20 Multiplayer Horror Games To Play With Friends

There’s a reason why scream and team sound so similar. Also, cream, but don’t worry about that. Whether you’re ghost-hunting, cult-banishing, or just “accidentally” setting your friends on fire, these multiplayer horror games prove that fear is better when you can make a funny story out of it with your mates. Remember to sub. Marine.

 

Barotrauma

As long as you can get past the 2Dness of it, Barotrauma will give you the claustrophobia of deep-sea exploration that swiftly turns into full-scale panic — with friends. Set aboard a rickety submarine drifting through Jupiter’s frozen moon, players take on roles like engineer, medic, or security officer, each responsible for keeping the tin can running—or sabotaging it from within. It’s a simulator and workplace meltdown that’s also a cosmic horror. So like working at McDonalds at 9PM.

Everything that can go wrong will. You’ll get hull breaches, reactor meltdowns, alien leeches chewing through the walls, and your captain screaming “who opened the ballast?” as the sub plummets into the abyss. The mix of manual systems and player-driven chaos means no two missions ever go the same way. You’ll either become a tight-knit crew or devolve into panic-fuelled mistrust in minutes. It’s grim, messy, and brilliantly tense. Few co-op games capture the feeling of being trapped together quite as well as Barotrauma.

 

Dead Island 2

After nearly a decade of development limbo, Dead Island 2 finally lurched back to life — and somehow, it’s actually fun. Dumb fun, like those little skateboards for your fingers, but still fun. Set in a gloriously sun-bleached, gore-soaked Los Angeles, you play as a “Slayer,” carving through the infected masses with melee weapons that crunch, splatter, and dismember in gloriously detailed fashion thanks to the game’s “FLESH” system.

It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. Combat is chunky, fast, and packed with environmental tricks. You can shove zombies into electrified pools, ignite leaking fuel, or carve through them with improvised garden tools. A new Skill Card system replaces traditional skill trees, letting you swap and stack abilities on the fly, and it’s way funner than it sounds.

Co-op supports up to three players, turning the city into a chaotic playground of limbs and loot. The writing veers toward self-aware stupidity and it’s shallow, sure—but sometimes you just want to chop up zombies with pals. Better the devil you know, and that.

 

Demonologist

Demonologist is a slicker, some might argue smoother alternative to Phasmophobia, built around the same idea. You and your mates investigate haunted locations, identify what’s tormenting them, and try not to scream when your name gets whispered through your headset. The big difference is that this one goes for full-blown gothic horror. Mansions creak, candles flicker, and the ghosts are kinda arseholes from the get go.

It’s built in Unreal Engine 5, which gives it dynamic lighting, detailed interiors, and ghost models that are higher fidelity. Each player takes specialised tools to detect EMF signals, temperature drops, or spectral voices, and the spirits respond to real voice commands — often in ways that feel a bit too responsive. The co-op play works best when you’re methodical, but it’s just as entertaining when everything goes wrong. It’s a stylish, genuinely creepy paranormal sim that proves the formula still has life (and death) left in it.

 

Devour

Devour is the kind of co-op horror that thrives on hooting and hollering. You and up to three other players take on the role of cult members trying to banish a demon, usually by collecting cursed objects scattered around a map while being hunted by whatever you accidentally summoned. The premise sounds familiar, but the tension it builds is nasty and effective.

Every stage has its own twist, from rural farmhouses to burning inns, each with new hazards and a different possessed antagonist. Progress is a balancing act between gathering items and managing your own fear as the demon grows more aggressive the closer you get to success. There’s a lot of sprinting, panicking, and blaming your mates when it all goes wrong. It’s been around for about 4 years now, and while its playerbase will never threaten Dead By Daylight, it’s still well worth checking out, even if you have zero patience.

Emissary Zero

Set in the decaying corridors of a quarantined research station, Emissary Zero traps players in a nightmare of malfunctioning machinery and alien corruption. It’s a co-op survival horror where a small crew must keep the lights on, repair systems, and complete objectives while something inhuman stalks the halls. The tone is like Dead Space and The Thing, but sometimes even more bleak.

You’ll spend most of your time creeping through dim corridors, solving puzzles, fixing generators, or arguing over who has to check the vents. It’s pretty tense when you realise your motion tracker’s going off but no one else can see anything. It’s a little less loud than other friendslop games and it’s one you can complete in a weekend without feeling like you have to grind it out for the rest of your time together.

