ArcadeWhale
Most “Halloween games” lists are party games: bobbing for apples, pass the pumpkin, mummy wrap. Good fun, but not much help at eleven at night when the party is over and you want something on a screen that makes the room feel a bit colder.
These six are video games, all free, and all of them run in a browser tab on a phone or a computer. We put them in order from cute to properly scary, so you can pick by mood. The order is our own judgment, not a lab measurement, and the gap between number five and number six is bigger than the gap between any other two.
Pick your fright
Answer three questions and we will pick one game for you.
Scare scale
The six squares are the six games below, from the least scary on the left to the scariest on the right.
1. Pumpkin Patrol: jack-o’-lanterns, bats and a cauldron of candy
Pumpkin Patrol is the one Halloween game here that is cute on purpose. A big black cauldron full of candy sits at the end of a cobbled road, and a parade of cartoon skeletons, ghosts and mummies is walking down it to take the lot. Your guards are jack-o’-lanterns. Drag one onto the grass beside the road and the little bats circling it bop everything that walks past.
Two lanterns of the same level merge into a stronger one, up to a golden ring of six bats at Level 5. New lanterns come from the giant pumpkins growing beside the road: bats carve the number on each one down to zero and it cracks open. From the third night the candles start burning down, and a dark lantern has to be moved to light up again. There are 36 nights on six streets, and on a phone you drag the grass to look around the bigger ones.
2. Bladestep: a dungeon with more bats than blood
Bladestep is the gentle end of the dungeon games. You play a small knight in a dungeon, and your only sword is also your only ladder: throw it into a wall, jump onto it, and call it back through the goblins between you and the next ledge. The rooms have Halloween furniture without the dread: bats, archers, spike floors, chests that turn out to be mimics, and dark vaults lit only by your knight and your blade.
Three bosses guard the way down, including a Bat Queen who dives at a red target mark and likes to land on a sword you have left in the wall. Recall it and she drops to the floor. The first six rooms teach the moves one at a time, so it works for someone who just wants a short, slightly creepy game between trick-or-treat rounds.
3. Gatefire: zombie hordes on a bridge
Gatefire is the zombie game for people who do not like being scared. A squad of soldiers marches across a long red bridge over the sea while the dead come the other way. The squad fires by itself; all you do is choose where to stand, and where you stand is what you shoot: a gate that adds soldiers, a stack with a prize on top, or the horde.
The zombies get stranger as you go: runners that sprint, a purple brute with its health written over its head, armoured ones behind riot shields and bloaters that split. It plays with one finger on a phone, and by our estimate a first run through all thirty stages takes around 37 minutes. We wrote a full Gatefire guide if you want to know which gate to pick.
4. Emberhold: a knight in torchlit halls
Emberhold is a top-down dungeon brawler: a caped knight fights through 30 short levels spread over three worlds, Ember Halls, Sunken Crypt and Amethyst Vault. Each world brings in its enemies one at a time before it mixes them, so you learn a new threat before it gets company.
The tension comes from reading them. Chargers stop and wind up in plain sight before they dash in a straight line, so you sidestep instead of running. In the Crypt, iron grates in the floor glow orange and then flare with fire, which hurts you and the enemies alike, so the trick is to lure a chaser over one just before it goes. Enemies drop weapons that each work differently, from a spear that reaches far along a line to a dagger that keeps a target burning after you walk away.
A level is two to six rooms, and your health only tops up a little between them. Fall and the level starts again from its first room, but you keep every ember you picked up, and embers buy permanent upgrades at the Forge. With the lights low on Halloween night, the Warden waiting in the thirtieth level is a good reason to keep going.
5. Blackout: you only see guards where your flashlight reaches
Blackout is where the list starts to get under your skin. It is a top-down shooter played almost entirely in the dark. Your flashlight throws a narrow cone and walls block it. You can make out a faint outline of the floor plan, but who is standing in a room you have not looked into stays a mystery. The guards carry lights too, and long before one walks into view you see his beam crawl around a corner and slide across the floor towards you.
You never aim a gun. You fire on your own at anyone your light catches, so every fight comes down to who saw whom first. A gunshot is loud and carries through walls that light cannot, so one careless kill tells every guard nearby where you were. There are 36 missions across six sectors, and each sector adds one new idea. Later on, wall cameras you cannot shoot sweep a purple beam and radio every guard in range when it finds you, and in the Vault, grabbing a data drive trips an alarm that keeps calling guards to your position for the next twenty-odd seconds, so you plan the way out before you touch anything. Each mission gives up to three stars, the third for never being seen at all, and you can start a live duel from the top bar if you would rather be hunted by someone else.
6. Ashen Toll: the one that is actually horror
Ashen Toll is the reason this list exists. It is an over-the-shoulder survival horror shooter set in a mountain valley where the fog never lifts. The villagers are still there, but something has hollowed them out. On the pass road they only shuffle towards you with amber eyes glowing through the mist. Further up the valley they run, spread out to close you in from both sides, and one at a time a hollow crouches, screams and lunges.
Here it is in a short clip from our channel:
Ammunition is scarce, so you cannot shoot your way out. A shot to the leg drops a hollow to its knees, a head shot stops a lunge dead, and while it staggers you walk up and kick, which knocks down everyone standing around it. The valley runs through a burning farm, a slow raft across a lake with nowhere to hide and a mill at nightfall, up to a bell tower where something in an iron cage is ringing the bell. Most players need around half an hour for the whole valley, and lanterns along the road are checkpoints, so you can stop and come back.
Fog does a lot of the work here, hiding what is coming until it is close. If you have ever wondered why fog and low detail land so hard, we wrote about why horror games with bad graphics are scarier. And it is not gory: when a hollow falls it does not bleed, it cracks, greys and crumbles into ash.
Playing on Halloween night with friends
None of these are party games in the board game sense, but two of them work well with a room watching. Ashen Toll is the one to put on a big screen with the lights off and pass the controls each time someone dies: everyone shouts at the screen when a hollow screams from the fog. Blackout is the one for a competitive group, since it has live duels in the dark.
For a quieter evening, Pumpkin Patrol, Gatefire and Bladestep are easy to hand to a younger player, and every game on this list runs in the browser with nothing to install. If you want more, the horror games page collects everything scary we have, and we will add to it as new ones arrive.
