5 Eerie Games to Haunt During Halloween Week

You’re utterly alone. Blood drips onto snow. A fanged entity slashes your significant other. A monstrous chase ends in death. Just in time for Halloween, five affecting horror games are full of harrowing alienation and loneliness.

Life Is Strange: Double Exposure

Reviewed on the PlayStation 5. Also available on the PC, Switch and Xbox Series X|S.

Forget the jump scares in the narrative-rich Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. Not exclusively a horror story, this L.G.T.B.Q.-friendly supernatural thriller presents unsettling moments from the get-go. It marks the welcome return of the smart sleuth Max Caulfield (voiced brilliantly by Hannah Telle). In the opening scenes, Max and her wry friend Safi explore an abandoned bowling alley. You can almost smell decades-old dust and mold in the ramshackle structure, which is complete with a creepy smiling bowling ball mascot and graffiti proclaiming “Hail, Satan!”

Max, with brown shoulder-length hair and a camera always with her, is a well-liked artist in residence for a bucolic college. It’s Christmastime, and a lone skater glides across a frozen pond. Yet members of Abraxas, a student group, seem to be plotting something. The campus’s visual beauty hides ugly human lies and something sinister to come. Everyone, including Max, has secrets to conceal.

When Safi is found murdered on a snowy bluff, Max begins an investigation using her signature cunning, hints from texts and something like Discord. But it’s a new superpower, the ability to move between timelines, that helps the most.

One of the times that Max enters a starry portal, she’s able to thwart a nosy investigator looking for clues. He has cornered Max’s friend Moses. In a parallel timeline, Max saves Moses, a holiday-light-loving nerd, by sneaking into his lab, stealing evidence and leaving before the investigator notices.