 

GTFO

GTFO is pure misery — and that’s why you gotta try it. It’s a four-player co-op horror shooter that demands coordination, patience, and probably a member of your friends group who doesn’t mind taking the blame for everything. You play as prisoners sent into a vast underground complex to retrieve objectives for an unseen overseer, fighting off hordes of mutated creatures lurking in the dark. Every mission feels like a doomed expedition. Your resources are limited, mistakes are punished instantly, and communication is everything.

Before the mayhem starts, there’s a tense stealth phase where you crouch in pitch-black corridors, and sync melee attacks to silently kill sleeping monsters. When things go loud — and they will — it becomes a desperate scramble to defend makeshift choke points, ration ammo, and pray your sentry turret holds out.

GTFO is brutal, unwelcoming, and incredibly rewarding if your group survives long enough to enjoy it — emphasis on if. Let’s GTTNE. Get to the Next Entry.

 

Hunt: Showdown 1986

Hunt: Showdown 1896 marked a major overhaul of Crytek’s cult PvPvE horror shooter, shifting the action to the mountains of Colorado with a new map, target, and a shiny CryEngine upgrade. The core PVPVE loop remains pretty damn good, though. You track a monster, kill it, banish it, and survive long enough to extract while every other team on the server hunts you for your bounty.

The update introduces the Hellborn, a grotesque new Wild Target, alongside revamped weapons, new hunter cosmetics, and a sharper, moodier atmosphere. The lighting, audio, and environmental detail have all been rebuilt from the ground up, giving each encounter a heavier, grimier weight. Some veterans grumbled about UI tweaks and balance changes, but the result still has that thick gothic horror vibe. If you and your mates don’t mind ten minutes of nothing happening until suddenly everything happens and oops, you’re dead, it’s quite the multiplayer horror.

 

Lethal Company

Lethal Company turns workplace horror into a workplace comedy. Imagine Workaholics with tentacles and you’re on the right track. You’re part of a scavenging crew hired by a nameless corporation to raid abandoned moons for scrap, just don’t ask why everything’s growling in the dark. Each shift is a delicate mix of greed and survival. You gotta grab as much loot as you can before the quota’s due, or die trying while your friends scream into proximity chat as you slowly descend in quicksand.

One player reads radar from the ship while the rest stumble through factories full of monsters, traps, and doors that somehow never open fast enough. When things go wrong — and they always do — it’s almost never a bad thing, because it’s just so much fun. Lethal Company has already become a co-op staple, so if it sounds like it might ring your bell, you’ve got one of the silliest horror games ever to look forward to.

 

Midnight Ghost Hunt

Imagine if Ghostbusters and Prop Hunt had a baby. That ectoplasmic baby, with a knife, would be Midnight Ghost Hunt. Four hunters armed with proton-style gadgets face off against four ghosts who can possess almost anything in the environment. For the first half of each match, it’s a frantic game of hide-and-seek. Basically, ghosts hide inside furniture or random clutter while hunters blast every chair, vase, and mannequin in sight. Then midnight strikes, and the ghosts turn the tables, becoming supercharged and hunting the hunters instead.

It’s fast and funny, and always fun to heebie your mates’ jeebies. Each map is packed with interactable props, environmental traps, and sneaky hiding spots that make every round unpredictable. The polish and balance have taken time to settle, and it never quite hit mainstream popularity, but it’s still a brilliant slice of multiplayer horror fun that you and your friends should snag on the next sale. I bate you can’t see this next game coming.

 

MISERY

Cos Kathy Bates, in the movie? Whatever.

MISERY is a co-op survival game for 1–5 players, set in a post-nuclear disaster zone. You play as PMC contractors guarding a secret research institute in the Exclusion Zone of Zaslavie, then, with the siren wheeling overhead, you’ve got 60 seconds to grab what you can and dive into raids.

In each raid you’ll scavenge procedurally generated zones—military bases, research stations, irradiated city ruins—fighting radiation, anomalies, mutants and hostile survivors. Back at your bunker you build it room-by-room: generators, craft stations, even a basement bar where you can trade loot and unwind.

If you enjoyed the open-world loot-and-survive loop of Project Zomboid or the eerie atmosphere of S.T.A.L.K.E.Rl, MISERY gives you both, along with a lovely modern retro aesthetic that just adds to the grime of it all.

