fixed camera angles.

Gregory Horror Show is a survival horror game based on a computer-animated anime series, published by Capcom in Japan and Europe and never released in North America. You sneak around a hotel run by Gregory, an old mouse, taking back the bottled souls his guests carry. A character named Neko Zombie teaches you the rules and hands over the first lost soul.

You spy through keyholes to learn their habits, because every guest can outrun you, and once you take a soul the guest stops fleeing and starts chasing. It is the cutest game on this list by a distance, and somehow one of the meanest. Nobody else on the list looks anything like it, which is exactly why players keep it on their lists.

Resident Evil Outbreak was the first Resident Evil with co-op play and online multiplayer, although PAL players never got the online part. Its episodes play out in a zombie-filled Raccoon City around the time of Resident Evil 2 and 3, with eight characters to choose from. David King the handyman, for one, can build weapons from his tools.

Take too much damage and you collapse and crawl while the virus speeds up, until you heal or another player helps. Reviewers liked the multiplayer but missed voice chat. Capcom followed it the next year with a standalone expansion, File #2, and players tend to name both Outbreak games together.

Forbidden Siren 2 is the sequel to Siren, and it never came out in North America, so English players got it in Europe. It strands several characters on Yamijima Island, whose entire population vanished during a blackout in 1976.

Twenty-nine years later a journalist's ferry capsizes on the way there, and a group of soldiers crash-lands on the island shortly after. You play it from their points of view, out of chronological order. The sequel adds crouch-walking and a hint system that points to your next objective, plus a tougher new enemy called the yamibito. A film inspired by the game, with a different plot and characters, came out the same year.

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is set after the first two games and follows three characters who lost loved ones and get drawn into the supernatural Manor of Sleep. You still fight ghosts with the Camera Obscura, and each character has different strengths. The idea came from director Makoto Shibata's own nightmares.

Tecmo planned it as the series' final entry on the PS2, and Makoto Shibata and Keisuke Kikuchi came back as director and producer. Tsuki Amano wrote and performed the theme song. Sales met Tecmo's expectations, and the ending where Rei, Miku and Kei all survive is the canon one. Players rank it well below the first two Fatal Frames, at #1 and #12.

Extermination was considered the first survival horror game on the PS2, and it was used to show off the system at trade shows before release. It got mixed reviews once people could actually play it. You play Dennis Riley, a Marine Corps Force RECON operative sent to Antarctica to stop a virus that mutates people.

The European and North American versions differ a lot: the hero was redesigned, and every line of dialogue was recorded again with different voice actors. So depending on where you lived, you met a different man. Some of the team later joined Access Games. Players who like it say the atmosphere wins out over the rough gameplay.

The Suffering: Ties That Bind follows Torque after he flees Carnate Island and heads back to his home town of Baltimore. Stan Winston helped with the game's design. Like the first game, it plays in first or third person. If you have a save from the first game, you can pick one of three openings based on the ending you got.

The sequel is stricter with your gear: Torque can carry only two weapons at a time and can no longer stockpile health bottles. Reviews were favorable, though critics said it was too similar to the original, and sales were underwhelming. Players rank it thirteen places below the original.

Obscure follows five students of Leafmore High School as they investigate strange happenings, and a second player can take over one of them. Each student has a use: Josh, a reporter for the school paper, can tell whether an area still has unfinished tasks. The monsters are photosensitive, so flashlights weaken them and direct sunlight kills them.

Hydravision made it for PC, PS2 and Xbox, and North America got it last, in April 2005, more than six months after Europe. It later reached the Wii and PSP too, and the series ended when Hydravision closed.

Manhunt 2 follows Daniel Lamb, a mental patient with amnesia, and Leo Kasper, a sociopathic assassin who guides him. It was due out in July 2007, until it was refused classification in some countries and rated Adults Only in the United States. Rockstar London made the PS2 version.

It came out in North America that October, and PAL territories had to wait until October 2008. GameSpy nominated it for its 2007 Game of the Year Award for the PS2. Players named it a little more often than the first Manhunt, but the first game's picks got more backing, so the sequel sits one place lower.

Manhunt is a stealth game from Rockstar North in which James Earl Cash, a death row inmate, is forced to take part in snuff films by killing the gang members sent to hunt him on camera. The PS2 got it first, in November 2003. A voice called The Director talks Cash through the whole thing over an earpiece.

It has twenty levels, called scenes, and brutal executions earn the stars that rate each one, while face to face fighting earns nothing. Its graphic violence got it banned in several countries, and the UK media tied it to a murder, an accusation the police and courts later rejected. It wasn't a commercial hit, either, but it built a cult following.

Echo Night: Beyond is a science fiction ghost story from FromSoftware, the third game in the series. You play a newlywed on the way to a honeymoon on the Moon, until the ship crashes and leaves you alone at an abandoned research base.

You explore the station in first person, inside a spacesuit, with ghosts and near weightlessness for company. You have no way to fight the ghosts, so you avoid them, and you can only get rid of them by clearing the mist they live in. Most honeymoons go wrong in smaller ways.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly traps sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura in a ghost-filled village, cursed by a failed ritual they are being forced to re-enact. Mio searches for Mayu with the Camera Obscura, the series' ghost-fighting camera.

Development began shortly after the first game, with director Makoto Shibata back, and the aim was to refine the gameplay and tell a story compelling enough to make players finish it. Singer-songwriter Tsukiko Amano created the theme song. Critics praised the story and gameplay and later called it a classic of the genre, and a Wii remake followed in 2012.

Siren comes from Keiichiro Toyama, who had written and directed the original Silent Hill, and his team was made up of staff from that game. Its interlocking stories follow a cast of characters across different time periods, all stuck in the town of Hanuda with the shibito, deadly zombie-like creatures.

