The Green Team of games consoles has never had as much of a reputation for horror games as its rivals. Where the PS1 and PS2 had their golden ages, and Nintendo had a fun old time integrating horror into its Wii, Wii U, and DS gimmicks, the Xbox has traditionally been content to lap up the third-party games coming its way (well, unless you count that British Silent Hill-style game with all the mummies that came out about a million years ago).

But with the indie scene thriving and the horror genre having arguably enjoyed its best ever year, there’s now a gory glut of great horror games on the Xbox Series X and S, making it Microsoft’s best console yet if you’re looking for those thrills, chills, and bowel-spills. We’ve also included a few last-gen classics that have received next-gen boosts, making them playable on the Xbox Series X/S via backwards compatibility.

10 The Medium

Confronting Your Demons

Bloober Team’s combat-free flavor of horror shifts away from its usual first-person perspective here, with The Medium opting for a semi-fixed-camera style that evokes the Silent Hill games of old (as does the soundtrack, which was co-composed by Silent Hill’s Akira Yamaoka).

Set in an abandoned worker’s resort in Poland in the 90s, you control spiritual medium Marianne as she goes to the haunted place in the hope of learning more about her powers. The game has some stunning surreal imagery, as your abilities let you switch between the real world and the spiritual dimensions, bringing you into confrontation with the demons residing there as well as those within Marianne.

It’s an intensely atmospheric, visually powerful game that leans more on unsettling imagery and the odd chase sequence rather than jump-scares, and the fact that Bloober Team got the Silent Hill 2 Remake gig soon after this is as solid a stamp of approval of its quality.

9 Scorn

A Giger-Like Nightmare

Unpleasant, woozy, and divisive, yet visually powerful and sickeningly atmospheric, Scorn is a first-person horror game that sees you navigating through a nightmarish Giger-inspired realm of flesh fused with machinery. There is no dialogue in this game, though pay attention to what’s going on, and you may just grasp its enigmatic story. For your part, you’re largely just wandering through this hostile, alien landscape, being blown away by its horrifying majesty.

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There is some combat here against appropriately disturbing creatures, and some environmental puzzles, but really this game thrives in spectacle, as you witness unfathomably gargantuan beasts, do all kinds of terrible things to your body to progress the game, and weave through spinal corridors and humanoid-farming factories. It’s a gory, painful, and at times tedious experience, and yet it leaves a hell of an impact despite its frustrations.

8 Amnesia: The Bunker

A Delve Through The Darkness

Amnesia developer Frictional Games has never done things by the book, and with each of its games has transported that run-and-hide formula into cool, distinctive settings, with distinctive monstrous threats and new mechanics.

Amnesia: The Bunker is the studio’s boldest game yet, throwing you into an abandoned World War I bunker laden with traps, resources to salvage (whose placement is semi-randomized), and a creature that lurks in the dark holes and corners of the foreboding environment. At the heart of the bunker is a generator that you need to keep fueled up lest the whole map get plunged into darkness, cleverly replacing the ‘Sanity’ system that’s defined the series up to this point. It’s a lonely, intense experience, evolving those distinctive, fiddly series mechanics that have given the series its reputation.

7 The Quarry

186 Different Endings

Supermassive Games has a well-established formula of putting you in charge of a bunch of brash twenty-somethings as they navigate a pleasingly tropey slasher story, with your decisions at key moments dictating how the story unfolds, who lives, and who dies. Having released a whole bunch of games now, Supermassive have had their ups and downs, but The Quarry is a definite highpoint for the studio, with some excellent characterization, writing, gory deaths, and silly scares.

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With nine playable characters, the game could easily have been spread too thin between them, but despite their individual quirks and annoyances, you end up wanting them all to live. Set in Hackett’s Quarry — a deliciously spooky summer camp — after all the kids have left, you must ensure that the camp counselors survive a night of ghost stories, scary hillbillies, and… well, we won’t spoil it too much for you, but it’s a great horror romp!

6 Dying Light: Definitive Edition

Parkour Heaven

The long-awaited sequel to the hit parkour zombie game where you can bound over the heads of a crowd of zombies before fly-kicking a giant hammer-wielding zombo in the face never quite lived up to the original. For our money, the complete package of the first Dying Light, which bundles in all DLC including the excellent The Following expansion, is still some of the best fun you can have killing zombies with friends.

