Summary
Macabre video gamesare ones where death, despair, and other disturbing content feel inescapable and suffocating. While the horror genre is inevitably notorious for being the main perpetrator responsible for some of the most disturbing, morbid, and gruesome games on the market, macabre video games are not limited to one genre or style of gameplay. Several entries on this list are nothing short of appalling in terms of upsetting content, whereas others merely examine macabre subjects in beautiful and serene ways.
Be warned: the dark content in these games ranges from terminal illnesses, grief, and loss to body horror, sexual violence, and depravity. Whether subtle or blatant in their depictions of death and suffering, themost disturbing macabre gamesleave players with an unshakable feeling of dread.
This list features games with dark, triggering themes and gruesome graphics.
Updated Jul 16, 2025, by Hamza Haq:While most games are meant to be an escape from the harsh realities of life and a way to leave one’s troubles behind to immerse in a fantasy world, it’s not always the case. Sometimes, the human mind deliberately seeks out disturbing things in order to feel something different from the norm, something that deliberately takes a person out of their comfort zone. It’s a form of escape not many players enjoy or appreciate, but for those that do, nothing else scratches the itch. The indie game sphere tends to be the best place to find these sorts of titles because without a studio of executives breathing down their necks, they can aim to make games they are passionate about instead of games that will likely make the most money.
Not nearly as gruesome or gory as other entries on this list,What Remains of Edith Finchis a macabre walking simulator with an unrelenting depiction of death. The protagonist, Edith, returns to the Finch home, which is essentially a mausoleum dedicated and preserved in memory of the relatives who died there, due to a rumored hereditary curse. Although each room of the home is sealed off in memory of a different deceased family member, the decor makes it one ofthe coziest houses in gamingthat feels as if its occupants are still present.
With every morbid tale, players mourn characters they have only just met but whose endearing personalities shine through undeniably. Players even fear (while traversing the more precariously built sections of the house) that Edith will fall to her own death and succumb to the family curse before their eyes. Despite criticisms for a lack of interactivity and autonomy, invested players will finishWhat Remains of Edith Finchwith the disturbing feeling of having just attended the funerals of twenty relatives one after the other.
No doubt a dreaded disease that plagues all ages, cancer feels particularly cruel and heartbreaking when a child is suffering from it.That Dragon, Cancercaptures that sharp morbidity of a childhood tinged with illness in a two-hour immersive virtual experience from Numinous Games about five-year-old Joel Green. The gameplay switches back and forth from honest recreations of Joel’s memories in and out of the hospital to abstract, dreamy mini-game sequences that imaginatively paint Joel’s feelings, all rendered with faceless 3D models that can feel intimidating or wholesome.
Already tackling a deeply emotive topic,That Dragon, Canceris particularly raw because the content is not fictional. Funded by donations from Kickstarter and created byRyan and Amy Green, this game is a love letter to their son Joel. Players will discover the dialogue is entirely voiced by Joel’s family and features real recordings of Joel’s voice; they may also notice the real photos and letters from cancer survivors and their families in the background of the hospital, blurring the lines between the game and reality. This game forces players to face the difficult truth of a real child’s mortality head-on. Tragically, Joel passed away while the game was still being developed. Released on Joel’s birthday,That Dragon, Canceris considered a memorial to Joel’s life, its credits brimming with photos of Joel at his happiest times with the family that loved him dearly.
Nothing is scarier to the human mind than the inability to trust itself. Diseases of the body are difficult to deal with, of course, but conditions like dementia that take a person’s mind away are impossible to imagine for someone who has not gone through it themselves.Cry of Fearattempts to give a glimpse into that possibility. It starts off as a traditional first-person survival horror game where the protagonist finds himself in an unfamiliar urban environment beset by monsters from nightmares. Relying on guns and wits, he navigates the world, struggling to understand what is happening around him.
