25 Best PS3 Horror Games

Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter from 4A Games, published by Deep Silver, and the sequel to Metro 2033. Artyom, a young soldier living in the Moscow Metro after a devastating nuclear war, has to find the mysterious Dark Ones. That sends him through the tunnels and up to a surface filled with radiated gases.

Money was tight. THQ was first set to publish it and gave the team a very limited budget, so the developers worked under extremely difficult conditions. Multiplayer was planned and then scrapped to focus on the single-player story, which they hoped would rekindle memories of Half-Life 2. It is a shooter first, but the dark tunnels make sure you never feel safe.

Alice: Madness Returns takes Alice back to Wonderland for an all new nightmare, where she fights to regain her sanity and for the truth behind her past. It is the sequel to American McGee's Alice (2000), directed by series creator American McGee. Wonderland and Alice are both being consumed by madness.

Her weapons are the harmless, everyday things that take on a deadly quality in her tainted Wonderland. When her health runs very low she can use Hysteria, but only for a limited time. Critics gave it mixed to positive reviews. It is pretty and nasty at once, which suits the place. American McGee had made several attempts to start production of another sequel.

Saw puts you in the shoes of Detective David Tapp, who wakes up in a decrepit, abandoned asylum. His longtime nemesis, Jigsaw, has captured him, and his obsession with catching the killer has already ruined his family.

The game is set between the first and second films. It came out on October 6, 2009, and Saw creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell helped with the storyline and new trap designs. Critics praised the story and its multiple endings, and the environment feels true to the films. The premise is the draw. It is rougher than the movies it borrows from. The Windows version followed on October 22, 2009, and most of the fun is guessing which room hides the next trap.

Saw II: Flesh & Blood picks up right after Saw: The Video Game and is set between the first and second films. You play Michael Tapp, David's son, who is kidnapped by Pighead after his father's suicide and forced to play Jigsaw's game to investigate his father's death.

The traps are the point. It came out in October 2010 to coincide with the release of the seventh film, Saw 3D. It runs on Unreal Engine 3 like the first game, and you can now use the environment against enemies in a combat system built on quick timing and defensive techniques. Reviews were unfavourable, lower than for the first game, yet it still ranks one place above it.

F.E.A.R. 3 is a first-person shooter from Day 1 Studios, published by Warner Bros. Games. The campaign can be played alone or in co-op, online or offline in split screen.

Filmmaker John Carpenter consulted on the cutscenes and the script, which comic writer and novelist Steve Niles wrote, and Jason Graves composed the score. It came out in June 2011, and in 2021 it joined Microsoft's backward compatibility program, so it now plays on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. It also reached GOG.com in 2015. It is the F.E.A.R. to play with a friend, which makes it the least lonely game on this list. Between the co-op and the film pedigree, it is a horror shooter with real personality.

Shadows of the Damned comes from two big names: Suda 51, of No More Heroes, and Shinji Mikami, of Resident Evil. It is a psychologically twisted vision of hell where you harness the power of light to fight the army of the dark.

Everything about it is loud and filthy, and it knows exactly what it is. Mikami produced it, Suda wrote it and Massimo Guarini directed it. Some puzzles can only be solved while Garcia stands in the darkness, and a few chapters turn into side-scrolling mini-games. A remaster, Hella Remastered, came out in October 2024. The punk rock style is Suda's and the horror design is Mikami's, and somehow they share the space.

Dante's Inferno is an epic single-player, third-person action adventure inspired by Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. It runs at 60 frames per second, and you choose whether to punish or absolve the souls of the enemies you defeat.

Dante is imagined as a Templar knight from the Crusades, and the spirit of the poet Virgil guides him through the nine Circles of Hell to rescue his wife Beatrice from Lucifer. It came out in February 2010 on PS3, Xbox 360 and PSP, backed by a prominent and at times controversial marketing campaign from Electronic Arts. It is the most literary game on this list by a distance of several centuries.

Resident Evil 5 is the seventh game in the Resident Evil series and plays a lot like Resident Evil 4, with the same over-the-shoulder view. This time the environment plays a bigger role and you depend on your partner more than ever. When the partner's health bar drops to 0, they enter a dying stage and you have to reach them before it runs out.

It is the first Resident Evil designed for two-player co-op, and it came out in March 2009 on PS3 and Xbox 360. Critics treated it as the first main game in the series to leave survival horror behind for action. Play it with a friend and it makes a lot more sense.

Dead Island is a dream holiday gone wrong. You arrive as a guest at the Royal Palms Resort on the fictional island of Banoi just as a mysterious epidemic breaks out, and with a zombie apocalypse on the beach, there is only one thing left to do: survive.

