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Five Spooky and Kooky Games For Halloween!

It’s the spookiest day of the year, and we at High Score couldn’t be more excited to spend it playing the games that give us the heebie-jeebies while sitting in the dark and ignoring the costumed kids coming to the door looking for treats! Get your own candy, six-year-old weirdly dressed as the Joaquin Phoenix version of the Joker! That movie is too mature for you!

The only problem is, there are so many frightfully good horror games that it’s hard to choose which ones to play! Are you facing the same problem? Well then, maybe this handy list of terrifically terrifying games will help you out too. Here are 5 of the best games to play on the day the Irish call Oíche Shamhna. Do they still call it that? We’re not sure.

Friday the 13th

We had a devil of a time choosing between Friday the 13th and Dead By Daylight. While Dead By Daylight does have Michael Myers – the horror movie icon of the holiday – as a playable character, in our opinion Friday the 13th is more fun to play.

In the game, you and your pals can come together to play rounds of the deadliest game of tag ever played. One of you takes on the role of Jason, while the others run around as camp counselors trying to get out alive. Each version of Jason has different abilities and loads of fun ways to kill the other players.

If your friends are lame, you can play online with strangers (and everyone knows a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet!) or play the single-player modes. No matter how you play Friday the 13th, you’re sure to be in for a bloody good time.

If you have Xbox Games With Gold, you can get Friday the 13th for free right now! All the more reason to get on it and have a great time punching holes through horny teens!

Luigi’s Mansion 3

Released today, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is, as the number suggests, the third game in the much-loved series. In the game, you play as Luigi, as the name of the game suggests, as you make your way through a huge hotel where ghosts have taken all of Luigi’s pals hostage.

While we haven’t played Luigi’s Mansion 3 yet, we’re pretty sure it won’t be nearly as violent as Friday the 13th. Unless Nintendo went bonkers, this is a good game for the whole family to play on what is a family-based holiday, no matter how many sexy Minion costumes Spirit Halloween sells.

Along with the story mode, Luigi’s Mansion 3 features some multiplayer game modes. There’s “ScareScraper”, where you and your team traverse through 25 floors of a randomly generated high-rise building, seeking out the ghosts hiding on each floor. “ScreamPark” pits two teams – Team Luigi and Team Gooligi – against each other. In this mode, the goal is to get more points than the other team across three game types. What are those types, you ask? We’ll happily tell you!

There’s “Ghost Hunt”, where teams score points by catching ghosts, “Cannon Barrage”, where the goal is to get points by collecting cannonballs and firing them at targets, and “Coin Floating”, where each team uses floats to collect coins that drop in a pool while avoiding mines.

The first two games are stone-cold classics, and the reviews for Luigi’s Mansion 3 suggest that this new entry may be joining them.

Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

We could have a few Resident Evil games on here, but we don’t want to be unfair to everyone else, so we chose just one that we think is the freakiest of the series.

Resident Evil came out of the grave and spooked players with the first game, but it was the sequel that made the series a worldwide phenomenon. Twenty years after it was released, Capcom brought all that horror back with a from the ground up remake of Resident Evil 2. This new version is more than just updated graphics and an increase in gore; Capcom kept the story and essential feel of the original Resident Evil 2, but changed up some things to make it fit better with modern game sensibilities.

They replaced the tank controls and fixed camera angles with an over the shoulder 3rd person camera like Resident Evil 4. While the original game called for players to find ink cartridges in order to save, the remake – when playing on Normal – lets you save whenever you reach a safe room. If you play on Hardcore, you’ll want to find those ink cartridges.

Be warned! Playing the Resident Evil 2 remake in the middle of the night will likely give you the creeps!

Left For Dead 2

While we all dream of the day that Valve announces the third game to the series (which, we have to be honest, seems unlikely as more time passes), we still have Left For Dead 2 to give us nightmares.

Left for Dead 2 takes everything great about the first game and builds on it. As with the first, you play through loosely connected campaigns, where each map presents totally different obstacles for the players. You can go it alone through campaign mode with the AI acting as your teammates, but the best way to play this game is with three of your friends. Then there’s Survival, a second co-op mode where the goal is, simply, to survive on one map for as long as you and your team possibly can.

On the versus side, we have two modes as well! There’s the one that is just called Versus, where a team of four Survivors tries to get out of the map alive while the other team plays as Special Infected looking to make sure that never happens.  In Scavenge, the Survivor players to collect and use as many fuel cans scattered about a level to fill up a power generator, while the Infected players attempt to stop them.

Left for Dead 2 is one of the most enjoyable horror games ever made. It moves fast, has plenty of freakout moments, and somehow never gets boring.

The Last of Us

You had to know this would be here, right? I mean, who would be mad scientist enough to leave off Naughty Dog’s instant classic? The Last of Us, a survival-horror game for the PS4, received universal praise upon release. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an award that the game won. It was, to be blunt, a pumpkin smashing success.

In the game, you play as  Joel. Your mission is simple – escort a young girl named Ellie, across the United States. Well, it would be simple if this was everyday life. You could just jump on a plane in Boston and land in Salt Lake City a few hours later. But this isn’t everyday life… The Last of Us is set in a post-apocalyptic world where zombie fungus people roam the countryside looking to murder the hell out of anyone they see.

While the gameplay of The Last of Us is great, what made the game really stand out was the story and characters. Joel and Ellie are fully fleshed out people, and you really come to care about them as you play through the story. You experience their horror and sadness, as well as a few brief moments of joy and hope, in a way no other game has ever captured. Naughty Dog’s story is really brought to life by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, the actors who play Joel and Ellie. Baker and Johnson didn’t just provide their voices, they did all the motion capture for the characters themselves, and even suggested changes to the characters to make them more relatable.

With The Last of Us Part II coming out soon (but not as soon as we all hoped), now is a great time to play – or replay – The Last of Us.

 

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