Simon, the protagonist, defeats malformed monsters, evil doctors, dark and gloomy forests, and much more to eventually find his way back to his home where his mother is waiting for him. Only to find out that his mother isn’t there, the house is empty, and everything he has experienced so far has been a figment of his imagination, a made-up story by the real Simon to help him cope with the trauma he has developed over years of depression and anxiety.
Doki Doki Literature Club!is a game that needs to be experienced in order to be appreciated. On the surface, it is a visual novel dating simulator where the protagonist (the player) attempts to woo different girls who are a part of the Literature Club in a fictional high school. The art style is cutesy and light-hearted, a typical anime dating sim by all accounts. But things quickly take a turn for the worse when the player finds out that one of the main girls, Sayori, has hanged herself inside her house. There is a jarring sense of vertigo in seeing something so unsightly in a visual novel game that comes right out of left field. Immediately afterward, players are forced to start a new run, back from the beginning of the game, but this time without the heroine who killed herself. It feels like the game is trying to reassert its light-hearted themes after being forced off the track, and it only gets crazier from there.
The disturbing part aboutDoki Doki Literature Club!is subtle and understated in its nuance, preferring to use fourth-wall-breaking twists and turns instead of straightforward storytelling to get its point across, forcing players to question what’s real and what’s not. It’s not disturbing in the sense of blood and gore, but rather in the psychological toll it inflicts on the mind during a playthrough.
20My Lovely Daughter
Contains: Mass Killing And Human Sacrifice
Although not the most visually horrifying game,My Lovely Daughteris a title with emotionally distressing gameplay. A cruel twist on typical parenting simulators, gamers play as a grieving father attempting to resurrect his daughter’s corpse utilizing the most sadistic methods possible. Using dark magic, the father figure creates dozens of living, elemental ‘homunculus’ daughters with real feelings, indulges in the pretense of raising them safely, and then mercilessly slaughters them to harvest their souls.
The gameplay necessitates players to nurture their homemade sacrifices for a set period of time and receive somber, frightened, and humanizing letters from the daughters they must later kill. Despite living a miserable existence, the daughters largely adore their creator, unaware of the player’s cruel intentions, resulting in a harrowing andheartbreaking gaming experience.
At first glance,Omorimight be mistaken for a nostalgic top-down 8-bit game, with its colorful, creative maps and cutesy unique character designs. It is deceptively cheerful when players have a happy party of friends following them to battle bizarre, adorable creatures, but it is far from child-friendly. In many ways,Omoriis a darker alternativegame to play for lovers ofUndertale, a wholesome pixel-art RPG, which bears many similarities, including multiple personas for the protagonist, quirky humor, and an emphasis on the power of friendship and kindness.
Players switch between controlling Omori while exploring a dreamy world called “Headspace” and Sunny when back in the “real world.” Dark themes become apparent as Omori faces dark hallucinations, and self-harms, kills his re-spawning friends, and encounters unnerving representations of Sunny’s real life, such as a black entity named “Dad” that states bluntly: “You’re not my son.” Without spoiling key plot points, Omori is an alter-ego created by Sunny to hide from the guilt and trauma of a terrible crime, and eventhe best possible endingsall involve bloodshed or despair of some kind, making it a poignant, macabre take on a traditionally gleeful genre.
18Welcome To The Game
Contains: Murder, Criminal Activity, Sexual Assault, Torture, Taboo
Although criticized for an overly dramatic portrayal of the dark web,Welcome To The Gametaps into the fear that online human depravity is only a few clicks away, leaving players feeling sickened with themselves for witnessing and participating. Players must scour the dark web in search of codes to access a live stream of a ‘red room’ while tackling hackers and evading kidnappers. The result is an eerie and, at times, frustrating experience, as players try to focus on their screens while feeling vulnerable toviolent jump scaresor creeping killers outside their field of vision.