Its big idea is sightjacking: you see through a shibito's eyes to work out where the threats are. They react to noise too, and search in the direction of any sound you make. Toyama even scouted abandoned villages around Japan for research. Critics liked the story and the atmosphere and were harder on the gameplay. Europe knew it as Forbidden Siren.

Silent Hill 4: The Room leaves the town behind for the city of Ashfield, where Henry Townshend tries to escape his locked-down apartment. Along the way he crosses a series of supernatural worlds and runs into an undead serial killer named Walter Sullivan.

It came out on PS2, Xbox and Windows, and it was made alongside Silent Hill 3. It gives you plenty of melee weapons but only two firearms, and how much damage Eileen takes decides whether she survives the final boss and which ending you get. It is also the first in the series with no joke UFO ending. Critics were mostly favorable, but its break from the formula divided players. It is the lowest Silent Hill on this list, at #10.

Clock Tower 3 is the only video game directed by the film director Kinji Fukasaku. Alyssa Hamilton, 14, comes from a family line of women who travel through time to defeat evil spirits, and she goes from 2003 London back to the 1940s and 1960s to do it.

It was the first Clock Tower with direct control instead of point-and-click, and Alyssa spends most of it unarmed, hiding from her pursuers. She only gets a longbow for the fights at the end of each level. Keita Amemiya designed the characters, and more than two hundred actresses auditioned for Alyssa's motion capture. Critics praised the cutscenes and Fukasaku's direction but found the gameplay repetitive, and it was a commercial failure.

Silent Hill 3 is a direct sequel to the first game, following Heather Mason, a teenager caught up in the town cult's plan to revive a malevolent deity. It was originally planned as a rail shooter. The final version was built from scratch in 10 months, and the scenario was written in one.

Its influences include the film Jacob's Ladder and the works of Stephen King, and it sold over 300,000 copies by September 30, 2003. Players named it far less often than Silent Hill 2, though they nearly always name the two together.

Kuon is a FromSoftware horror game set in Japan's Heian period, during an outbreak of monsters at Fujiwara Manor in Kyoto. One of its three heroes is the veteran onmyōji Abe no Seimei.

Producer Atsushi Taniguchi wanted a dark story built on Japanese kaidan ghost stories, with female leads, and the gameplay grew out of FromSoftware's earlier Lost Kingdoms. Agetec published it in North America, and Europe had to wait until 2006. Used copies are rare and expensive, and players argue about whether the game is worth the money.

Cold Fear puts Tom Hansen of the US Coast Guard aboard a Russian whaler in the Bering Strait, where a parasite has turned the crew into zombie-like creatures. Darkworks made it as its second game, after Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare.

To make the ship roll realistically, the team wrote a completely new program, the Darkwave editor, and used real physics for the loose objects on board. In other words, the sea is also trying to kill you. Tom Salta composed the soundtrack, with a Marilyn Manson song in the mix. Critics compared it unfavorably to Resident Evil 4, which came out the same year, and it was a commercial failure.

Rule of Rose is set in Britain in 1930, where a nineteen-year-old named Jennifer is trapped in a world ruled by young girls who have formed a social hierarchy, the Red Crayon Aristocrats. Punchline drew on the Brothers Grimm for the story and on Silent Hill for the look.

Studio musicians produced the whole score. Before it reached Europe it became the subject of a moral panic built on rumors about its content, and various European authorities called for it to be banned. The UK cancelled it, even though the Video Standards Council called the complaints nonsense. Critics were hardest on the gameplay. Players have kept it in the top five anyway.

The Suffering is a horror shooter from Surreal Software that plays in first or third person. Torque is on death row for murdering his ex-wife and two children, a crime he has no memory of committing, and soon after he arrives on Carnate Island an earthquake hits and supernatural creatures attack the prison.

Most of its monsters stand for the execution methods once used on the island, so Slayers represent decapitation and Marksmen the firing squad. Stan Winston Studios finessed the team's creature designs. Your choices decide Torque's morality, and that decides which of three endings you get. Players often recommend it together with Ties That Bind.

Haunting Ground follows Fiona Belli, a young woman who wakes up in a castle dungeon after a car accident. She befriends Hewie, a White Shepherd, and the two explore the castle looking for a way out. Hewie is, by any measure, the best boy in survival horror.

Capcom set out to make a survival horror game with a female lead, and treat Hewie badly and he will not save Fiona when it counts. It has been described as a spiritual successor to Clock Tower, and it shares a lot with Clock Tower 3. Critics praised its themes of vulnerability and found the gameplay repetitive. Players named it a touch more often than Silent Hill 2, but Silent Hill 2's picks got more backing.

Silent Hill 2 follows James Sunderland, a widower who travels to Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his dead wife. Team Silent started work in June 1999, soon after the first game was finished, and the story was inspired by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Pyramid Head, the monster everyone remembers, was based on the executioners of the town's history and exists to punish James. The Xbox got an extended version with a bonus scenario, Born from a Wish, that December, and the PS2 caught up with a Greatest Hits release in 2002. A remake by Bloober Team arrived in 2024. Players keep recommending it as the one to play, and some call it their favorite.

Fatal Frame follows Miku Hinasaki, a spiritually sensitive girl searching the haunted Himuro Mansion for her brother Mafuyu, and her only weapon against hostile ghosts is a mystical camera. Director Makoto Shibata and producer Keisuke Kikuchi set out to make the scariest game possible.

Its atmosphere was inspired by Japanese horror and war films, and some parts were cut for graphic content. Shibata's concept came from his own dreams, and the working title was Project Zero. An expanded Xbox port followed in North America in 2002, but the PS2 had it first. Players recommend the whole series, not just this first game.