An underrated marketplace for indie horror gems is Itch.io. Whether you’re looking for a good story to hook you or you want to feel alive through fear, here is our ranking of the 13 best horror games you can play right now on Itch.io.
The 13 best Itch.io horror games
13) NextDoor
- Developer: Broelbrak
- Price: Free
- Scare rating: 4/10
- Story rating: 4/10
As a huge fan of Junji Ito, I take no pleasure in saying there aren’t many great adaptations of this legendary horror mangaka’s work. However, a pixelated side-scrolling tribute of The Woman Next Door (from Mimi’s Tales of Terror), titled NextDoor offers just the right amount of horror you need in a compact setting. The idea of having a neighbor that never makes a sound even when they’re home all day is bizarrely unsettling, especially when you can see that multiple people live there. Paranoia sinks in as you start to believe something nefarious may be going on. Is the person behind the door even human?
A free horror game with a 10-minute runtime, NextDoor is a must-play regardless if you’re an Ito fan or not. While this game is a retelling of The Woman Next Door, it captures the original tale perfectly and delivers it in a new art form that is easy to digest.
12) Elevated Dread
- Developer: andrground
- Price: Free
- Scare rating: 5/10
- Story rating: 3/10
Starting on the ground floor, Elevated Dread invites you into its cold, grimy, and dark embrace. It doesn’t seem like a safe place to visit, but you need to get those flyers up if you want to call it a day. As you ascend the nine floors of Elevated Dread, there’s a continual feeling of being watched. The atmosphere is reminiscent of Silent Hill as static fills your screen if you try to take the stairs instead. You feel the hairs stand on the back of your neck every you enter that elevator, but the game forces you to step inside.
You start to wonder if this place is truly haunted or condemned—or whether your psyche’s breaking because you’ve spent the day putting up flyers. Elevated Dread is its title: That feeling of dread rising as you ascend the apartments. The silence is deafening for a seemingly empty building with no soul in sight, but that apprehension you’re feeling is only exacerbated when you realize you’re not really alone.
11) Buckshot Roulette
- Developer: Mike Klubnika
- Price: $2.99
- Scare rating: 2/10
- Story rating: 2/10
Buckshot Roulette is one of those games that’s surprising it didn’t come out years ago. A gritty version of Russian Roulette, the goal is to defeat the AI in an intense one-vs-one. A 12-gauge shotgun sits at the center of a table, your opponent opposite you. You realize only one of you will get out of this situation alive. Why would you partake in such a deadly proposition? For millions of dollars, of course. Bullets are randomly loaded into the chamber, some blank, others live. It’s down to you to outsmart your opponent by using the resources in front of you.
For such an intense setting, Buckshot Roulette is a highly entertaining game. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out here hoping a game like this existed in real life—but the setting is the perfect amount of fear and anxiety that literally forces you to fight instead of flee. It’s just you and the AI. Are you brave enough gamble it all—to point the barrel at yourself—and pull the trigger?
10) Let’s Find Larry
- Developer: germ food
- Price: $3.99
- Scare rating: 2/10
- Story rating: 6/10
The horror equivalent of Where’s Waldo? Let’s Find Larry appears light-hearted at first as you search for your childhood friend while they go about their day. The gameplay is particularly unusual, as you take a bird’s-eye perspective, almost insinuating you are playing God as you hunt this man down. With a magnifying glass in hand, the game has one rule: Find Larry. But Larry doesn’t want to be found. In fact, as time goes on, you realize Larry is starting to get restless, scared, and concerned for his safety. You start to feel bad for Larry without knowing the entire story, and soon enough the truth is revealed—and it was looking at you the entire time. You only missed it because you were so hellbent on finding Larry.
Let’s Find Larry starts off as an innocent and entertaining experience that’ll leave you impressed by the end of it. From the same creator as Night of the Consumers, germ food is an underrated indie developer that has a clear style and artistic direction, accompanied by incredibly unique ideas.
