The Most-Anticipated Horror Games Of 2025 And Beyond

A new year is upon us, and though it promises many horrors of its own, it deserves to be said that 2025 should be another banner year for the video game horror genre. From new sequels in major tentpole series to indies you may well learn about by reading this roundup, the year ahead in simulated scares is long, diverse, and overall unsettling. We've arranged over two dozen horror games for you to preview below, and included store links to each so you can wishlist what you'd like and keep them on your radar.

We've arranged these games in order of release date, though many haven't been given concrete dates yet. Games that have been linked specifically to launching this year have received "2025" windows, while those that seem likely to launch this year but haven't mentioned any specifics have "TBA" listings for our purposes. Here are the most-anticipated horror games of 2025 and beyond on PC and consoles. If you're more interested in something you can play right now, check out our picks for the best horror games to play or a broader look at all of 2025's upcoming game releases.

• Developer: Montraluz
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: January 23

This liminal-space horror game kicks off our list but won't be the last of them highlighted. Whereas Below, Rusted Gods (mentioned further down) seems to promise enemies to dodge, Dreamcore looks--at least from trailers--to be devoid of combat and chases. That's actually my preferred kind of liminal-horror experience, but given the nature of these kinds of games, more than anything I'm just along for the ride. With several different settings and a bit of analog horror thrown in for good measure, Dreamcore's setup suggests a bit more story than this sort of project usually includes, which may help it stand apart from the many games like it.

• Developer: Belief Engine
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: January 30

With a hazy, nightmarish filter, Dead Letter Dept.'s data-entry and mail-sorting gameplay is already creepier than it would seem when you hear those words being used to describe it, but it's the story that's teased in the game's demo that has me really intrigued. As you type up letters that have met their dead-ends, what happens when the mail seemingly starts addressing you specifically? I don't know if this game is ultimately a metaphor for the ennui of the modern underemployed workforce or a fever dream of an ex-postal worker or something else, but I'm ready to find out.

• Developer: Vivi
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: January

Kiosk is arguably the strangest game on our list, and that's really saying something. In it, you run a small restaurant cooking burgers, hot dogs, and other dishes, slinging them out the window to odd customers in a rainy city. Is there a monster lurking in this story? A threat of any kind? I don't actually know. But I know the sharp polygons of the world and the unnerving atmosphere work well on me. A demo is out now ahead of the game's debut, so you can see if you can stomach this one yourself.

• Developer: Tripwire Interactive
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: March

Killing Floor is a series that loudly and proudly knows what it is: a co-op PvE wave-based horde shooter with over-the-top enemies and characters slicing and dicing to an energetic metal soundtrack. Killing Floor 3 sure does look like more of that, albeit with perhaps more fidelity and polish than past games. If you've ever thought Call of Duty's Zombies mode should be a bit more B-movie in its enemy designs and character barks, Tripwire has just the game you're looking for.

• Developer: FromSouthGames
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: Q1 2025

Below, Rusted Gods is the next of several liminal-space horror games on this list, and I confess to that revealing a bias of mine. I find liminal-space horror experiences to be super creepy, whether they're the type to feature monsters and enemies like the plethora of Backrooms games on Steam today or those, like Pools, which just leave you with your own thoughts and bad vibes. Below, Rusted Gods looks Backrooms-inspired but does not seem to include those famous yellow walls despite how wishlist-friendly they are right now. That suggests a confident team to me, and I'm eager to see more.

• Developer: Techland
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: Summer 2025

Once intended as DLC, Dying Light: The Beast is now a standalone game set in the Dying Light world, but those who own Dying Light 2: Ultimate Edition will get it for no additional charge. It brings the story to a new open-world setting and puts you back in the parkour-friendly shoes of Kyle Crane, protagonist from the first game. It also adds new enemies, driveable vehicles, and new weapons, like a launcher that fires UV lights and a flamethrower. It seems like it'll have all the markings of a major expansion, with the added bonus of being a standalone on-ramp for players new to the series.

• Developer: Supermassive Games
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: 2025

For those following The Dark Pictures Anthology closely, you've been handed a new cinematic horror-adventure game roughly every year for several years now. Throw in spiritual tie-ins The Quarry and The Casting of Frank Stone, and Supermassive has been getting by on Hollywood-inspired scares since 2019 without taking a year off. The next Dark Pictures entry gets into sci-fi horror, with a story that looks a bit like Event Horizon. Some folks losing their minds, some body horror. All the genre flourishes you'd hope for.

• Developer: Vincent Adinolfi
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: 2025

There have been many games chasing the aesthetic and stylings of classic survival-horror games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, but most of them have looked to the PS2 era for inspiration. Heartworm goes further back in time with a horror story heavily built on PS1-era games. You'll still manage inventory and run through corridors presented through fixed camera angles, but you'll not fight zombies with guns. Instead, you'll take on apparitions with a camera. I've played a few demos of this one over the last year and I've loved the music and atmosphere, including the traditional safe room song.

