4) Until Dawn
This criminally under-marketed PS4 exclusive from 2015 is one of the few titles on this list that relies heavily on its graphical horsepower and high fidelity visuals. Supermassive Games’ interactive slasher is two parts Friday the 13th and one part Heavy Rain with a dash of Saw thrown in for good measure.
It’s a game you can play over and over again and have an authentically different experience each time. Much like Quantic Dream’s well-renowned interactive thriller, choices that you make can lead to your characters hastily biting the dust, and when they do, they’re out of the game for good.
All in all, it’s a surprisingly reverential love-letter to the cinematic teen slasher genre and in some ways is a big step forward from David Cage’s aforementioned Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, mainly due to its tighter writing and snappier dialogue. If you own a PS4 and enjoy your slasher movies, Until Dawn is an absolute no-brainer.
3) Clock Tower 3
I’m surprised Capcom hasn’t gone back to the well with the Clock Tower series, as it’s an incredibly underrated survival-horror franchise. Released back in 2003 on PS2, Clock Tower 3 is actually the fourth instalment, with the story focusing on 14-year-old Alyssa Hamilton, who must travel through time to defeat evil spirits and bring peace to the troubled, tormented souls who are trapped in the otherworld.
The game is played from a fixed third-person angle and tasks players with exploring 1940s London, completing puzzles, along with fleeing and hiding from creepy antagonists known as Subordinates. What’s really striking about the title though is how dark it can be.
Your adversaries are serial killers and they’re unrelenting in their hunt for you. Some of the imagery within the game is quite startling as well; a 14-year-old schoolgirl being chased by a giant scissor-wielding murderer is pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel and really sticks in my mind. The Corroder boss also stands out, as he’s a hulking, gas-mask toting nutcase who runs around with a backpack filled with sulphuric acid, which he uses to melt his victims with. It doesn’t end there though, as he also dumps their remains into vats of acid to dispose of the evidence permanently. How very thoughtful of him…