It came out in September 2011 in North America and Europe and sold over 5 million units by February 2013. Reviews were lukewarm, with praise for the atmosphere and the playable characters and complaints about technical trouble and glitches. A remastered version later shipped in the Dead Island Definitive Collection, which also includes a 16-bit side-scrolling spin-off, Dead Island: Retro Revenge. The sunshine makes the zombies worse.

In Dead Rising 2 you play Chuck Greene, and you have 72 hours to save your infected daughter and clear your name before the military nukes the city. To survive, you combine everyday objects into deadly combo weapons.

It came out between September and October 2010 on PS3, Xbox 360 and Windows, and a non-canon reimagining, Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, followed the next year. The bosses are psychopaths, people who were driven insane by the outbreak or are taking advantage of it. In co-op both players are Chuck and keep the experience and items they collect, but only the host saves the progress. It is horror played for laughs, and the laughs are loud.

The Darkness mixes a dark modern crime drama with supernatural horror. It is a first-person shooter where you call on the forces of the evil underworld while fighting through gritty urban streets, and it is based on the comic book series from Top Cow Productions.

Jackie wakes up in the Otherworld, a hellish landscape controlled by the Darkness that looks like the trenches of World War I, with undead soldiers still at war. Back in the city, several levels use New York City locations that you visit more than once. It came out in 2007 in North America and Europe. It has aged better than most shooters of its time, mainly because its best ideas have nothing to do with guns.

Dead Nation is a top-down shoot 'em up made for the PS3 by the Finnish developer Housemarque. Killing zombies earns you money and score multipliers, and the money buys and upgrades weapons at checkpoints.

It launched on November 30, 2010 in North America and the next day in Europe. Get hit, and you lose your multipliers along with your health. It had no online voice chat at launch, an update on 10 March 2011 added it, and the Road of Devastation expansion followed in September 2011. It is quick to pick up and hard to put down. In co-op, when one player opens a box with money, only that player gets the cash.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is a first-person shooter with gameplay broadly similar to the original F.E.A.R. You wake up in a strange hospital that is seemingly under attack by a black ops squad, while Alma, now free from her confinements, takes a keen interest in Becket.

It ignores the story of both expansion packs made for the first game. Monolith developed it and Warner Bros. published it, and it came out on all platforms in February 2009. The team set out to correct the two most criticised elements of the first game, monotone and repetitive environments and a lack of enemy variety. A single-player DLC pack, F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn, followed in September 2009.

Dead Space 3 is the third and final main game in the Dead Space series, developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts for PS3, Windows and Xbox 360. It adds online co-op, where a second player takes the role of a new character, John Carver.

Production began in 2011, right after Dead Space 2. It was first planned as a horror-focused experience, but demands from Electronic Arts brought in action elements and pushed the horror aside. Jason Graves and James Hannigan wrote the score, and the Awakened DLC episode in March 2013 put more focus back on horror. Of the three, it is the one players rank lowest. Play it for the co-op and the finale.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is the sixth Silent Hill. Alex Shepherd, a soldier returning from war, comes home to Shepherd's Glen and finds the town in disarray and his younger brother missing. The search digs up the Order, the town's history and then his own past.

Its Otherworld arrives as paint falls from the walls and the ceiling light drops down. The Japanese release was cancelled, and the game had trouble passing the censors in some countries before it could go on sale. Since July 2018 it has been backward compatible on Xbox One. Critics later pointed to its action-heavy linearity. Players put it three places below Downpour, and the fog never quite lifts.

Splatterhouse is a horror themed beat 'em up and hack and slash game from Namco Bandai Games, released in North America on November 23, 2010 and in Europe three days later. It is a reimagining and reboot of the original Splatterhouse from 1988.

It leans into the original's gore and never apologises for it. Dr. West believes The Corrupted will resurrect his dead love Leonora, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Rick's girlfriend Jennifer. Critics praised the graphics and voice acting, but criticised the glitches and the repetitive gameplay. If you want a gore fest, it delivers exactly that. It came out on the PS3 and Xbox 360, and a talking Mask drives Rick through the bloodbath.

Resident Evil 6 is a third-person shooter from Capcom where four heroes confront the force behind a worldwide bio-terrorist attack. Their four campaigns interweave, and each one has its own tone and style of play.

It had a development staff of more than 600, making it Capcom's largest production, and it came out in October 2012 on PS3 and Xbox 360, then returned for the PS4 and Xbox One in March 2016 and for the Nintendo Switch in October 2019. Critics praised the graphics and controls, but many felt it had traded the franchise's survival horror roots for action. It is the loudest Resident Evil, and that is either the problem or the point.

