Free Horror Games For Halloween 2016

penumbra

It’s well past daylight hours. The only illumination outside is the faint hue of the moon. Everyone else is asleep, the streets cloaked in black, with only the scattered areas of buzzing, orange street lights revealing a single spot of the sidewalk. You sit by the window, not quite tired yet, listening to dead leaves scrape against the ground as the wind rustles the landscape. It’s time for horror games.

And this is “Broketober”. There are plenty of massive, triple A, big budget games coming out this October, and you need to save your money for those so you can keep up with your friends, and you can’t afford some of those pay-to-play horror games right now. Luckily, there are some freebies you can indulge in this coming Halloween, and I dug through some of the better known Steam ones that you should give a try.

 

1. Cry of Fear

cry-of-fear
Source: Cry of Fear Wikia

This is probably the most well known, as it has been available to play for quite some time and has a decent sized fanbase. It started as mod for the original Half Life, but later progressed well beyond what standard Half Life could offer by using a different renderer to enable much more technologically advanced graphics.

Today the game is available as a free, standalone download on Steam. I wouldn’t quite say it has the finesse of paid survival horror games, but considering it doesn’t cost you anything, it’s safe to say that this is one of the more enjoyable horror games you can play this season. There are guns, but inventory space is limited and combat purposely clunky. However, this does sometimes juxtapose with the gameplay, as it’s often at odds with whether it wants to be survival horror game where combat is discouraged, or a full shooter but only giving you limited space and resources to deal with enemies, often leaving you in frustratingly cheap situations where there isn’t any way around it.

It’s still a fun and eerie experience, and the sense of both isolation and insanity are often nerve wracking. There’s also the plus of a full co-op campaign, which is slightly shorter than the main game, but still a fun way to experience a similar creepiness with some friends.

 

2. SCP Containment Breach

scp-cotainment-breach
Source: deviantart.net

While not available on Steam, this is another free horror game with a sizable fan base released a few years ago. The last I checked, it’s still not complete, and I have encountered a few bugs that still have yet to be squashed, but SCP Containment Breach is a terrifying experience.

While some of the game’s antics do wear on the player rather fast, as you learn the enemy patterns and become almost too familiar with some of the game’s cheaper design elements, at least for your first few hours of your playtime you should be incredibly paranoid and horrified at your surroundings. Based off of the SCP “creepypasta” series, this is a survival horror game that places you in the perspective of a test subject meant to interact with various “SCPs” in order for researchers to better understand how to contain and deal with them. Any SCP can be either completely harmless, or astoundingly hostile and deadly, as well as anywhere in between.

As long as you go into the game without the prior knowledge of these entities, you’ll be going through both intrigued as well as fearful of everything you come into contact with. Ambiguity is the game’s biggest strength, as each creature and entity in the game has it’s own characteristics, behaviors, and abilities that they will likely use to try and kill you with, but some might actually have useful properties you can use to your advantage, making some of the gameplay a bit trial and error. Luckily there is a quick-save feature, however there were a few times during my personal playthrough where I did have to restart the entire game due to an error in the world’s random generation.

It’s still not a complete game, as it needs quite a bit of polish and updating, but for one whole payment of absolutely nothing, it’s a very entertaining horror experience that might actually be worth researching afterward on the SCP Wiki if you’re interested in some creative writing.

 

3. Penumbra: Necrologue

penumbra-necrologue
Source: YouTube

This title does actually require a copy of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, however, I’m assuming if you’re a horror fan who’s desperately looking for a horror game to play this season you likely already have a copy of that game somewhere. Penumbra: Necrologue is a free mod available on Steam that uses the Amnesia engine to continue the story and atmosphere of Frictional Games’ previous series, Penumbra.

The original Penumbra series has had a bit of a mixed response as each title was released, with many saying the first is the best while the other two go progressively downhill in quality. Despite that, however, all three games are still great horror titles, with at least one of them relying entirely on the atmosphere rather than having any actual monsters chasing you. Necrologue seeks to capture the best of the series and adapt it into a brand new title, bringing with it familiar creatures, puzzles, and environments. This mod does actually feel exactly like another sequel developed by the original developers, with the exception of a couple missteps, but in my opinion this is probably the most polished horror game on our list.

If you’re going to give this mod a try, I do recommend you give the original game’s a try if you haven’t already, as they are great horror games themselves and are rather cheap to download on Steam or GOG.

So do go on and give these few free horror titles a try. These are just a few that I’ve personally played and feel confident in recommending, but there are whole lists of these games on Steam and other sites. There should be plenty to keep you both entertained and thoroughly terrified this Halloween.

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