Halloween is upon us again – time for fake spider webs, pumpkin carving, spooky stories, and a selection of classic horror-themed iPhone games.
Sit back in a darkened room, preferably with rain pouring down outside. And by candlelight and the glowing screen of your iPhone, prepare to be scared!
Related: 12 of the best spooky apps for Halloween
Five Nights at Freddy’s ($3/£3)
Being a night watchman should be easy – sit tight, stay awake, and get paid. But in this pizza joint, animatronics come alive at night. With limited electricity (thanks, cutbacks!), you juggle cameras and door controls, fending off robotic freaks only too eager to tear your face off. Later games expand the lore, although by the end you’ll be such a wreck you probably won’t remember any of it.
Eyes Horror (free + IAP)
It’s late at night and you’ve broken into a mansion, aiming to pilfer bags of cash. The tiny snag: the place is haunted by a murderous demon. You’ve only yourself to blame for your likely demise. To stave off your end, you can use mystical eye runes to glimpse where the monster’s lurking, in a tense game of hide and seek. Extra levels can be bought via IAP, including one where you chase a magic pumpkin.
Very Little Nightmares ($7/£7)
This creepy game is like a cross between Limbo and Monument Valley, featuring a little girl in a yellow raincoat picking her way through a hostile mansion. Each room is a miniature logic trap, where you need to figure out the correct path, sequence, and timing to survive. The simple gameplay is elevated by the eerie atmosphere and nerve-wracking moments where you urgently need to flee from certain death.
Get Very Little Nightmares / also on Apple Arcade
Death Road to Canada ($15/£15)
Every Halloween round-up needs at least one game featuring the shuffling undead. This is the best of them, combining shooty action, frenetic sieges, RPG-style decision making, and hordes of walking corpses that want to eat your brains. It’s tough, but the game’s inventiveness and daft humor keeps you playing. (Top tip: don’t make a moose angry.)
Speed Dating for Ghosts ($3/£3)
Even the dead want to find love. Here, you speed through chats with prospective phantom partners, before choosing one to go on a date with. This is essentially a visual novel and so your choices are limited. But suitably, given the game’s subject matter, this is also a game with plenty of soul.
Slayaway Camp 2 ($3/£3)
Rather than running away from horror, you’re dishing out death in this oddball puzzler with lashings of cartoon gore. You shuffle wannabe horror icon Skullface around, so he can chop up anyone nearby. It’s more ridiculous than horrific, but if you want less on-screen blood (and faster gameplay), check out the original.
Candies ’n Curses (free + IAP)
More cartooning, but this time without the gore. In Candies ’n Curses, the adventurous Molli Pop bounds about platforms, obliterating ghosts and other terrors by way of her flashlight. With gorgeous pixel art and entertaining boss battles, the game echos classic arcade cabinets like the Bubble Bobble series. Ignore the IAP nudges and revel in its fast-paced gameplay and cast of adorable specters.
Limbo ($4/£4)
This platform puzzler features a boy trudging through a bleak monochrome landscape. On trying to pass traps, he’s frequently dispatched – and then reborn to try again. That might sound joyless and somber, but Limbo’s clever and thoughtful. It’s horrific too – a moment where the boy’s speared by a giant arachnid will stick in your mind longer than the whiff of the season’s last pumpkin latte.
Into the Dead 2 (free + IAP)
This mash-up of endless runner and Walking Dead is as infested with IAP as zombies. But we’ll forgive it because the action is tense and exciting, if oddly dreamlike and surreal with its tilt-based control system. Prefer your zombie fare to be more premium and console-like? Check out Resident Evil 7 instead – but only if you’ve got a controller handy.
Boo! (free or $2/£2)
Based on one of the creator’s own premium puzzlers, Factory Balls, Boo! invites you to decorate a pumpkin by dipping it into paint pots. The thing is, you must match a target design, and only have a few items to help mask parts of the pumpkin. The game’s more cute than terrifying from a visual standpoint, but later levels will make your brain scream.
Forever Lost ($3/£3)
This room escape game dumps you in an abandoned asylum – and writing scrawled across the wall makes it clear you’re not the first to be trapped. It messes with reality too – early on, you play a game on an abandoned out-of-place iPad and an object you find ends up in your ‘real world’ inventory. Spooky – unless you believe Apple kit is magic. If you like it, two more episodes are available.
Night Book (free + $5/£5)
If while watching horror movies you yell at the TV when a character makes a dreadful decision, Night Book might offer an outlet. The game features a woman working nights as an online interpreter, but her shift goes awry when a caller reads from an ancient text. Cue: jump scares aplenty but also decisions you periodically take to get her through the night.
Year Walk ($4/£4)
Like traversing a painterly picture book based around Scandinavian folklore, this eerie game has you flip virtual pages to explore a barren forest. Snow crunches underfoot as you work your way through opaque puzzles and gradually discover horrors and scares that bar the way of the protagonist trying to find his one true love. Note: grab Year Walk Companion (free) too – it comes in very handy.