9) Home Safety Hotline
- Developer: Night Signal Entertainment
- Price: $14.99
- Scare rating: 3/10
- Story rating: 5/10
A blend of analog and cosmic horror, Home Safety Hotline is the easiest game to consume from this list. It’s delivered in a simple-but-polished package where you’re tasked to figure out the caller’s query based on their brief description of a household disturbance they’re currently experiencing. The entries are varied, with common household problems like mice and mold. But that all begins to change as bizarre, otherworldly creatures begin to invade homes. With similarities to Mandela Catalogue and The Mist, Home Safety Hotline gives us excellent analog horror with creatures from fae folklore.
Home Safety Hotline isn’t particularly scary. Instead, its strength lies in its attention to detail. From the artwork and entry descriptions to the voice acting of each caller, the Home Safety Hotline feels like a real workplace where fae creatures invade callers’ homes. I’m starting to wonder if the mischievous Common Hobb is the culprit behind my mosquito zapper turning itself off at night—or, perhaps I’m suffering from a Memory Wisp. It might be time for me to call the hotline.
8) Bloodwash
- Developer: Torture Star Video
- Price: $7.99
- Scare rating: 6/10
- Story rating: 6/10
Bloodwash doesn’t try to hide its obvious attempts to scare you. 10 minutes into the game and you’re being told “you’re going to die tonight.” All you want to do is wash your laundry and call it a day, but you need to travel to the laundromat to do so. Hearing that there’s a killer on the loose who specifically targets women (while you play as a woman) immediately rings alarm bells. A chase is inevitable, but who is the killer? As you learn of the recent missing person reports, you start your own investigation into the matter while waiting for your clothes to dry—but you quickly learn that curiosity only gets people killed.
Bloodwash is a slow burn of horror, but when it finally hits, it hits you like a truck. The game has excellent world building and dialogue that keep your attention throughout. This slow burn creates a greater, more intense climax than skipping all dialogue just to get to the final fight quicker.
7) FAITH: The Unholy Trinity
- Developer: New Blood Interactive
- Price: $14.99
- Scare rating: 6/10
- Story rating: 7/10
If we were going to compare FAITH to anything, it’d be those FNaF mini-games that stay with you for a while, scratching at the corner of your mind as you wonder what it all meant. FAITH appears simple on the surface with it’s 8-bit design and religious themes. But the simplicity lets it focus on what matters in a horror game: The story, atmosphere, and its scares.
It’s hard to put into words why pixelated horror works so well, but FAITH feels like this presence that has always been around. It’s soundtrack fits the 8-bit art style perfectly, and the slow animated walk from our protagonist forces you to take everything in. While details are minimal, the slow movement of the characters puts your guard up, as you can’t rush through a section, hoping to avoid any jumpscares. The real scares are in the animated cutscenes that are executed perfectly as the character’s face twists and forms into something unnatural and sinister. The pixels peel off, revealing a monster underneath, and the distorted screams echo into your nightmares.
6) Fears to Fathom: Norwood Hitchhike
- Developer: Rayll
- Price: $2.99
- Scare rating: 7/10
- Story rating: 6/10
The second installment in the Fears to Fathom series, Norwood Hitchhike took the rational fear of home invasion from its predecessor and expanded on it. While it isn’t confirmed, there are links between the story of Norwood Hitchhike to Larry Ralston, a serial killer back in 1975-77. There is this unmatched level of uneasiness that comes from playing Rayll’s games. You feel like you’re in danger from the moment you start. It doesn’t help that you’re playing from a young girl’s perspective, where the average stranger seems like a threat to society.
Norwood Hitchhike was the first of the Fears to Fathom series to add the terrifying open mic mechanic that quickly became a staple. This only enhances your fear as you attempt to swallow down that scream that’s just clawing at your throat to escape. Just like the rest of Rayll’s Fears to Fathom series, Norwood Hitchhike shows us that the real horror isn’t the fear of the unknown, the monster under your bed, or the ghosts that haunt an abandoned building—it’s other people that we should be afraid of.