• Developer: Supermassive
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: 2025

Little Nightmares 3 is a fascinating game to have on this list. For one, it's from Supermassive, which is already represented on this list with the aforementioned Directive 8020. That makes the studio the only one to appear twice. But this is also the first game in the creepy series not from Tarsier, which is a studio with a different game on this list that also looks a bit like Little Nightmares. But all of that preamble aside, LN3 also adds co-op to a formula I'm not at all tired of. A demo I played last year suggested the addition of a friend doesn't diminish the scare factor.

• Developer: Dual Effect
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: 2025

The original Tormented Souls has been an under-the-radar genre favorite for a few years now. It's obviously cut from the Resident Evil cloth, even setting you in a mansion full of dead ends and doors "locked on the other side," but like I've said elsewhere in this roundup, that's exactly what many players are hoping for. The sequel changes the location but brings back its playable character for a second nightmarish chain of events to survive, surely complete with all kinds of elaborate locking mechanisms.

• Developer: Tarsier Studios
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: 2025

I referred to Reanimal earlier in this roundup because it's the next game from the original Little Nightmares team. It does look quite like Little Nightmares, broadly speaking, with its twisted, Laika-like character models and art direction. But the world the team has created is markedly different from its past games, too. This time, it features strange animal-esque monstrosities and can be played in co-op or with an AI companion. Tarsier seems content to stay in the horror realm, and with such inspired monster design, I'd say the team has found its strong suit.

• Developer: Pulsatrix Studios
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA

A.I.L.A. is a first-person horror game that sounds a lot like a particular episode of Black Mirror. If you've seen the episode called Playtest and thought, "I'd like to play that," this is the game for you. It pits players as a playtester exploring an all-too-real VR world. In this case, however, the nature of the horrors seems to change a lot, as though the simulation is running through many kinds of horror stories. No matter your preferred subgenre of scare, A.I.L.A. may have you covered.

• Developer: Bloober Team
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: TBA

Cronos is the next game from Bloober Team, which was actually revealed in the same week Silent Hill 2's glowing reviews appeared online. That was a big week for the Polish horror team. In an interview last year, a Bloober Team dev told me the studio is done making "shitty" games and SH2 shouldn't be viewed as a fluke or a momentary high note. The team is excited about Cronos, which combines elements of Dead Space and Netflix's Dark to tell a sci-fi horror story with a time-travel twist.

• Developer: Targon Studios
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA

Darkwater is a multiplayer horror game built around an extraction gameplay loop in which players explore creepy, unwelcoming spaces and hunt for resources. That suggests it's the latest in a line of Lethal Company-inspired games, but I don't mean that as a bad thing. Popular indies always inspire similar games, but the best of them stand out as worthwhile in their own right--like how Amnesia presumably led to Outlast. If it can keep the loop unpredictable like its inspiration, Darkwater may be worth a swim in the deep end.

• Developer: We Have Always Lived In The Forest
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA

DarkwebStreamer (stylized as darkwebSTREAMER) seems primed to hit on a subject that's been popular in other media as of late, such as the film We're All Going To The World's Fair or the novel We Had To Remove This Post. That subject is the dark underbelly of the internet and the effect it can have on our psyches. DarkwebStreamer is, according to its developer, "a narrative roguelite. a psychological horror. a self-creating story that changes every time. a made-up genre. it's a batshit attempt at something NEW." I'm in.

• Developer: Variable State
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: TBA

Deepest Fear is probably one of the most mainstream-friendly games on this list, and that's despite its strange origin story. It's an immersive-sim horror game with metroidvania leanings, and all that sounds very cool, but it notably comes from Variable State, a team that first arrived on the scene with the very Twin Peaks-like walking sim, Virginia. Since then, the team has been hard to nail down, following up that game with a Telltale-style adventure and, soon, a PvP shooter. It's hard to think of an indie team willing to show this much range, but my hope is Deepest Fear proves to be well in their apparently expansive wheelhouse.

• Developer: Sonka
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA

Holstin is a bit like Heartworm in that fans of retro horror games will find something interesting here, but it does several things in its own way, too. Exploration is done in third-person, but at a zoomed-out, isometric angle in levels that look like boxed dioramas, giving it almost a 2D look at times. Combat switches you into over-the-shoulder gameplay, so the game's POV is quite dynamic. Set in an eerie Polish town in the 1990s, it's also sure to be dreary as hell, which I am always up for.

