So much horror is the horror you inflict on yourself. No amount of visual fidelity or storytelling can truly overcome the fear that exists in the gaps of your understanding. One of the secrets to producing truly terrifying media is to leave enough imagination for your own brain to fill in the blanks.
Here comes Analog Horror, a genre rooted in low-quality graphics reminiscent of the 90s. It relies on low-quality video, the liminal feel of old media, and a general sense of wrongness to create these gaps. When this aesthetic is combined with an interactive medium, you're in for an uncanny valley and screen tearing nightmare. These titles literally mean it.
Updated October 3, 2024 by Alfred Robelo: The analog horror genre is constantly evolving, with the indie scene mastering the craft. With new games constantly coming out that push what the genre can do, we've updated this article to include even more great titles.
13 Closing shift
Not every job is worth the reward
Played with a VHS-style fuzz over the view and set deep in the nineties, The Convenience Store deals with two terrifying things: the supernatural and working in customer service. You are placed in the shoes of a barista who works alone on the night shift in a small, brightly lit, exposed cafe in the middle of a dark city.
Mundane tasks give way to growing paranoia as your shift becomes terrifying. You find out that there is a suspicious person on the run, and suddenly every customer starts to make you nervous. Is it safe to turn away and make drinks? Will taking out garbage bags be deadly? It's a tense experience.
12 Maple County
Test your training
Inspired by the petrified horror series “The Mandela Catalogue”, Maple County puts you in the role of an apparent police officer in the county. You are tasked with completing an interactive training tape that deals with a threat you should not reveal to your loved ones. Dealing with threat requires learning how to pick out faces that look “bad” in some way.
You'll go through the training, looking at this disturbing material in a rather detached way, until the game unexpectedly throws you for a loop and makes the whole thing practical. Be prepared for a surprise.
11 Anatomy
A house that embodies something
Anatomy is a slowly building, tense and terrifying horror experience set in a house. Tapes scattered around compare parts of the house to parts of the body. Paranoia slowly builds as you search the various rooms for the tapes, all the while wondering what they mean.
Where some horror movies may rely on throwing monsters and moving shadows to scare you, Anatomy takes a much more carefully crafted route by slowly filling you with dread and creating a place that never feels safe or welcoming. Some places just feel like you shouldn't be there.
10 Discover the ocean
Find out why some things should be let go
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Discover The Ocean is a short game that starts out much like an educational CD-ROM from the 90s. Moving around in an apparent underwater exploration drone, you zoom in and get short video clips of ocean animals and accompanying facts. Then things start to get weird.
Soon the camera will start to drop, the depth gauge will drop sharply and you will be given some cryptic clues to follow. These will take you on a crumb trail of cracking the ARG code. It plays almost like a warning.
9 Group-864 Training Program
Survival is not guaranteed
Have you ever read the SCP Foundation articles and wished you were one of the D-class workers? Definitely not? This is still worth watching. The game is a darkly comedic visual novel where you take on the role of an individual participating in computer training for the highly suspicious Group-864. You are soon informed that you are an employee of R3 – an inmate on death row has offered a place of execution. Not a good sign.
The program presents you with situations and questions about terrifying supernatural entities, allows you to communicate with a spirit via a remote uplink, and threatens you with a “room of smiles” if you don't come to work with the right attitude.
8 Home invasion
Even houses are not safe
Home Invasion, a VHS-style game that originally appeared as an infomercial, quickly drags you down a disjointed, terrifying rabbit hole. He begins by talking at length about weapons, their safety and training in their use. However, it soon turns out to be much more sinister.
The game is a wild, terrifying ride, switching between game types that slowly reveal the events of the title's home invasion. This culminates in some impressively disturbing use of camera flashes to illuminate the area.
7 Assessment test
Who is judging whom?
Assessment Examination dives back into the terrifying alternate universe of the Mandela Catalogue. You are a potential candidate for the AAD, or Authenticity Assessment Department, and you have to answer some rather ominous questions as part of the exam.
It continues by looking at different images and deciding whether they can be trusted or considered a threat. But the longer you play and the more recordings you hear of possible victims of this menace, the more you start to wonder who is behind the tape – and who you're helping.
6 Don't take your eyes off the red fridge
Because it eats you, of course
The fridge wants to eat you. It already ate your daughter. You don't want to be eaten by the fridge. If you look away from the fridge, it starts to move closer. The only way to prevent yourself from becoming food for the demonic refrigerator is to try to seal it in its name. Unfortunately, you can't move and all you have to work with are the items scattered across the floor.
Reading some of the notes on the floor may give some clues as to how to proceed, but don't spend too much time reading. If your eyes are on the tracks, they're not on the fridge.
5 Iron lungs
There's something there
What's scarier than being alone at the bottom of an ocean of blood, sealed in a leaking, rusting, slowly collapsing submarine that you don't think you'll survive to get out of? Not to be alone.
Iron Lung is a small PS1-style experience that takes advantage of the limitations of your own perception. Your small craft has no open windows and you must navigate using instruments and a camera that has a delayed development time. However, you don't need to see things outside to be afraid, just sounds are enough.
4 Deadly sign
Your first step into the Rabbit Hole series
Lethal Omen is itself a strange, unsettling shooter with a 90s aesthetic, set in a campsite. You explore the area, collect keys and shoot men in camouflage. Finally, he alarmingly declares your enemies dead in an area where you haven't seen any enemies, and it only goes downhill from there.
The game is unnerving on its own, and becomes an absolute gold mine of horror lore when paired with Gemini Home Entertainment's adjacent series. Watching other media in the series reveals many in-game parallels, and knowing the context of this strange location makes it even worse. There are several different endings, even if none of them suit you.
3 Home safety hotline
Protecting people from bees and monsters
The Home Safety Hotline world envisions a fantastic lot where people can buy a home at a reasonable price. There's one catch, of course, and that's that most houses in this world have some form of magical creature living in them, from shape-eaters to moles that you really don't want to mess with.
You'll take on the role of the newest member of the home security hotline, instructing homeowners on how best to deal with their particular pests. Perform well enough and you'll be rewarded by those underground, but they can just as easily punish you if you get the answer wrong too many times.
2 Paratopic
Disturbing VHS tapes
The term paratopic refers to the space behind the story, so you spend a lot of time waiting for an elevator or riding somewhere; these are the moments that stories often skip. But it's in these rather unsettling moments that Paratopic's story takes place, leaving you to pick up the pieces of what's really going on.
However, there is a lot going on in the few snippets of story we get to see. It all seems to be related to the trading of VHS tapes, which contain a recording so overwhelming that it can alter a person's perception of time as well as their own physical self, warping enough to seemingly disappear.
1 Who is Lila?
The best unanswered question
The best kind of horror is the unknown, and if there's one thing we were never supposed to know, it's the answer to this game's title: Who is Lila? The mystery is as deep or shallow as you want it to be, but the enigmatic nature of the questions it asks, as well as the imagery it offers alongside it, make it a must for all horror fans.
All this without mentioning the main gameplay function of the game, which is the movement of the faces of the player character. They claim they can't make faces easily, but as you play, you'll find yourself fighting the face to make the “right” answer, as it smiles in grim moments and laughs when someone's in pain.
