10 Most Anticipated Horror Games of 2016 3

Routine

Routine is yet another first-person exploratory horror game, but its setting helps it stand apart. Set aboard the Lunar Research Station, with an art style that reflects an 80’s vision of the future, Routine tasks players with discovering what happened to the station’s missing crew. The game will feature permadeath, and give players no option of fighting back against enemies, which should make it an especially intense experience.

Routine is due for release this year on PC.

We Happy Few

In We Happy Few, the citizens of the procedurally generated Wellington Wells are controlled by a drug called Joy, which makes them perpetually happy. The player character dares to refrain from the drug, which makes them a target relentlessly pursued by the disturbing, face-painted citizens, as well as the 1984-esque surveillance systems. While We Happy Few focuses more on the “survival” side of the survival-horror equation, it still looks like it will be one of the most unnerving games of 2016.

We Happy Few is scheduled to release in June for PC and Xbox One.

What Remains of Edith Finch

Giant Sparrow, the developers of the critically-acclaimed The Unfinished Swan, are venturing into the realm of first-person exploratory horror with their next project, What Remains of Edith Finch. In this game, players take control of the titular Edith Finch, as she relives the last moments of her family members in an attempt to discover why she is the only one left alive.

The game will feature significant gameplay and tonal shifts depending on the personality of each family member, and each segment will end with a death. Out of all the games on this list, What Remains of Edith Finch appears to be the horror game of 2016 with the potential for the most emotional impact.

What Remains of Edith Finch will be available at some point later this year, exclusively for the PlayStation 4.

Before wrapping this up, we’d be remiss if we also didn’t mention the fact that horror icons Leatherface and Alien will be in Mortal Kombat X. Set to be added as a part of Kombat Pack 2 later this year, the inclusion of these characters will allow gamers to pit Friday the 13th‘s near-immortal horror icon against the demented killer from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, which should be a treat, to say the least.
If Mortal Kombat X‘s new combatants and the previously listed games are any indication, 2016 is going to be a great year for fans of the horror genre. There’s plenty of experiences to look forward to, all with their own unique approaches to scares and atmosphere. At this point, few can argue that the horror genre is here to stay.
Which horror games are you looking forward to playing this year? Are you excited about any of the games on our list? Leave us a comment below and give us your thoughts on horror gaming, and the horror games of 2016 that have the most potential.

10 Most Anticipated Horror Games of 2016 2

Outlast 2

The first Outlast game has become a modern horror favorite for many gamers, combining elements of the found footage film genre with the survival-horror game. The sequel, Outlast 2, is looking to continue that tradition, but trades the asylum setting of the first game for a foreboding, wooded countryside. The Outlast 2 teaser trailer hints that it may also explore some religious themes, which is interesting and rarely visited territory for video games.
Outlast 2 is scheduled to launch this fall for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.


Overkill’s The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead franchise has already enjoyed quite a bit of success in the gaming industry, with Telltale’s episodic adventure earning critical acclaim across the board. However, Payday developer Overkill is looking to do something different with Overkill’s The Walking Dead through FPS co-op gameplay. We haven’t seen much of Overkill’s take on the series just yet, but considering the pedigree of the developer, the game stands a good chance of being quite a bit better than the previous Walking Dead FPS game, Survival Instinct.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead is due for release later this year for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Perception

BioShock and Dead Space stand as two of the best horror games of the last generation, so when developers that worked on both of those games came together to form The Deep End Games, horror fans took notice. The freshman project from The Deep End is a Kickstarter-funded game called Perception, which puts players in the role of a blind woman that has to explore a spooky mansion. Promising a story with plenty of twists and scares and a unique art style that is meant to represent echolocation, Perception has a chance to be one of the better horror experiences in 2016.

Perception is expected to release in June for PC.

Resident Evil Zero HD Remaster

10 Most Anticipated Horror Games of 2016

For horror gaming fans, 2015 was a fairly great year. Yes, there was some heartbreak in the form of Silent Hills being cancelled, but 2015 also saw a number of high quality horror gaming experiences launch, as we illustrated in our Best Horror Games of 2015 list.

