27 Games with a horror setting like BlackSite: Area 51 that you should try

Gordon Freeman became the most popular nameless and voiceless protagonist in gaming history. He is painted as the most famous scientist and a hero within the world of Half-Life, and for a good reason.

The second game returns us to the city of Rapture, on the New Year’s Eve, but this time player takes control of Subject Delta, Big Daddy, that’s been separated from his little sister and has been forced to shoot himself 2 years before the events of the first game took place.

Time manipulation applied to objects rather than the whole world: you age a crate to dust or restore a collapsed staircase, and it is used cleverly in traversal and combat. A tight, short campaign. It borrows heavily and openly from BioShock and Half-Life 2, and the shooting itself is unremarkable once the time device stops surprising you.

The second installment of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise is set one year before the events of Shadow of Chernobyl and serves as its prequel. You will explore the forbidden area around Chernobyl, Ukraine, after a new disaster that turned into The Zone, a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of mutants.

With over 2 million copies sold, the new episode of the most internationally successful S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series seamlessly connects to the first part of the Shadow of Chernobyl. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Three separate campaigns — Marine, Alien and Predator — each rebuilding the game around a different body: the Marine's motion tracker and dread, the Alien's wall-crawling, the Predator's cloak and vision modes. The Marine campaign is the one that holds up. The other two are short and thin by comparison, and the multiplayer that carried it in 2010 is long dead.

The one most people remember: more branching, better boss design, and an arcade pace that still holds up in short sessions. The infamous dialogue is part of its reputation. Same caveat as the original — it is a light-gun game, and without the hardware the aiming feels imprecise in a way that undercuts the whole design.

An arcade light-gun shooter, which means it is built for short bursts and score chasing, not for sitting down with. Branching paths reward saving civilians. On a controller or mouse it loses most of what made it work, the voice acting is famously poor, and the whole thing runs under an hour per credit-fed run.

A conventional military shooter wearing Quake's skin: corridor combat with heavy weapons, at its best in the mid-game once the Strogg conversion sequence gives it a hook. Level design is repetitive metal hallways for long stretches, and the squadmates who accompany you do little beyond soaking damage and opening doors.

Its enemy AI is still the reference point twenty years on: soldiers flank, suppress and call out movements, so firefights unfold differently each time. Slow-motion makes that legible instead of trivial. The horror sections have not aged as well — the same office corridors repeat for hours, and the scares telegraph themselves long before they land.