My honest answer for horror games to play with the lights off this October is Alien: Isolation, with only the telly glowing and the big light off, nothing else. It's built for slow dread rather than jump scares, so it needs a properly dark room to actually do its job.
I'm not the sort of person who finishes a horror game in one sitting like it's nothing. I pause it to make tea. I pause it because I heard a noise that turned out to be the boiler. Once I paused it because my own reflection in the black telly screen made me jump, which is not a great sign for how the actual game is going.
What horror games should you play with the lights off?
My rule for October is simple. If a game relies on jump scares alone, it gets boring fast, however dark the room is. What I actually want is the slow kind of dread, the sort that gets into your shoulders before anything has even happened yet. That's the whole appeal of playing with the lights off in the first place. It's not for the scares. It's for the atmosphere doing its job properly, instead of fighting against a lamp and a half-open curtain.
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Alien: Isolation is the one I keep coming back to. It's not new, and it doesn't need to be. You spend most of it hiding in a locker listening to something enormous walk past, and the tension of just waiting is worse than anything that jumps out at you. I've sat in that locker holding my breath for a fictional creature that cannot hear me breathing, which tells you everything about how well it's built.
How do you get through a full horror game session in the dark?
Here's the bit nobody puts in the serious gaming write-ups. Playing horror games properly, in the dark, on your own, requires a small amount of setup or you will simply give up halfway through and put a comedy on instead. For me that means something warm over my knees, because being cold makes everything scarier and not in the fun way. I've had the same Chunky knit throw blanket draped over the sofa arm since last winter and it has become, unofficially, part of my horror gaming kit. It is doing absolutely nothing to protect me from anything on screen. It helps anyway.
The other thing that helps is knowing when to stop. I learned this the hard way after a very poor decision to play until half past midnight, only to lie awake convinced the wardrobe door was doing something it definitely was not doing. Horror games are best in an hour or so, not marathoned, unless you enjoy having a full conversation with yourself about whether stairs creaking is normal for a flat this old. It is. I've checked. Several times.
What's a good horror game if you're new to horror?
Not everyone wants full survival horror where you're rationing bullets and crying about a locked door. If you're newer to this and just want horror games to play without the constant threat of dying in a corridor, go for something with more story and less combat, where the fear comes from what you're being shown rather than what's chasing you. Ease in. You can work up to hiding in lockers.
Either way, turn the big light off, not all the lights. There is a difference, and the difference is whether you can still see your own hands.
Tell me what you're playing this month. I'm always looking for the next thing to be quietly terrified by, ideally something that lets me keep the blanket on the whole way through.
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