5 Short Horror Games To Melt Your Brain This October

We’re well into the throes of October at this point, which means it’s a perfect time to experience some of the best, nastiest horror games released in 2024. Taking even a cursory look at Steam reveals an alarming number of curiosities, and after sifting through many, we’ve found a few you don’t want to miss, whether it’s because of their psychological scares or anxiety-inducing gameplay. Specifically, this list is focused on ones that don’t overstay their welcome, so shorter, mostly independently produced projects that left a mark and that you can easily get through before this season of fear comes to an end. Turn off the lights and melt your brain with these five uncanny games.

Mouthwashing

Mouthwashing is a bleak first-person psychological horror game developed by Wrong Organ, who genre-heads may know from their surreal freeware title How Fish is Made. While their latest starts out in a somewhat more grounded place (in that you don’t play as a sardine engaging in faux-philosophical discussions), it gradually builds towards similarly hallucinatory turns that make this a brain-searing lo-fi horror experience. After your captain crashes the Tulpar, a cargo spaceship, in a botched suicide attempt, the rest of the crew grapples with being stranded in deep space. Spoilers, they don’t handle it particularly well. If it wasn’t clear from this setup, this one is downright oppressive; your vessel is a dreary, increasingly dilapidated tomb portrayed via low-poly visuals which, like many games in this style, invite us to imagine the finer details for ourselves. These dimly lit corridors draw us in, less building towards jump scares or frightening encounters with monsters, and more inching us further into these characters’ headspaces as they approach heavily foreshadowed carnage. As you explore this ship, solving simple puzzles, the narrative uncomfortably peels back the layers of its crew like a Charlie Kaufman film, prodding at fears of purposelessness and employment anxieties as it builds towards its nightmarish climax that unveils the unforgivable act at the heart of this story. Through its portrayal of desperation, avoidance of responsibility, and crushing guilt, Mouthwashing is as cold as the vacuum of space. —Elijah Gonzalez

Crow Country

Crow Country is set in 1990, but it looks straight out of the late ‘90s—primarily the era of the original PlayStation. It’s another 21st century survival horror game that uses the archaic aesthetic of the genre’s first major wave to ratchet up its tension and horror. Its dread comes not just from its cryptic story, its twisted monsters, or its difficulty, but from the creepiness of its outdated, slightly off graphics; it’s the videogame equivalent of a horror movie using the anachronistic fuzziness of a VHS tape to unsettle a modern viewer. The mystery at the heart of Crow Country is threefold: why was the titular theme park opened, why did it shut down suddenly, and what caused the accident that sent a young guest to the hospital while it was still open. I wouldn’t call the answers all that fulfilling, but it’s not always about the destination. Crow Country’s point-and-click inspired puzzle solving is engrossing and rewarding enough to make up for its narrative looseness, and its sharp writing and character building pick up the plot’s slack. —Garrett Martin

Buckshot Roulette

“Now, me and you, we are dancing on the edge of life and death,” the dealer says, their cartoonishly dismaying jagged teeth and hollow eyes peering through the abyss-like reaches of this gambling den from hell. Simply put, Buckshot Roulette is a horror-tinged game of chance where you do exactly what the title implies: play Russian roulette with a pump-action shotgun. Each round, a varying number of blanks and live rounds are loaded, and you take turns with the dealer pulling the trigger on yourself or your opponent. If you shoot yourself with a blank, you get another turn, and if it’s not a blank, well, thankfully, there are some medics on hand to defibrillate you back to life (as long as you have health points, that is). From here, additional layers of complexity come into play that make this more than a straightforward question of probability: you get items that let you do things like look in the chamber to see the next shell, double up on damage, skip your opponent’s turn, etc. It makes for an engaging take on the highest form of gambling there is, one where your life is on the line. And it can’t be overstated how grungy the vibe is, the washed-out color palette and murky, lo-fi graphics making this blood sport all the more dismal to behold. Between its snuff presentation and surprisingly complicated take on a simple premise, Buckshot Roulette is a blast. —Elijah Gonzalez

Flathead

Speaking of games that explore the horrors of gambling, Flathead may seem very similar to the previously mentioned title, but it has its own putrid vibe. Surrounded by a mystifying combination of analog contraptions and inexplicable phenomena, you’re forced to play a seemingly straightforward gambling game: over-under. When you win, you get between 1-4 points, with each consecutive victory granting more points until you reach the maximum, but if you bust, you lose everything on the line. Cashing out resets the bonus, but you’ll need to do so to cash in the points required to clear that round: get through 3 rounds, and you win. Of course, this situation is complicated by the fact that every second you spend setting your bet and waiting for slot machine digits to settle into place, the footsteps behind you get closer, with every bet taking on additional weight as a horrible figure approaches. While Flathead’s many gameplay methods of manipulating odds add some depth and help avoid gambler’s ruin, what really makes it all work is its specific sense of anxious anticipation, as the creature’ methodical approach taps into a spiraling sense of doom that you’re going to lose it all.

There may be a seemingly rational game of numbers and statistics in front of you, but everything surrounding it is anything but; faces dance in your peripheral vision, and a truly unpleasant animatronic abomination stares in your soul. After surviving a run, you’ll get a new audio tape that frequently invites more questions than answers, and while these sort of explain what’s happening, they’re equally intermixed with dark poetry and difficult-to-parse prose that maintains the mystique around this perplexing imagery. Horror is often a deeply formulaic space, but everything here is so otherworldly and bizarre that it defies easy categorization, the emotionless rationality of its probabilistic outcomes contrasting against the intense dread of an approaching monster. Oh, and the game costs, like, two dollars on Steam, making it an even easier recommendation. See you in my nightmares, Flathead. —Elijah Gonzalez

Psychroma

Sometimes, it can be easy to get suckered by the allure of memory, imagining how things could have been different or getting fixated on how idyllic everything used to be, even if neither was actually the case. Psychroma is a sci-fi horror game all about the dangers of getting lost in these kinds of thoughts, one that takes us through a house that’s haunted by its past as Haze, an amnesiac, tries to remember. Things start seemingly idyllic enough; they’re surrounded by a found family that loves them in a place that seems like a rare bastion of normalcy compared to the rest of the world under this cyberpunk skyline. But of course, it’s not quite that simple, and as Haze investigates odd alcoves and hidden laboratories that tie in with some forgotten experiment, events quickly spiral out of control. There’s a great sense of build as you solve point-and-click adventure-style puzzles to delve deeper into this home and its secrets, and everything from the creepy pixel art to the hum of its ambient score deepens the sense of unease around each mystery. Eventually, it culminates in body horror moments that overlap with gender dysphoria and ruminations on queer identity as our protagonist pieces together who they were. While the game’s short runtime makes some of its storytelling turns feel a little too abrupt, Psychroma is an atmospheric horror game that deserves more attention. —Elijah Gonzalez

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.