To its detriment, the gameplay and graphics are clunky and unimpressive at times, and the antagonists are prone to cheesy, heavily recycled catchphrases.Welcome To The Game 2took the original concept and stepped it up with improved visuals, even scarier villains, and the ability to roam more freely around an entire building rather than feeling chained to the desk and computer. At its heart,Welcome To The Gameis about the terrifying details; players who take the time to read the twisted fictional web pages will uncover the heart of this franchise’s morbidity.
What makes theLittle NightmaresSeries haunting is its storybook-esque aesthetics, starring adorable tiny child protagonists that players desperately want to protect from the sinister gray darkness of their surroundings, even if the true little nightmares are the children themselves. In the first game, players must protect Six, a dangerously hungry little girl in a yellow raincoat who is trapped on an underwater vessel called the Maw. As she traverses the puzzles in this platformer game, the fantastical creatures Six encounters largely want to cause her harm, such as the carnivorous leeches or the long-armed janitor. Six comes across other listless children who are being kept prisoner and falls into a room of children’s shoes, implying a systematic massacre of innocents. Throughout her journey, Six loses her innocence, becoming more violent and hungry to cope in a harsh world.
In 2021, Tarsier Studios releasedLittle Nightmares 2,which is actually a prequel, whereby Six is saved by a boy with a paper bag on his head called Mono. Six becomes Mono’s non-playable companion as their bleak adventure takes place in a school plagued by cruel bullies and scary teachers and in a hospital with evil doctors and headless mannequin patients. However, their main antagonist is the Thin Man, whom Mono is able to free. After Six heartbreakingly betrays Mono, he morphs into a new Thin Man doomed to repeat the cycle, while Six is driven by her hunger to go to the Maw, launching the events of the first game. TheLittle Nightmaresseries is most upsetting due to its bizarre, unnerving character designs, which hint mysteriously towards dark backstories that are rarely explained to the player. The last entry to the Franchise,Little Nightmares 3,is due to be released in 2025 by Supermassive, and will hopefully be as disturbing, bleak, and unsettlingly beautiful as its predecessors under Tarsier Studios.
Falsely accused of killing several police officers,Codenamed: Criminal Originsplayers attempt to clear their name as respected FBI agents by single-handedly chasing down serial killers without backup: a nightmare few want to face. Investigating in near darkness with a dimly lit flashlight, players are submerged in unpleasant crimes and faced with the dregs of humanity as they seek the cause for the escalation of mindless violence in the area.
Some aspects ofCondemned: Criminal Origins' gameplay might feel outdated andin need of remastering, including occasional cheesy dialogue, character designs, crow-bar-swinging enemies, and limited fight mechanics for the PC. Flaws aside, this game is disturbing for its macabre content and sanity deterioration, forcing players to distinguish between what is real and what is a hallucination.
15A Plague Tale: Innocence
A Plague Tale: Innocenceproves that even the most enthusiastic time-traveling historians would behorrified to live in a game worldset in 14th Century France, suffering at the height of the Black Death. Revolving around a sibling duo attempting to cope with unimaginable illness, evading the violent Inquisition and swarms of ravenous diseased rats, Asobo Studio’s 2019 survival adventure game is bleak and unforgiving.
Set in haunting backgrounds of mass graves and fields of corpses, the title references the innocence of fifteen-year-old Amicia and five-year-old Hugo, which is trampled upon mercilessly throughout gameplay. Both struggle with trauma and guilt as Amicia is forced to repeatedly slaughter their enemies to protect her brother, and sensitive, sickly Hugo eventually commands armies of rats to savage people. Endearing moments of hand-holding, hugs, and lighthearted playfulness with the adorably polite Hugo serve as the only levity among a cast of sadistic characters. The 2022 sequel,A Plague Tale: Requiem, escorts players from the filthy, festering streets of France to a brighter, scenic Mediterranean setting, temporarily distracting gamers from the gruesome, heartbreaking story of this sequel thatsurpasses its grim predecessor.
