NEW SCARY GAMES COMING SOON

I keep a messy text file on my desktop called horror.txt. It's just a list of every new scary game I've gotten interested in, with notes next to each one like "probably 2027" or "this might be vaporware" or, in the case of one very famous project, just three question marks. That file has gotten longer every month for about two years now, and I figured it was time to actually sit down and turn it into something other people could read.

So here's where things stand. These are the new scary games I'm watching, grouped by how confident I am that they'll actually come out in any kind of reasonable window. I've tried to be honest about the uncertainty, because a lot of horror coverage online pretends every teaser trailer is six months from release, and that's not how game development works. Some of this stuff is close. Some of it is years away. Some of it might never ship at all. That's fine. Hype with clear eyes is more fun anyway.

The ones that feel close

Starting with the projects I'd put actual money on arriving within the next twelve to eighteen months. These have shown enough substance in public that I think the studios behind them are past the point of no return.

Silent Hill f

Silent Hill f is the one I'm most excited about that also has the clearest path to release. Konami has been showing it consistently, the setting shift to 1960s rural Japan is a genuinely interesting pivot for the series, and everything I've seen from the gameplay footage suggests a team that actually understands what made the original Silent Hill games work. The writer is Ryukishi07, who did Higurashi, which means the story is almost certainly going to go to some weird and upsetting places.

What makes me confident this one ships on schedule is that Konami seems to have learned from the silent hill 2 remake. That project took forever to come out, got pushed around, and by the time it launched people had already accepted that Konami moves at Konami's pace. Silent Hill f appears to be further along than that, with more public demos and more hands on previews coming out. I'd bet it lands within the next year, maybe with a minor delay, but nothing catastrophic.

The risk here is tonal. The trailers have shown some absolutely gorgeous cherry blossom corruption stuff, with flowers growing out of people in ways that are both beautiful and horrifying, but the series has a long history of swinging for the fences and missing. Silent Hill Downpour exists. Silent Hill Homecoming exists. Not every swing connects. But this one has the right people attached, and the visual identity is already stronger than any Silent Hill game since the PS2 era.

Cronos: The New Dawn

Bloober Team earning some goodwill after the Silent Hill 2 remake means Cronos: The New Dawn is getting a closer look than it probably would have otherwise. The setup is time travel plus body horror plus a post apocalyptic Poland, which is a combination I didn't know I wanted. The aesthetic is cold and industrial, the creature design has that weird fused flesh vibe that reminds me of The Thing, and the combat looks like a tighter version of what Bloober attempted with The Medium.

I trust this one to ship because Bloober is in a specific position right now where they need to prove the Silent Hill 2 success wasn't a fluke. Studios in that position tend to finish their projects. Whether it's good is a different question, but I'd wager on it actually coming out.

Resident Evil Requiem

Capcom has been on an absolute tear with the RE series for years now, and Requiem is the next mainline entry. The shift back to a more traditional horror focus after the action heavy direction of some recent entries is the right call, and the protagonist being Grace Ashcroft, daughter of a character from RE Outbreak, is the kind of lore pull that tells me someone on the team is actually invested in the series continuity.

Capcom ships games. That's the thesis. They're one of the most reliable publishers in the industry in terms of hitting dates and delivering polished products. Requiem will come out roughly when they say it will, and it will probably be good. The only real question is whether it leans more toward the slower first person dread of RE7 or the faster paced Village style. Based on what's been shown, I think it's closer to 7, which is what I want.

Mouthwashing follow up territory

I'm putting the broader Wrong Organ ecosystem in this tier even though we don't have a firm announcement of what's next. Mouthwashing came out of nowhere and became one of the most talked about indie horror games in recent memory, and the studio has been open about wanting to keep making stuff in that space. Low poly, unsettling, short, mean. Whatever they announce next, I'm buying it on day one, and whatever it is will probably ship within a year or so of announcement because that's the scale they work at.

The prestige projects with question marks

These are the big swings from big creators. I believe they'll come out eventually, but the timelines are vague and the scope is uncertain.

Project Mara

Ninja Theory described Project Mara as a grounded psychological horror that's going to try to depict mental terror in a way games haven't really attempted before. That's a big claim. The studio has the pedigree to back it up, since Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is one of the more uncompromising mainstream attempts at putting mental illness into a video game without turning it into a gimmick.

Here's my concern though. Microsoft owns Ninja Theory now. Hellblade 2 came out, got a mixed reception commercially, and the future of the studio's larger projects has looked wobbly ever since. Project Mara was announced a long time ago and has been extremely quiet. I want to believe it's still cooking, but in the post Xbox reorganization era, anything from an internal Xbox studio that hasn't shown gameplay recently gets a question mark from me. I hope I'm wrong. The concept is exactly the kind of thing I want more of, and nobody does first person mental dread quite like Ninja Theory.

If it comes out, it'll probably be one of the most memorable horror games of its year. If it doesn't, it joins a long list of ambitious Xbox projects that got quietly shelved.