With 2015 behind us, it’s now time to look forward to what 2016 will offer to horror gaming enthusiasts. The following 10 horror games releasing in 2016 stand out as the ones with the most potential, and are Game Rant’s most anticipated horror games of 2016.

Allison Road

While it’s still upsetting that P.T. was pulled from the PlayStation Store, Allison Road is looking to fill the void left behind. Inspired directly by the creepy, claustrophobic atmosphere that Hideo Kojima created as a tease for Silent Hills, Allison Road looks like one of the most genuinely terrifying experiences gamers can look forward to in 2016.
Allison Road is expected to release this October for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Friday the 13th

While the Allison Road Kickstarter wasn’t a success, with Team17 stepping in to see the game finished, the same can’t be said for the Friday the 13th Kickstarter. The game hit its initial funding goal, and even managed to reach some of its stretch goals in the process. An asymmetrical mulitplayer game in which one player controls Jason Voorhees and the others control camp counselors,, the Friday the 13th game is one of the more unique titles on this list, and should provide a different kind of horror gaming experience than we’ve seen before.

The Friday the 13th video game is due for release later this year for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Layers of Fear

Layers of Fear is the tale of a painter that is obsessed with painting a masterpiece. His relentless pursuit of this goal has caused him to drift into madness and alcoholism, themes which are explored in the context of a first-person exploratory horror game. Like Allison Road, Layers of Fear takes a few cues from P.T., and could very well ride the popularity of that release to its own strong sales.

Layers of Fear is currently available through Steam Early Access on PC and the Xbox Preview Program on Xbox One, with a full release expected for later this year.

Creepiest, weirdest stuff you'll find in Fallout 2

The Pickman Gallery

Oh, man… the Pickman Gallery. We're just going to cut straight to the chase: this is probably the most "nope"-inducing place in all of the Commonwealth in Fallout 4. The house is made up of three floors and each one is a doozy, full of mangled corpses and blood splattered everywhere. As you make your way through the basement, past the various chopped-up body parts, you'll come upon a group of raiders attacking Pickman himself. It's clear from all of the bodies and buckets upon buckets of blood everywhere that Pickman is some deranged serial killer, so you can either leave him to his fate or rescue him. If you choose the latter, he'll gift you with a key that opens up a safe containing a named weapon called Pickman's Blade. Just be informed that if you save him, you'll have saved a creepy murderer who paints with the blood of his victims.

The Dunwich Borers

The Dunwich Borers in Fallout 4 is more or less a sequel to the Dunwich Building from Fallout 3. If you decide to travel to this godforsaken place, you'll find what looks to be an ordinary quarry. Sure, it's full of ghouls and traps, but if you can manage to clear it, you can enter an underground portion that houses something… paranormal. Sounding familiar yet? The prize for getting through another set of supernatural flashbacks and armies of ghouls is a nifty weapon called Kremvh's Tooth, which is located in a pool of irradiated water. It should be noted that this weapon was used as a sacrificial knife and is also another reference to H.P. Lovecraft. And, as a word of warning, try not to enter the pool while wearing a suit of Power Armor, because it'll sink to the depths of the pool and become irretrievable.

Vault 11

Now we come to Vault 11, otherwise known as one of the most savage of Vault-Tec's vaults. It should be common knowledge by now that every vault set up by Vault-Tec also doubled as an experiment of sorts. What makes Vault 11 fascinating was that it was a social experiment that tested out the inhabitants to see what they'd do when told to sacrifice a fellow vault-dweller every year. Refusal to pick an annual sacrifice would result in the extermination of all vault-dwellers.

When you enter the vault, you find four dead bodies lying on the ground by the entrance. As you delve deeper and deeper into the vault, you can unravel the mystery about the bodies and find out the full story. You eventually find out that by the time everyone decided to stop with the sacrifices, only five people were left. Four of them agreed to kill themselves and to bury the secret of the vault with their deaths, but the fifth one decided otherwise and shot the other four before fleeing into the wastes. And that, friend, is why you discover four corpses at the entrance.