Remember: misery loves company.

 

Nuclear Nightmare

You cannot deny that nuclear stuff is pretty hot right now.

Nuclear Nightmare blends industrial horror with co-op survival, setting players loose in a Soviet-era facility after a meltdown has warped both the landscape and whatever’s left inside. Teams are tasked with scavenging vital materials and restoring power while dealing with radiation zones, failing machinery, and things that clearly aren’t human anymore.

What makes it stand out is how the environment itself feels like the enemy. Your Geiger counter constantly ticks, oxygen runs low, and flickering lights reveal creatures just long enough to regret seeing them. Players can split roles — one monitoring reactor pressure, another managing containment valves — but coordination breaks down fast when alarms start blaring

If you liked S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Barotrauma, or even MISERY, this scratches the same cold, radioactive itch.

 

Phasmophobia

By now Phasmophobia is basically the gold standard for ghost-hunting horror, so much so that I worried it might be kinda…boring to put here? You and up to three others take contracts to investigate haunted houses, schools, and derelict prisons, armed with half-working gadgets and too much optimism. You build evidence in order to try and figure out what the ghostie actually is, but it’s the way the ghosts react to your actual voice that makes it feel alive. Say the wrong thing, and it might answer. Or worse, appear.

The pacing is brilliant. You will have long stretches of silence broken by lightbulbs bursting, doors creaking, and that horrible rasp as a hunt begins. It’s packed with solid jumpscares, some just from you sneakily flicking the light switch to annoy your mates, but the tension gets so high that sometimes you won’t even wanna leave your van. The deeper you go, the less you trust anything, including your friends. Even years on, Phasmophobia remains the best proof that fear just needs bad lighting, unpredictable AI, and sometimes rude ghosts.

 

REPO

Here’s the elevator pitch: Lethal Company meets Adult Swim. Does that do it for you?

REPO drops a crew of debt-collecting contractors into a rotting, otherworldly city to retrieve “assets.” That usually means dragging some cursed object or half-alive entity back to the van without dying in the process. It’s a mix of scavenging, stealth, and total panic, where every run plays out like a corporate horror ritual gone wrong.But at least you look kinda silly.

Each mission generates a new layout filled with traps, anomalies, and half-lit corridors that feel pulled straight from a feverish office nightmare. You can grab tools to detect movement, pry open locked doors, or calm certain creatures, but most of your time is spent arguing over whether to press on or bail with what little you’ve found.

REPO is a bit of an overexposed content machine, true, but anything that appears in Fortnite has to be pretty good, right?

 

Sker Ritual

Sker Ritual reimagines Maid of Sker’s eerie folklore setting as a full-blown co-op shooter, which is even weirder considering it’s Welsh. Not many glocks in Merthyr Tydfil.

You and up to three others fight waves of masked cultists and supernatural horrors across the decaying Sker Hotel and surrounding countryside, using steampunk-style weapon mods and special abilities called “miracles.” It’s a massive tonal shift from the original’s slow-burn stealth, but it’s actually not bad at all.

Each run mixes fast-paced shooting with light objectives, all while an increasingly unhinged preacher shouts through old radio broadcasts. The progression system’s simple but satisfying, as you earn upgrades between rounds to tweak your loadout and unlock new cosmetics. It has a few rough edges, but it’s stylish and confident enough not to need to be. Think Call of Duty: Zombies by way of Welsh folklore and a BBC 2 late night drama you forgot about, and you might have some fun here.

 

Sons of the Forest

Sons of the Forest builds on The Forest’s bleak survivalish horror with a surprising amount of family dysfunction. You and your crew crash on an island crawling with mutants and cultists, then promptly decide you’re the world’s worst household. One person’s hoarding logs, another’s antagonising the locals, and your AI companion Kelvin is dismantling the base because you worded a command badly. It can be scary at times, but Sons of the Forest will just feel like a strange sitcom for most of your time with it.

The crafting and base-building are impressively detailed, but what really sells it is how alive everything feels. Enemies adapt, and your group dynamic slowly unravels as boredom over cutting down trees set in. You start out as survivors, but end up as a weird, co-dependent family that communicates mostly through screaming. It’s grim, hilarious, and endlessly re-playable, though The Forest does still hold up fabulously.