OD from Kojima Productions

OD is the Jordan Peele Kojima collaboration that was announced at the Game Awards a while back and has been mostly silent since. What we know is that it's horror, it involves Peele, it's using Xbox cloud tech in some capacity, and the cast includes faces from Peele's movies. What we don't know is basically everything else.

Kojima is Kojima. Death Stranding 2 is his current focus, and by the time that ships and then ships again in another director's cut, we're probably still a couple years out from OD being the main thing. I fully expect this game to exist and come out eventually. I do not expect it soon. If someone tells you OD is launching next year, they are guessing.

The cloud tech angle is the part that worries me a little. Games built around specific streaming infrastructure have a bad track record of aging well, and I'd rather OD just be a regular game I can own. We'll see what shape it ends up taking.

ILL

I've already written a whole deep look at what we know about ILL so I'll keep this short. ILL is a body horror first person shooter from a tiny Russian studio, and the visual fidelity of the monster work is genuinely unprecedented for a team of that size. It's been teased for years. It's the kind of project that either drops suddenly as a fully realized thing or stays in development forever.

I'd put ILL in the middle of my confidence ranking. Not close enough to count on, not distant enough to write off. When it hits, it's going to be a moment.

The sequels and expansions I'm quietly watching

Smaller scope stuff that doesn't get as much attention but is still on my list.

The Casting of Frank Stone sequel territory

Supermassive and Behaviour haven't officially confirmed a direct sequel to The Casting of Frank Stone, but everything about how that game was positioned in the Dead by Daylight universe makes it obvious they want more. The first game was a decent narrative horror piece with the usual Supermassive branching choices, and while it didn't set the world on fire, the setup for future stories in that same universe is right there.

If I had to guess, we'll see something in that space announced within the next year or so. Whether it's a direct sequel, a spiritual followup, or another Dead by Daylight adjacent story, Supermassive is a studio that ships consistently, and Behaviour has every reason to keep the crossover content flowing.

Amnesia the next one

Frictional has been relatively quiet since Amnesia: The Bunker, which I thought was one of the best horror games of recent years. Whatever they do next, whether it's another Amnesia or a return to Soma style sci fi, I'm there. Frictional doesn't make bad games. They also don't make them fast. Add another year or two to whatever your guess is.

More Iron Lung adjacent stuff from David Szymanski

Szymanski keeps making weird, focused, genuinely scary small games. Iron Lung, Chop Goblins, all the little experiments. He's already mentioned more horror projects in the pipeline. These tend to come out when they come out, with not much warning, and they're almost always worth the ten dollars.

The ones that look promising but have almost no information

Lightning round for projects that are in the conversation but I don't have much to say about yet.

Routine is the lunar base horror game that's been in development since roughly the Obama administration. It technically still exists. I will believe it when I see it on a storefront.

Still Wakes the Deep got a lot of love when it came out, and The Chinese Room has indicated they want to keep doing horror adjacent work. Nothing firm announced, but worth tracking.

The Bloodborne PC port or a potential Bloodborne remake keeps getting rumored, and while Bloodborne isn't strictly a horror game, it's horror adjacent enough that it belongs on any list like this. Fromsoft does what Fromsoft does. Anything is possible. Nothing is confirmed.

Slitterhead came out and was divisive, and Bokeh Game Studio has been pretty transparent about working on their next project. Keiichiro Toyama's stuff is always worth watching because the man made Silent Hill 1.

Which ones look most promising to me

If I had to rank the whole field by a combination of how likely I think each project is to ship and how likely it is to be great, here's roughly where I land.

Silent Hill f is my top pick. It's close, it has the right people, and the visual identity is already locked in. Resident Evil Requiem is right behind it because Capcom is reliable and the direction is smart. Cronos: The New Dawn is in third, mostly on Bloober's recent form.

In the next tier, I've got ILL and whatever Wrong Organ does next. Both are indie projects with enough of a track record that I trust the taste of the people involved, even if the timelines are fuzzy.

Project Mara and OD I'm rooting for but not counting on. The Casting of Frank Stone sequel and a new Amnesia I'm quietly confident about but they're probably further out than people realize.

The general shape of horror right now

What I find exciting about this list, when I look at it all together, is how different these games are from each other. Silent Hill f is doing a period piece in rural Japan. Cronos is doing time travel body horror in Poland. Mouthwashing did claustrophobic psychological horror on a cargo ship. OD is doing whatever Kojima and Peele are doing. ILL is doing shotguns and meat.

There's no dominant horror aesthetic right now, which is the healthiest the genre has been in a long time. When every horror game was trying to be Resident Evil 4, or every horror game was trying to be Amnesia, or every horror game was trying to be PT, you could feel the bandwagon. Right now, everyone is making their own weird thing, and most of it looks good.

If you want more context on where any of this fits into the broader release calendar, I've got running lists over at upcoming horror games 2026, and if you're looking for stuff you can play right now on specific hardware, best horror games ps5 and best scary pc games 2026 cover the current landscape pretty thoroughly.

For now, my horror.txt file is staying open. I'll update it again when the next batch of reveals happens, which based on the last two years of announcements, will probably be within about six weeks. Horror is eating well right now, and I don't see that slowing down.