Creepiest, weirdest stuff you'll find in Fallout

The wastes of the modern Fallout games are rife with adventure, intrigue around every corner, and plenty of interesting people to befriend. Or shoot. It's easy to get swept up in the desolation of Fallout 3, the whimsical immersion in Fallout: New Vegas, and the sense of discovery in Fallout 4, but it's even easier to overlook the fact that the wastes are home to many stories, and not all of those stories are particularly savory. Here are some of the strangest, creepiest, most unnerving stories that the wastes have to tell. Steel yourself and pray that your Power Armor has a biological waste disposal system, because things are about to get weird.

The Dunwich Building
If you've played Fallout 3, chances are that you've explored the heck out of that map. If so, then you might have run across a location called the Dunwich Building. Fans of H.P. Lovecraft might notice the reference to The Dunwich Horror, which is part of the Cthulhu mythos, so one might already expect to find some otherworldly, maddening shenanigans. Upon entering, you're greeted by corpses and a surprising number of ghouls running amok, with the occasional Glowing One threatening to relegate you to the past tense. Deep in the building is an entrance to an older part of the ruins where players can experience supernatural phenomena like flashbacks, doors that open by themselves, and disappearing objects. Also, there's an obelisk being worshipped by ghouls with a woman climbing out of it. So yeah, have fun with that noise.

The McClellan family townhome

The McClellan Family Townhome seems to be a reference to a Ray Bradbury short story called "There Will Come Soft Rains", which, funnily enough, has to do with a robotic house that still tries to perform its duties, not realizing that its family has died because of nuclear war.Only three of the McClellans are accounted for, which are the boy, Muffy the dog, and a Mister Handy. You can have the Mister Handy unit perform its duties, such as walk Muffy, pick up groceries, read a bedtime poem, and patrol the grounds. If you choose to have it walk Muffy, it will hover over to the corpse of the dog outside and try to get it to stand instead. Eesh. If you have it read to the kids, it will recite the poem to the dead child, seemingly unaware that the baby's missing as well. Yikes on bikes, guys.

Vault 22

When wandering through the deserts of the Mojave Wasteland, you wouldn't really expect to find an overabundance of greenery. But after finding and entering Vault 22, you might change your opinion. Inside the vault are weeds, vines, and other examples of flora. Some of these plants are carnivorous, and will actually try to kill the player. Yep, Vault-Tec was trying to experiment with plants and accidentally created a fungus that was toxic to humans, with spores that mutated them into monsters. An oasis in the Mojave Wastelend, this is not.

Sierra Madre (Dead Money DLC)

In what is probably one of the best pieces of DLC that any Fallout game has to offer, Dead Money offers players a vacation in Sierra Madre, a glittering jewel in the desert and the creepiest casino you'll ever witness. You wake up in this city of death with a bomb collar around your neck. Sounds fun already, right? This means that someone is holding you tight with a very short leash, and that someone happens to be Father Elijah, a shadowy man who tasks you with gathering a crew in order to pull off a heist, deep within the bowels of the Sierra Madre.
What makes this part of the game so creepy and disturbing is the overall atmosphere, which gives you the feeling of being stuck in a city of death. It also happens to be full of deadly gas clouds and is inhabited by nearly invincible ghosts. With the constant threat of death literally looming around every corner and traps everywhere, Dead Money makes for a very intense gaming experience.

Most gratuitous superheroine costumes 2

White Queen

Speaking of villainesses in underpants, Marvel's White Queen always seems like her real costume is in the laundry, and all she's left with is a corset and a cape. Depending on which version of the X-Men you're reading, Emma Frost is always experimenting with ridiculous costumes, but the most ridiculous is probably her New X-Men duds, which are literally made of the negative space surrounding the letter X. It sounds clever until you realize how terribly impractical the whole thing is. When you can read minds, why would you wear something that would generate horrible thoughts?

Shanna the She-Devil

Logic dictates that any exploration of the jungle should normally be undertaken with the maximum amount of coverage possible, but that's rarely the case with jungle heroines, who are apparently only capable of skinning only one tiger ever and making a bikini out of it. In a world devoid of infectious bug bites, thorny plants, and the general unseen, bitey perils of nature, Shanna the She-Devil somehow evades every danger with flawless, overly-exposed skin, instead of being a mass of gnarled scar tissue like any other human who spends every day outside being eaten alive by murder-flies and fang-leeches.

