The Best Horror VR Games
Virtual reality is the perfect medium for horror games. Normally you can turn off the lights and try to make your home as horror-filled as possible, but there's still some objective distance between you and the screen. In VR, the monsters and nightmares are just an inch from your eyes, and there's no way to avert your gaze. The Oculus Quest 2 has some genuinely frightening and fun horror VR games, but these are the first games you should try.
Arizona Sunshine 2
The long-awaited sequel to a VR zombie shooter classic — now with more doggo.
Many VR gamers' first VR FPS shooter/ horror game was Vertigo Games' Arizona Sunshine. It took about seven years for Arizona Sunshine 2 to amble its way onto the Quest 3 at a zombie-like pace. In many ways, it was worth the wait.
Fans of the original will love Arizona Sunshine 2. It retains the dark comedy essence of the first, complete with excellent dialog and one-liners. There's little funnier than the ramblings of a man who somehow survived the apocalypse and has gone a little crazy without other humans to talk to.
Like the original, Arizona Sunshine 2 has a core single-player experience, two-player co-op, and a four-player horde mode. That adds some important replayability, since the main game will probably take 6 hours or so, plus extra time for collectibles.
You do have new elements like a crafting mechanic and new weapons. But the biggest update to the sequel is Buddy, a dog companion who you can order to attack zombies or pick up nearby items. You can use him to stealthily take out zombies before they're alerted to your presence, or have him detect when a "dead" zombie is really biding its time. And you can store extra guns on his back, so you don't have to commit to one or two options.—Nick Sutrich
Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted
Chuck E. Cheese animatronics weren't even close to being this scary
There are two types of Five Nights at Freddy's (FNaF) fans out there: those who obsessively watch theory videos about the Bite of '87 and those who just enjoy watching their favorite YouTuber scream over animatronic jumpscares. This Quest 2 port appeals to both types. You can revisit scenes from old entries and get to interpret obscure lore moments, but it also lets casual fans enjoy jumpscares without worrying about the details.
As someone who saw the original games as kind of cheesy and too repetitive, let me assure you that the gameplay is so much more frightening and tense in VR. Unlike other horror games with stories that ease you into scary scenarios, FNaF:HW has nearly nonstop moments of tension. Plus, the mix of different gameplay mechanics from different games ensures that things feel more varied. That being said, you're still just as stuck in one place as in the PC games, so don't expect to explore your surroundings or be allowed to flee from Freddy Fazbear's gang.
While not as visually crisp as the PSVR or Steam version (which you can access via Oculus Link), Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted doesn't suffer much on the Quest 2 since the games have never been that graphically demanding. You should also invest in the Curse of Dreadbear DLC, which adds Halloween-themed baddies and (more importantly) new minigames to survive.
Jurassic World Aftermath: Parts One and Two
Making dinosaurs scary again
I was still in elementary school when the first Jurassic Park movie came out, and I'll never forget the wonder and horror that ensued. The concept was so fresh, and the dinosaurs were absolutely terrifying; the latter, in particular, was a concept that none of the many sequels captured. The many tense moments in that kitchen scene alone can be felt throughout the entirety of Jurassic World Aftermath.
You (stupidly) take a job to recover some lost data on good old Isla Nublar — two years after the fall of Jurassic World, might I add — and predictably crash land when a group of Pteranodons obliterates your aircraft. Once you make it to the facility, you realize the raptors are still hanging around and are ready to play cat and mouse with you while you are just trying to escape for your life.
Like any good stealth survival horror game, Jurassic World Aftermath makes you feel totally helpless against these creatures. There are no weapons and no real way to defend yourself. You just have a wrist-mounted gadget that can be used to activate old electronics remotely, along with a series of lockers, desks, and other debris to hide yourself in during the adventure. It's an astounding sensation of fear that's primal in nature and nearly flawless in execution.
Jurassic World Aftermath Part Two gives you more of the same story, scares, and gameplay, clearing up the first part's cliffhanger and adding new dinos and puzzles to keep things fresh. —Nick Sutrich
Lies Beneath
Forget survival; this is pure horror
If you're a fan of Japanese horror manga, you've likely heard of names like Junji Ito and Shintaro Kago. If you've not heard of these names, go ahead and Google their work — you'll immediately understand what you're about to undertake in Lies Beneath, a survival horror game inspired by these works. From the comic book style to the onomatopoeia that flies around the screen as you run, shoot, and kill, Lies Beneath will immediately transport you to a world gone wrong and completely upend your sense of reality.