 

The Blackout Club

The Blackout Club captures the perfect suburban nightmare. No, not a homeowners association (America why do you have that), but a bunch of teenagers investigating why everyone in town keeps sleepwalking into the woods. It’s a first-person co-op stealth horror, where you and your friends sneak through backyards, cul-de-sacs, and underground tunnels armed with nothing but smartphones, noisemakers, and bad ideas. The monsters are adults under some kind of mind control, led by a presence you can only see when your eyes are closed.

The mix of stealth, traps, and improvisation gives every mission a scrappy, DIY feel, like Stranger Things run through a found-footage filter. Even better, it has a weirdly personal online element. The game occasionally sends players eerie, customised messages from its “god,” blurring the line between in-game and real-world communication. It’s creepy, clever, and totally unique, which also unfortunately means it was nowhere near as popular as it might have been. It’s still a fun time if you can get it on the cheap.

 

The Outlast Trials

The Outlast Trials takes the series’ trademark sadism and makes it social, but at least there aren’t any algorithms! You and up to three other unwilling test subjects are trapped in Murkoff’s Cold War–era facility, forced to complete psychological “trials” that involve being hunted, tortured, and humiliated for research purposes. It’s grim, filthy, and absolutely relentless, but somehow funnywhen you’re suffering through it with friends.

Each trial throws you into a different hell. You will be, of course, sabotaging generators while evading lunatics, rescuing “patients” who really shouldn’t be saved, or creeping through gas-choked corridors as alarms blare. Stealth is essential, but teamwork is the only thing keeping you from total collapse. You can revive each other, share items, or just hide in the same locker and panic together. It’s still Outlast, genitals and all, just now with a group therapy session attached. Can’t promise those genitals will stay attached though.

 

The Quarry

The Quarry is Supermassive’s most interesting stab at the teen-slasher formula. Originally planned for the Stadia, it’s a cinematic horror game that plays out like an interactive movie, complete with branching dialogue, quick-time nonsense, and a cast full of familiar faces doing their best to survive the night. You’ve got David Arquette as the overly chill camp owner, Ariel Winter and Justice Smith as counsellors in way over their heads, and Lance Henriksen chewing through every line like  it’s his last meal.

The co-op options make it shine. In local couch play, everyone controls a different character, and online sessions decisions are shared — and arguments are guaranteed. It’s all about judgement, where a bad instinct can get half the cast mauled before dawn. For that reason, sometimes it’s also about just picking the funniest option. The pacing drags in spots, but the presentation’s top-notch, the writing’s self-aware, and it nails that late-’90s horror tone better than most films that inspired it.

 

VEIN

VEIN is a post-apocalyptic, open-world, multiplayer survival sandbox where the world’s gone to hell, most people are dead, and the rest are trying not to get eaten. Sounds fun right? You spawn in with basically nothing and have to loot houses, explore abandoned buildings, fight zombies and bandits, and slowly build a base, either solo or with mates. The pitch is literally “gather supplies, defend your home, rebuild society.”

The good bit is that the world actually changes. Time passes, seasons shift, and long events roll through the map so it never stays comfortable for long. You can fortify a spot, craft gear, run missions together, and defend it when hordes or raiders show up. Co-op is drop-in, but progress/saving is still being tuned in Early Access, so hosting matters. 

So yeah — calling it “Project Zomboid in first person” is pretty fair, just with a 3D, modern Steam-survival flavour. Also, go play Project Zomboid, I just didn’t wanna gab about it for another entry for like the 20th time.

 

World War Z

World War Z, or Z if you like jams, takes the spirit of Left 4 Dead and scales it up until it’s actually just kind of stupid. You and three others travel between cities like New York, Moscow, and Tokyo, mowing through oceans of sprinting undead that climb, swarm, and collapse in sickening piles. It’s third-person, faster-paced, and built around being as big as possible. You’ll hold a bridge for two minutes and kill a literal thousand zombies in the process.

Each class brings different gadgets and perks, from medics with stim pistols to gunslingers. It’s loud and crunchy, and very rarely boring. Later updates added crossplay and horde modes, turning it into a surprisingly deep co-op package. This feels like the kind of game an adult cartoon would parody in just videogamey it is, but it’s also just a brilliantly fun multiplayer horror to kick back with for a weekend.