The Best Horror Game of 2023

ign.com:

With both Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 launching within the first quarter, it was clear that 2023 was going to be a strong year for horror remakes. But what we perhaps wouldn’t have counted on as the year began was that this was going to be a stellar 12 months for the horror genre as a whole. It’s been such a good year for it, in fact, that we had to give it its own award category.

There have been so many great horror games this year, spanning numerous different sub-genres and studio sizes. As previously mentioned, it’s been a fantastic year for remakes, proving the classics can be as relevant today in their revitalised forms as they were when they first arrived in the 2000s. But it’s also been a period of wonderfully experimental indies that have found brand new ways to shake us up. World of Horror fueled our nightmares with images drawn in Microsoft Paint (seriously!), while Dredge had us desperately wishing for a bigger boat as a Lovecraftian nightmare unspooled its tentacles beneath our hull. Meanwhile, we finally got a worthy spiritual successor to Alien: Isolation in Frictional’s terrifying Amnesia: The Bunker.

But what did the IGN team think was the very best horror game of 2023? Here’s how the voting panned out.

Tied with 2.4% of the vote each are Sons of the Forest and World of Horror. Both are from smaller studios (the latter is actually largely the work of a single developer), but that didn’t stop them from taking Steam by storm.

The long-awaited sequel to one of the most respected survival games of all time, Sons of the Forest builds on its predecessors strengths to create a chilling journey into a cannibal-infested woodland. The crafting core of the original has been overhauled with much more realistic