The open-world setting is full of dangerous activities, and a robust crafting system lets you upgrade all kinds of meat-carving weapons to take on the threats around you — from rusty knives to heavy hammers and katanas. Great parkour mechanics, and some cool systems — like how at night the world becomes immeasurably more dangerous when the lethal Night Walkers begin to prowl the streets — make for an experience that’s equal parts intense and playful. Dying Light received a Next-Gen update with Quality, Performance, and Balanced modes, giving you plenty of freedom to enjoy it at the fidelity and smoothness you want.

5 Metro Exodus

Dramatically Expands The Already Beloved Metro Setting

It’s a huge credit to the first two Metro games that they were two of the best shooters of all time while telling their grim post-apocalyptic stories almost entirely in the dingy tunnels of the Moscow Metro system. Metro Exodus takes the action above the surface, as Artyom goes on an epic train expedition across post-apocalyptic Russia in search of a new life, giving this latest outing a sense of scale and expanse never before seen in the series.

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Certainly more of an action game than others on this list, Metro Exodus doesn’t abandon the dripping tension and atmosphere that made its predecessors special, and there’s still plenty of resource scarcity, horrifying mutants, and expertly crafted sequences in its sprawling semi-open levels to test the nerves of even the most stalwart players.

4 Dead Space (Remake)

A Stompy-Good Time

A great remake is no mean feat, especially when the game being remade is one of the most beloved sci-fi horror games ever made. But Motive Studios’ Dead Space remake is a wild success, bringing the Necromorph-stomping, industrial-grade machinery-wielding game into the modern generation.

The Brutalist spaceship USG Ishimura is as grim an environment as ever, with parts redesigned to allow for a little more non-linear exploration. The no-UI design philosophy of the original continues to shine here, as ammo, health bars, and interactable buttons are all contained within the game world itself. The satisfying process of tearing Necromorphs limb from limb, meanwhile, feels as crunchy as ever, aided by a more elaborate (and re-speccable) upgrade system. It’s as great a remake as we could’ve asked for, leaving us excited to see what’s next for the series.

3 Resident Evil 4: Remake

Revisiting A Polished-Up Horror Classic

Another great remake, with arguably more scope for improvement than Dead Space due to the original game dating all the way back to 2004. While Resident Evil 2 Remake is probably equally deserving of a spot in the Top 10, we’re giving RE4 Remake the nod on account of recency and it taking advantage of the extra technical firepower offered by the current console generation.

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Previously questionable characters have been improved, clever tweaks have been made to the combat mechanics — such as walk-and-shoot and a parrying system — while the enemies are that bit faster and more aggressive, ensuring that you’ll be needing to put those new skills and mechanical smoothness to use. It looks absolutely gorgeous too, with every enemy design feeling like a scarily realistic iteration of the beloved originals.

2 Alan Wake 2

Surreal Horror Meets Incredible Storytelling

It’s not every year (or really ever) that you get a horror game that can be an all-singing, all-dancing rock musical one moment, a moody Silent Hill-style puzzle-horror the next; a Twin Peaks-style detective drama one moment, and a creeping-through-the-dark-woods horror the next. Alan Wake 2 somehow manages all these things, culminating in a wholly unique horror that burrows right into your psyche.

What stops Alan Wake 2 from getting top spot is its awkward combat, which while not persistent in a game that’s tastefully slow-paced, is still a little too prevalent for how unrefined it feels. But push your way past that, and you have one of the most original and intriguing horror games ever made, with a story that masterfully blends in-game graphics with FMV sequences, and some incredible visual design and set-pieces. Our reviewer Jeff loved it, and it was voted our 2nd-best game of 2023.

1 Alien: Isolation

Timeless Tension

Being a previous-gen game (that, incredibly, also appeared on PS3 and Xbox 360) gave Alien: Isolation an uphill fight to make it onto this list, but its high ranking is testament to Creative Assembly’s (yep, the Total War team) incredible achievement in design. Casting you as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ripley from the movies, it throws you into a dark, immersive space station throughout which you’re relentlessly stalked by the legendary Xenomorph, with the game’s incredible combo of sound design and systemic unpredictability making for a suspenseful 12 or so hours.

With few scripted events in the game, you don’t know when or where the alien’s going to appear, with the plip-plips of your radar and sounds of heavy scuttling often being the only giveaway that it’s approaching. The retro-futuristic design of the ship really harks back to the feel of the earlier movies, and its focus on hiding and stealth, rather than fighting, make for a suspenseful sci-fi horror that still ranks among the very best horror games out there. Xbox Series players get to enjoy FPS Boost and Auto HDR too.

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