Lies Beneath is a first-person survival horror that'll have you trekking through the woods and deeper into madness as you recover from the ashes of a fiery car crash. The demons you encounter could be real or just a figment of your imagination, but they're no less deadly regardless of their otherworldly appearance. You'll have to be savvy and sneaky on your journey if you're to avoid being overwhelmed, both by enemies and the thoughts that constantly grow louder in your mind.
Few games master the feeling of panic that Lies Beneath delivers. The game was developed with the Oculus Quest in mind, and, amazingly enough, all the character models were created completely in VR using Medium by Adobe. That's important since VR can give you an understanding of scale like no other visual medium can, and creating the enemies you face solely in VR has allowed the team to make models that are more convincing than what you'll find in other games. —Nick Sutrich
Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire
A puzzler-horror combo we've never seen before
Silent Slayer has a straightforward premise. You want to kill a vampire ensconced safely in its coffin. To do so, you must disarm the protective traps, find and reassemble relics to bind the vampire, and find its weak point to stake, all without alerting it to your presence.
It feels like a more in-depth and murderous version of the classic board game Operation. The Quest has plenty of action-horror and straight-up horror experiences with some puzzles tacked on, but this feels like the rare experience where puzzles are naturally baked into the experience, and become more tense than usual because of the setting and stakes.
Rest assured that this is a scary experience. Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire has plenty of jumpscares, and you should be ready to fail over and over before you manage to succeed. Schell Games took its "I Expect You to Die" template and applied it to gorgeous, fully realized rooms in an ancient castle.—Nick Sutrich
Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution
Post-apocalyptic New Orleans is a veritable hellscape
The original Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners was a marvel of a game. Chapter 2 takes everything that was good about the original and turns it up to 11, giving you free rein of a post-apocalyptic New Orleans day and night — that’s an improvement over the original in which you could only traverse the streets during the day. Not only that, but your humble school bus abode has been expanded into the nearby crypts with shelves upon shelves filled to the brim with weapons, usable scraps, food, and just about anything you could want to get a good adventure started.
TWD S&S Ch 2 launched in November 2022 with a bevy of bugs that made it literally impossible to play. We even delayed our full review until the developer could iron things out since we couldn’t progress beyond a game-breaking bug early on in the game. But, after a month of patches and updates, the game is better than ever and even more impressive than the first entry, utilizing the power of the Quest 2 to bring about more detailed environments and brand-new gibbing mechanics that’ll have you satisfyingly slicing through zombies in different ways each time just to see what happens.
Ch 2 takes the story portion of this action RPG to new heights. You’ll find more detailed dialog trees to choose from, multiple branching paths to explore, and what feels like a million new things to craft and find. It’s still got a bit of that weird physics jank that games like Bonelab suffer from but, so long as the occasional glitch or oddity doesn’t bug you too much, it’s a rewarding experience that’ll have you wondering why more VR games aren’t so in-depth.
If you’re a Walking Dead superfan and absolutely must experience every last drop of the universe, the original Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is still well worth playing. Otherwise, don’t worry too much about jumping headfirst into Ch 2. You’ll get a quick recap of the first game’s story at the beginning — including a lovely boat ride detailing the history of what happened in New Orleans after the zombies took over — and the game takes all the areas from the first and adds to them rather than fully replacing them. —Nick Sutrich
Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife
You thought death was scary? Wait until you see what's after.
When I first played Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife as part of a hands-on event in March, I really only had an inkling of how scary the game could be. Turns out, the final version (check out our Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife review) is considerably scarier than I could've imagined. There are few words to describe the feeling of dread the game paints at every corner, and you'll be turning quite a few of them as you roam the halls, rooms, and courtyards of the massive Barclay Mansion.
Wraith is set in the World of Darkness universe, including games like Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and others. In Wraith, you play as a photographer that woke up dead one day and found himself trapped in the last place he was still alive: Barclay Mansion. As you roam the halls, you'll unravel the story of what happened, narrated by a very dead, very scary shadow of your former self. You'll quickly find out that everyone was a part of a mysterious seance, led by a woman tasked with calling upon the dead to heal the owner of the mansion. But, in true horror fashion, something went terribly wrong, and everyone was brutally murdered — or were they?
Along the way, you'll find spectres destined to rip and tear you to pieces if they spot you, and you've got no good defense against them. Thankfully, you do have the special powers only bestowed upon a Wraith at the time of death — powers you'll only earn as you progress through the story. I'm not a horror fan, but the story here was compelling enough to pull me through the terror and keep me wanting more, giving it the honor of being on the list of best Quest 2 games. —Nick Sutrich