• Developer: Saber Interactive
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: TBA

Dinosaur horror is a subgenre that's been underserved since Dino Crisis went away decades ago. A few recent indies on PC have toyed with the premise, but if anyone is going to bring it back in a big way, it's Jurassic Park. This first-person game goes several steps past the dangers depicted in the somewhat family-friendly movies and leans way into the horror of being hunted by re-emerging dinosaurs. Saber has made a ton of horror games based on licensed horror IP, so the team feels like a natural fit to adapt Jurassic Park in this exciting way.

• Developer: Broken Bird Games
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA

I've written many, many times about the wave of games that P.T. spawned. Luto is not a novel idea, but it is quite effective, and sometimes that's enough. A post-2014 first-person claustrophobic haunted house game like Luto story certainly wears its inspiration on its sleeve, but a game can be both derivative and scary as hell, can't it? The demo for this one gave me that impression when I played it a year or two ago. Hopefully this is the year we can uncover the complete tragic backstory of Luto.

• Developer: DCE Projects
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA, pre-alpha available now

For the last liminal horror game on this list, I present a game that is actually said not to be a horror game. Paradise Nowhere's Steam page says the "game isn’t intended as a horror experience, [but] your feelings towards liminal spaces might make it one." I'm definitely in that camp, and if you are too, this is one to check out. If Below, Rusted Gods is the liminal horror with monsters, and Dreamcore is the one with a hidden story to uncover, this one seems to be purely made for atmosphere.

• Developer: Red Soul Games
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: TBA

Post Trauma was on this list last year, but got pushed out to 2025 last October. It's too bad it wasn't around for the Halloween season, but horror enthusiasts aren't known to be picky about when they're getting a new entry to the genre. Unlike lots of Resident Evil-inspired games, this one isn't pairing those combat and puzzle elements with retro graphics. Instead, it's going for a modern look, so you can see all of its grotesque monsters in high definition.

• Developer: Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: TBA

We know close to nothing about Project C and Project D--including, apparently, their real names--and yet they're two of the most exciting games on this list. How can that be? Well, for starters, they come from Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow, creators of inventive live-action, medium-bending adventures like Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality. As best I can tell from their especially cryptic Steam pages, both are horror games, or at least horror-adjacent, with Project C actually being a collaboration with Brandon Cronenberg, director of some of the best horror movies of the past decade. No Half Mermaid and Sam Barlow game has ever been less than fascinating, and with these two shrouded in secrecy, the anticipation is half the fun.

• Developer: Lunar Software
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S
• Release Date: TBA

If you like Ridley Scott's Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or No Code's Observation, Routine looks like one for the wishlist. Set in a world similarly imagined using a 1980s vision of a scanlines-heavy, analog future, Routine is a horror story about a lunar base that seemingly houses some, uh, problematic denizens in the form of humanoid robots--or is it a singular, hard-to-kill robot? That's one of many mysteries surrounding this one.

• Developer: No Code
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: TBA

Silent Hill gave us one of 2024's best games in the remake of Silent Hill 2, but also one of its worst in Silent Hill: The Short Message. With two more announced games in the series forthcoming, Konami can maybe break the tie soon. Townfall is the presumed smaller game of the two, but that doesn't mean it's worth overlooking. It comes from No Code, a team already mentioned several times in this roundup given its genre excellence. We know basically nothing about this one other than that, but that's plenty if you've played the team's other games.

Sorry, there's no store listing as of yet.

• Developer: Neobards
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Release Date: TBA

Speculation says this is the next mainline Silent Hill game. That would make Silent Hill f the first new mainline Silent Hill game since 2012's Silent Hill Downpour. Like Townfall, we don't know much about this one, though its odd name seems to hint toward something related to music, as the lower-case "f" is the symbol for "forte," which denotes a section meant to be played loudly. It's also said to take place in Japan during the middle of the prior century, making for a novel setting for the long-standing series.

Sorry, there's no store listing as of yet.

• Developer: Deklazon
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA

They Are Here touches on a subject I find odd we don't see more of in this medium: alien-abduction horror stories. So often, aliens in games are depicted as opposing militias or animalistic beings. They Are Here leans into the X-Files' way of doing things, with bug-eyed grey aliens threatening to beam down and overpower you the way humans might to an ant on the sidewalk. That sort of power dynamic is inherently terrifying, so if They Are Here can deliver on it, the game should feel both haunting and fresh.

• Developer: David Wehle
• Platforms: PC
• Release Date: TBA

I should hesitate to call anything on this list Dark Animal Crossing, but if anything were to be called that, it would be We Harvest Shadows. The first-person horror game is also a farming sim and tasks you with unlocking new equipment like rakes and shovels, managing your crops, and, well, yeah, once in a while performing ritualistic sacrifices in the woods surrounding your home. See, it's not so different from Animal Crossing.