Silent Hill: Downpour is the seventh game in the series. It centres on Murphy Pendleton, a prisoner who enters the town of Silent Hill and keeps slipping into the otherworld, which leads him to unlock repressed memories.

Murphy's rainy, rusted version of the town is the best part. Reviews were mixed. Critics praised the atmosphere, the story and the return to survival horror and exploration after the action-heavy linearity of Homecoming, but criticised the monster design. There is even a joke ending where Murphy tunnels out of his cell and into a party in his honour. One review gave it 7.5 out of 10, while another gave it 4.5. It beats Homecoming here too.

The Last of Us is a third-person action-adventure of stealth and combat. You face both infected creatures and hostile human enemies, and there is also a competitive online multiplayer mode called Factions.

Naughty Dog began development in 2009 and split into two teams for the first time, one making this game and the other Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson played Joel and Ellie through voice and motion capture, and Gustavo Santaolalla composed the score. It reached the PS3 in 2013 to critical acclaim. It is not strictly a horror game, but the tense parts are tense enough to earn the spot. It has trophy support, and extra downloadable content was made available.

Dead Space 2 begins three years after the Necromorph infestation aboard the USS Ishimura. Isaac Clarke wakes from a coma, confused and disoriented, on a space station called The Sprawl, and just as his health starts to improve, the station is overrun by even more advanced Necromorphs.

Pre-production began in 2008, right after the first game. The story focuses on Isaac's deteriorating mental state, with classic nursery rhymes as motifs, and the gameplay became faster-paced and more overtly action-driven. Multiplayer arrived as a separate mode, based on fan feedback and requests from Electronic Arts. Players treat the first two Dead Space games as a pair that you play together.

The Evil Within embodies pure survival horror. It combines an intricate story with limited resources at your disposal, all built to keep the tension high.

The film-like 2.35:1 aspect ratio is the first thing you notice, though a patch in 2015 let players switch to full screen. Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami directed it, and it came out in October 2014. The single-player story runs across 15 chapters. Critics praised the horror and the atmosphere, but they criticised the story and the technical issues. A sequel followed in October 2017. It arrived late in the console's life and still made the top five. You rarely get a safe moment to catch your breath.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot is a psychological thriller with first-person shooter and survival horror elements. It is set eleven months after the first game, and former FBI agent Ethan Thomas has become a violence-prone alcoholic plagued by hallucinations.

The gameplay splits into combat and investigation. The fighting is built mostly around melee, and firearms are relatively uncommon. Monolith made it as the sequel to 2005's Condemned: Criminal Origins, looking closely at what fans and critics liked and disliked in the first game. Sega published it in March 2008 in North America and Australia, and Europe got it the following month. Few horror games make a fistfight this frightening.

In Siren: Blood Curse, a TV crew from America arrives to film an exposé on the urban myth of Hanuda, the Vanished Village, where human sacrifices are said to have taken place. Hanuda is frozen in the 1970s and surrounded by a red sea, and an ancient curse has been set upon the town.

Blood Curse is the third and final game in the series, and a reimagining of the first Siren from 2003 with many alterations and most of the gameplay improvements from Forbidden Siren 2. It came out in July 2008 in Japan and on the PlayStation Store in North America and the PAL regions. Reviews were generally favourable. It is the most Japanese horror game on this list.

Alien: Isolation is a single-player action-adventure with an emphasis on stealth and survival horror. You play Amanda Ripley from a first-person perspective, exploring a space station across nineteen missions while avoiding, outsmarting and defeating the enemies on it. The story is set 15 years after the original 1979 film.

Creative Assembly meant to make a third-person game and switched to first person for a more intense experience. It copies the lo-fi, 1970s look of the original film rather than the action of the 1986 sequel, Aliens. Ammunition is limited, so the game rewards hiding over fighting. It sold over two million copies by May 2015, and one player called it "one of the most nerve-racking" games around. It earns that.

Dead Space is a science fiction survival horror game from EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games), released in October 2008 for Windows, PS3 and Xbox 360. You play Isaac Clarke, an engineer who battles the Necromorphs, reanimated human corpses, aboard an interstellar mining ship, the USG Ishimura.

Isaac joins a search and rescue team sent to the Ishimura after it goes radio-silent, following a message from his girlfriend Nicole. Critics regard it as one of the best video games of all time, and it won a number of industry awards. A remake from Motive Studio arrived on January 27, 2023, and the prequel Dead Space: Extraction reached the PS3 in 2011. It is the game players name most when someone asks for horror on the PS3, and its two sequels are on this list too.