Halloween is right around the corner, hiding with a collapsible plastic knife and a red-stained bag full of both the best and the worst candy you’ve ever devoured. It’s a perfect time to catch up on horror movies, spooky TV shows… or get your thrills from video games, especially since the sun isn’t likely to shine into your screen anymore.
Games are possibly the best medium for scary stories. After all, for all their merits, movies or books can’t put you in the shoes of the protagonist as much as games can. Being the one making choices that might lead to death or survival does wonders for immersion and soaking in the atmosphere.
This invites a question, however: what would a good spooky video game playlist for October 2024 include? Should your eyes be irresistibly drawn to the G2A.com marketplace, you’d find a wealth of digital adventures, after all. What to pick? Well, there are a few very good options, including a few new releases...
Return to the mists - Silent Hill 2
An obvious contender is the recent remake of one of the best horror games in general: Silent Hill 2. Studio Bloober Team recreated Konami’s classic from 2001, and the Polish developer did an incredible job with it.
SH2 puts you in the role of James Sunderland, a man who received a letter from his dead wife, prompting him to visit the titular town, ever covered in thick fog. There is something wrong with the place, however, as if it responded to the troubled psyches of its visitors, conjuring disturbing creatures and visions… but to what end?
Silent Hill 2’s atmosphere is impeccable, the plot tangled, complicated, and messed up, and the remake makes the town look more immersive and believable than ever before. A must-play for the spooky season.
Awake by a lake - Alan Wake 2
Another good option would be Alan Wake 2, a horror game which has plenty of scares in store, but its true love is weaving a weird, convoluted mystery story about a creepy lake and a people affected in various ways by the Dark Presence dwelling within.
AW2 is a mix of horror, mystery, and over-the-top sequences which often involve an incredible soundtrack created by the heavy metal band Old Gods of Asgard (played by Poets of the Fall). The touch of absurdity and silliness makes Alan Wake 2’s atmosphere all the more eerie and unsettling.
However, it is recommended to play the first game, too. Their releases might be separated by over a decade, but their stories are rather tightly woven.
The undeath of Western - Red Dead Redemption
For an open world action game, Red Dead Redemption is a fairly serious affair. A story about an aging outlaw dragged back into life on the road by people chasing his past.
… and yet! One of the post-launch DLCs it got was Undead Nightmare, which placed ol’ John Marston in the middle of a zombie outbreak. There is incredible appeal in undead cowboys, and RDR: Undead Nightmare plays it to the hilt. It’s just… fun. And since the first RDR is coming to PC this October, you don’t even need a console to enjoy the game!
B-movie extravaganza - Resident Evil 4
Straying even further away from a straight-faced horror, consider Resident Evil 4 (which, coincidentally also got a recent remake).
Let’s set the scene: you’re a special agent (with a very 90s haircut), Leon S. Kennedy, sent to rural Spain in search of a kidnapped daughter of the US President. Once there, you find the populace turned into zombies and mutants, while the leaders of the mess are being twisted, monstrous weirdos in their own right.
RE4 isn’t very serious game. It’s an excellent game, certainly, and the remake is fantastic, but it also has the vibe of a direct-to-VHS action movie you’d pick up to have something silly and bombastic to put on the TV while your friends come over for a Halloween get-together. It’s a fun, single-player game, and an absolutely classic one at that.
Wack-a-Zombie - Black Ops 6
Finally, we’ve got Call of Duty: Zombies mode, with special attention given to this year’s CoD: Black Ops 6 version of it.
Zombies is a fan-favorite part of the Call of Duty series of FPS games not only because it’s an excellent co-op experience, but also because its stories tend to involve alternate dimensions, weird science, Easter eggs, and general silliness absent from bombastic, military stories of the singleplayer campaigns.
If you want something broadly Halloween-adjacent to blow off some steam with up to three friends, you could do a whole lot worse than CoD: Black Ops 6: Zombies mode.
Playful Halloween
These are just a few examples of what to play on Halloween, but there are many more, located all over the scary-silly spectrum. First-person horrors, silly ghost management, and action-packed zombie-hunting with a chainsaw. Gaming has it all, no matter the kind of Halloween you’re craving this year.
And to make sure you’ve got enough budget left for the snacks, decorations, and treats, you could find tempting offers on any of the games mentioned, and thousands beyond, on the G2A Marketplace, just ready for somebody to grab them for their own, surely nefarious, purposes.