5) IMSCARED
- Developer: Ivan Zanotti
- Price: $3.99
- Scare rating: 6/10
- Story rating: 7/10
There is nothing quite like this pixelated nightmare. IMSCARED won’t leave you shaking in fear or hiding behind furniture, but it has an impressive atmosphere because of its wall-breaking mechanics. What makes IMSCARED so unique is how you are often pushed out of the game to look into your files; otherwise, you cannot progress. Information is issued through private YouTube videos and new notes added to your IMSCARED game folder. This added layer of mystery and intrigue invites puzzle-solving that’s different to horror classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
This unique feature creates an unmatched connection between yourself and the game. It uses technology in a way that many horror games never even tried before.
4) Midnight Scenes: A Safe Place
- Developer: Octavi Navarro
- Price: $5.99
- Scare rating: 5/10
- Story rating: 9/10
Haunted by nightmares, desperate to fight off that insomnia to get a good nights sleep for once, Midnight Scenes: A Safe Place immediately throws you into the action. Unaware of your surroundings, you rely upon the protagonist, Phil, to fill you in. Perhaps this is a tale of agoraphobia (the fear of going outside), or hikikomori (severe social recluse), or perhaps Phil really is being haunted by something from another realm. Locked inside a single room, Phil relies on you to select what basic tasks he does each day. Everything is simple, safe, and secure in the daytime—but that all changes when the sun sets over his newspaper-covered window.
Octavi Navarro crafts fantastic stories for the Midnight Scenes series. You come for the horror and stay for the story, as Midnight Scenes: A Safe Place is the type of game that would otherwise make a fantastically creepy campfire story. Consistently great art design and writing, A Safe Place is our top pick for narrative lovers.
3) IT STEALS
- Developer: Zeekerss
- Price: $5
- Scare rating: 9/10
- Story rating: 5/10
If you thought Lethal Company was scary, then you must try IT STEALS. With five different chapters and monsters to deal with, IT STEALS delivers iconic Pacman gameplay in the most terrifying way. Similar to Dark Deception, IT STEALS has you being chased by monsters while accumulating orbs. Rather than fleeing from something behind you, IT STEALS‘ monsters hide from you and wait for the right moment to strike. Just when you thought you’d grown accustomed to the rules, IT STEALS throws the entire book out the window, forcing you start again.
While IT STEALS doesn’t have any complicated lore, its gameplay is more than enough to hook you in from start to finish. With five different fears to go through and a unique but terrifying monster to face in each one, IT STEALS will snatch your attention, and entice you with the satisfaction of defeating your opposition. Due to the hide and seek nature of the game, it’s highly likely paranoia will spread through the labyrinths of IT STEALS and attach to your fear.
2) Amanda the Adventurer
- Developer: DreadXP
- Price: $7.99
- Scare rating: 4/10
- Story rating: 10/10
An incredibly unique experience from start to finish, Amanda the Adventurer is a fourth wall-breaking horror that pits you up against a cursed children’s cartoon character. If you were wondering what a twisted form of Dora the Explorer would look like, well… here it is. This indie gem ticks all of the boxes: Secrets? Check. Atmosphere? Check. A Satanic underbelly of child sacrifices? Check.
Amanda the Adventurer leaves a lot out in the open as the credits roll. You will be no wiser about the lore once the game concludes, but you will have more than enough conspiracy theories that’ll keep yourself up at night. Yes, you will drive your family and friends mad with your theories, but it’s all part and parcel of converting them to the mysterious world of Amanda the Adventurer.
1) Nun Massacre
- Developer: Puppet Combo
- Price: $4.95
- Scare rating: 10/10
- Story rating: 5/10
Not for the faint of heart, Nun Massacre commits horrendous acts of evil against anyone who dares to play. Simply put, it is a brutal experience and one that I don’t wish upon my worst enemy. There is no debate or confusion as to Nun Massacre‘s intentions when you head inside—it wants to traumatize you. It may appear simple on the surface, but its execution is perfect. And it’s pretty much turned me off Catholic school for life.
Sure, nothing makes sense, but that only adds to the terror as the knife-wielding nun chases after you. The audio is deafening, penetrating every aspect of your soul as the nun swings the knife in your direction. She wants nothing more than to see you suffer—and suffer, you shall. It is one of the most disorientating experiences you will ever go through and there’s a strong chance you won’t make it out of this one alive. So, are you in?