Lady Death
If you want to get into some really insane territory, you have to wander into smaller publishers that were operating in the '90s. They were often remorseless when trying to lure in well-paying young men. Chaos Comics' Lady Death is some kind of goddess who is bone white from hair to toe, with thigh-high leather boots that latch onto her underwear, which somehow serves a function not known to mere mortals. Lady Death was passed around through several failed publishers and given new origins at least once, but she's not much more than a less-successful Spawn, and even her well-proportioned appearance can't seem to keep a publisher afloat.

Vampirella

Vampirella hails from an era where black and white comics were beautifully drawn by virtuoso artists and written by master storytellers, so it's hard to hold these origins against her. The fact that Vampirella's tiny costume was designed by a woman, Trina Robbins, is also a point in her favor, and somehow, being from the planet Drakulon feels like enough of an explanation for the absurd costume. Maybe it's also the association with vampirism that makes this costume strangely appropriate, since post-18th century vampire lore can get kinda sensual.

Witchblade

"Bony carapace" isn't really a sexy phrase, unless you're into some pretty weird stuff, but pointy shards of bone and tendon are all that make up Witchblade's costume, which emerges from a razor-fingered gauntlet on the wearer's hand. There's literally no reason that this deadly weapon also requires all of the user's clothes to fly off in a cloud of shredded fabric, but woe befall any change you had in your pocket, because it belongs to the devil now. Sorry. Again, it was the '90s, so the more revealing the costume, the better.

Dawn

Dawn's appearance is a little tricky because, according to canon, she would appear differently depending on the viewer, and creator Joseph Linsner always maintained that this was because all women are beautiful. Despite this positive message, every Dawn cover depicted the red-headed witch as a buxom babe in translucent clothing rather than one of these "other" Dawns. Because she was created during the '90s by a small publisher, Dawn is also the goddess of something, and her boyfriend is Death, and we stopped paying attention right about there.

Most gratuitous superheroine costumes

Respecting comics as legit literature is a relatively new thing, and it's been a battle made especially difficult by the distractions caused by ladies in skin-tight costumes, designed specifically to titillate. Absurd outfits have often overshadowed some pretty great stories being told between comics' illustrated pages, but it's hard to blame publishers for using the tools at their disposal to appeal to their most profitable audience. Still, there are certain superheroine costumes that undeniably go over the top, so here are a few ladies who would have just as many powers even if they covered up a bit.

Power Girl
DC Comics' superheroine is probably the most notable example of a costume that seems unnecessarily revealing, with a huge panel cut out right in the ol' decolletage region, exactly where most male heroes wear their icons of power. DC tried to explain away the gaping costume hole by saying that the outfit is intentionally designed to distract male villains, but Power Girl already has all of the powers of Supergirl, so "distraction" seems like overkill. DC's recent New 52 redesign covers her up a bit more, but also managed to ruin the DC Universe, so no ground really gained there.

Phantom Lady
Gratuitous costumes aren't really just a modern issue, since they date back all the way to the 1940s, with the introduction of Phantom Lady, who uses the power of "black light" to make herself invisible. Phantom Lady is a pretty solid expression of '40s pin-up art, which is revealing without being exposing. Her design is undoubtedly part of a cultural movement that includes great artists like Vargas, but her publishers also attracted the attention of Fredric Wertham, an anti-comics crusader who cited Phantom Lady specifically as dangerous to the soft and squishy minds of children because of her weird, handkerchief-like costume.

White Rabbit

Despite DC Comics making inconsistent efforts at making comics slightly less ridiculous, they also regularly make some pretty unfortunate missteps. One of those stumbles is White Rabbit, who isn't even important enough to have her own Wikipedia page, and who is not to be confused with Marvel Comics' character of the same name. White Rabbit appears out of nowhere to antagonize Batman, can somehow split into two people at once, and looks like she's working at a strip club. There's no reason for any of it, and even Batman doesn't seem all that interested in seeing how it plays out.