Detention is really that kind of game that forces you to draw a line between “scary” and “disturbing.” Parts of Detention are certainly scary in the traditional sense, but this isn’t really the kind of game you play when you want a good jump scare. Instead, Detention is the kind of game you play when you want to test the limits of your ability to process some heavy and unnerving material.

I could see some arguing that The Cat Lady isn’t a “horror” game in the most traditional sense of the idea, but I truly believe it qualifies for the purposes of this list. Besides, few will argue that this game is anything less than seriously troubling, regardless of which genre they ultimately put it in. The game is also full of the agonizing stories of the Ishimura’s crew as they were turned into Necromorphs one by one. Just as a well-timed jump-scare can make you lose your chill, a deeply disturbing game can shake you down to your core.The game only gets darker and darker from there, eventually falling apart completely and revealing yet another layer to the puzzle. This is a list of disturbing horror games rather than disturbing games. The line between those types of games can be fine, but the basic idea is that this list doesn’t include otherwise non-scary games with disturbing moments. It also includes gratuitously brutal mechanics like recovering health by executing incapacitated victims in gruesome ways. The horror comes not only from your enemies’ brutal and twisted nature, but from your own raw murderous violence.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is lauded by critics and mental health specialists for its realistic portrayal of mental illness, and the distortions in perceived reality experienced by psychotic patients.There’s no one thing that makes a horror game truly disturbing. Some are so gory that you begin to wonder if you can physically endure them for much longer. Others get under your skin in ways that may not be immediately apparent until you find yourself having nightmares about them. The one thing all disturbing horror games share is the way they make you want to escape them at any cost. Of course, the best such games keep you hooked long after you know you should go. When a delivery goes wrong, Kitty Island ends up being covered in gigantic screws. However, they're not at all like normal run-of-the-mill hardware store screws. Quite far from it! Kittey is tasked with clearing the island of this potential danger. A new adventure begins. It doesn’t take detailed graphics and realistic environments to create a disturbing experience that’ll take you out of your comfort zone. The Suffering is perhaps best thought of as Crime and Punishment meets The Shining. While any game set in the most nightmarish prison imaginable is obviously not going to be a good time, The Suffering goes a step further by forcing you to deal with the possibility that you may be the worst monster in that suddenly supernatural structure. There are images in this game you’ll never be able to forget, but it’s the slightly more subtle elements of the story that really burrow into your brain. 11. The Cat Lady That said, slicing up some alien monsters isn't enough to land Dead Space 2 on the "Time to turn this game off right now" list. Dead Space 2 has one specific scene, however, that might just scar you for life. If you've played the game, you know what we're talking about: the NoonTech Diagnostic Machine. Also known as "That awful scene where you jab yourself in the eye with a needle."

If games really were turning people more violent, this was about to cause a massive rise in murderous psychos. Outlast puts you in control of a halfwit journalist who puts himself in deathly danger by infiltrating a shady psychiatric hospital instead of just staying home and writing a sports column. At first, I felt kind of bad about including two gory FMV games from the ‘90s on this list. Ultimately, though, it was hard to part with either of those twisted, ugly journies that leave you feeling like you just played through a snuff film.You control main character Ethan from the first-person perspective, which gives you a privileged point of view to the horrors he must endure – including getting his arm chainsawed off at one point. Never mind that he gets a new hand and attaches it with a stapler and some magical healing water or something only moments later. Some Starfield players — including me — are experiencing a strange audio bug that causes missing dialogue and sound effects alongside echoed sound distortion. The issues appear to be impacting Starfield on Xbox Series X.

Destructoid's retrospective on Sanitarium calls it "disturbing but not scary," and talks about how the game's "disfigured children, lonely freaks, grotesque aliens, and mourning ghosts are far more unnerving" than the typical horrors you find in video games. Fortunately, newer versions of Windows only support the highest color options possible, so this is probably a worthwhile thing to look into only if you're using Windows 7, Vista, or XP.While many games play with the idea of making you question your sanity by forcing you to separate the real from the unreal, Sanitarium arguably gets the most mileage out of that concept. There are points in this game when you’ll really start to question which (if any) of the game’s worlds you’re really in. This game is just a masterpiece of surrealist storytelling that grabs you with its incredible premise and striking style before making you question how far down the rabbit hole you’ve fallen. 2. Agony Agony is all about a lost soul trying to survive a journey through Hell. While a trip through Hell is never a good time (and this title’s atrocious gameplay doesn’t help the experience), this game’s vision of Hell is one of the most disturbing that I’ve seen in any medium. Even if you brush aside this game’s stunning amount of unbelievably gory scenes (which is not an easy task), you’re left with its almost Hellraiser 2-like vision of a labyrinthian version of the underworld. This one is really quite the endurance test. 1. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream While certainly one of the more popular games on this list, don’t let Outlast’s bigger budget and better presentation values give you the wrong impression. This is easily one of the most disturbing horror games ever made.