YouTube and Let’s Plays have been a game-changer (no pun intended) in the video game industry and how it’s interacted with, especially in the horror genre. Instead of just players to worry about, developers now have to consider how people who won’t play, who will simply watch the game, would feel about the experience.

There are plenty of games that I feel should be played through with your own two hands in order to get the best experience (such as any Silent Hill game, considering the vast amount of symbolism and detail). However, there are games on the other end of that spectrum as well: where the best way to experience them is to just watch them.

There are a multitude of reasons why it would be better for someone to watch a game rather than play it; someone could be new to gaming overall and not have the skills for the learning curve, someone may just want to pay more attention to the story without worrying about gameplay, someone may want to save money, or someone may just want to see their favourite YouTuber reacting to it.

For these games, one way or another, it’s better to watch someone play through it.

10

FAITH: The Unholy Trinity

Give Your Full Attention to the Story

FAITH: The Unholy Trinity is an Atari-style horror game that really hones in on the religious superstitions and fears of the time period. You play as a disgraced priest, going back to a house with a possessed girl to fix the mistakes of his past.

First things first, the sound design of this trilogy is fantastic, incorporating the classic, Atari sound with its rotoscoped visuals. Not to mention, it has a genuinely riveting story about guilt, responsibility, and faith itself. After all, what you’re about to do in this game has not been approved by the Vatican.

While it’s a good time if you’re a fan of simplistic gameplay, it can be a drag for other players. Some people can’t push themselves through slow, methodical gameplay, and that’s okay — however, the lore of this game is so rich that it would be a genuine crime to overlook it. Seriously, it’s wonderfully done, and anyone who simply watches a playthrough of it would get nearly the exact same experience as if they had played it themselves.

This is definitely a game you’d want to give your full attention to, and if the gameplay will take that attention away, just watch someone else finish it.

9

Cry of Fear

Let Someone Else Do the Platforming

Cry of Fear is actually pretty divisive when it comes to survival horror games, mainly because of how incomprehensibly difficult it can be — deceptively so, too. However, there is one section of the game that just gets outright enraging: the platforming during the Nightmare sequences.

At the same time, Cry of Fear has a creepy atmosphere and a solid story, so it would be a waste if a player were to overlook this game just because of its janky difficulty. With that in mind, just watch someone else play the game and let them deal with the platforming segment instead, saving you unnecessary frustration.

Originally a Half-Life 2 mod, you play as Simon, trying to navigate his hometown of Stockholm as everything starts to crumble around him. There are a couple different endings to this game, so if this is a game you’re going to watch instead of play, be sure to look up all the endings so you can get the full picture.

Not to mention, this was a horror game that got popularity because of YouTube, so this will just take you back to the early 2010s.

8

Layers of Fear

Walking Simulators Are Easy Watches

When it comes to Walking Simulators, players either love them or hate them, but even those who don’t like walking sims can’t deny that the stories in these games are cinematic and incredible. Bloober Team’s horror breakout Layers of Fear was what popularised the subgenre, with simplistic gameplay to focus on the narrative first.

That being said, the gameplay can be too simplistic for some players, so this would be a game that’s better to watch and enjoy. In fact, many walking simulator horror games would better fit being watched rather than played.

Layers of Fear has you playing as a disturbed painter, trying to create your magnum opus, and it also has a few different endings depending on how you handle the climax. So if you’re watching it, be sure to check out videos of the other endings to see what alternate pathways the painter could have taken.

It’s incredibly moody, and a good introduction to horror and narrative-driven games overall. I just wish the game was a little scarier.

7

Outlast

People Panic-Running Is Hilarious

Outlast is perhaps the scariest game of Hide & Seek that you could play; and while it’s incredibly nerve-wracking to try and get through Mount Massive Asylum and survive everyone you’re trapped with, it’s actually ten times funnier to watch someone else try and survive this game, especially when the chases begin.

When you panic run in a horror game and it leads to disaster, it’s frustrating. However, if you watch someone else playing the same game panic and end up getting killed in-game, it’s hilarious instead.

In an interview with VICE, co-founder of Outlast Phillipe Morine credited YouTube for helping the game’s success, stating: “I guess horror games are so popular on YouTube because seeing somebody being scared is a guilty pleasure. It becomes a combination of horror and humor.”

He’s exactly right, too, and it’s a major reason why I tend to prefer watching playthroughs of this game rather than playing it again.

6

The Walking Dead

What Choices Would Someone Else Make?

While everyone is raving about Dispatch, created by former members of Telltale, the original Choose-Your-Own-Adventure horror experience complete with QTEs and heavy decisions was The Walking Dead.

As gut-wrenching as it is freaky, in The Walking Dead, you play as Lee, trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world overrun with walkers, protecting a little girl named Clementine along the way. While it’s fun to play, it’s even more fun to see the multiple other pathways that other players would take.

You’d make choices like who to follow and who to trust, and that will influence the entire outcome of the game; seeing someone else make the decisions you wouldn’t want to allows you to see where that pathway goes, guilt-free. You could watch 20 different people play this game, and no two players would approach it the exact same way, feeling like a fresh, new experience every time.

Just have a box of tissues nearby for when you start watching. You’re going to reach for them.

5

Doki Doki Literature Club

You Might Get Different Scares

Visual novels are pretty unassuming on the surface; however, Team Salvato took things to the next level by making a horror visual novel, one that seems to seep into your very computer: Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC). While this is a fantastic gaming experience (especially when you have to get into the game files to progress), there’s a lot that you’re going to miss.

That’s because many of the scares are percentage-based, meaning that there’s only a slight chance that some scares will even happen in your playthrough. In the same vein, it could show up in someone else’s playthrough, with some scares unique to those who are recording the game in the first place.

Sure, you could replay the game yourself to try and find everything with a fine-toothed comb, but again, that’s if your next playthrough would also have some of those rarer scares. There is so much content about this game on YouTube, about all the hidden horrors and details that were overlooked, and it’s something that will captivate you for hours.

It’s also hilarious to see other YouTubers try to come up with unique voices for each of the characters, no matter how ridiculous it ends up being.

4

Alien: Isolation

A Quick Game of Hide & Seek

Hide and Seek horror games make for good content in general, especially if you’re watching someone particularly entertaining try to run and hide — bonus points if the game happens to be Alien: Isolation. In Alien: Isolation, you play as the daughter of Ellen Ripley herself — who also happens to carry the family curse of having their ship taken over by a Xenomorph.

Being one of the best examples of a game with highly intelligent A.I., the Xenomorph learns from you and how you play; and considering how everyone plays differently, it’s genuinely fascinating to see how the creature adapts to other play-styles.

For example, you may not frequent the vents, but a YouTuber you’re watching does. Considering the Xenomorph didn’t need to adapt, you’d completely miss out on the alien now entering the vents to hunt you; however, you’d catch it in someone else’s playthrough who would make these mistakes. If nothing else, it’s worth watching to see the A.I. in action.

Of course, it’s even funnier when the person you’re watching is running around without a plan, leaving them vulnerable to attacks (and subsequent jump scares).

3

Until Dawn

Who Will They Save?

Supermassive games are notoriously difficult to Platinum, and Until Dawn is no exception to this. There’s no shame in not really replaying the game to see all the choices, just because of how tedious it can be. However, if you want to scratch that itching curiosity to see what happens if you made a different choice, you can just watch someone else go through the game.

Considering the ending of the game is based on how many people you’re able to keep alive (and that’s tough in and of itself), and your choices constantly have ripple effects that could bite you in the behind down the line, it’s not going to feel the same. Not to mention, I personally wasn’t a fan of Until Dawn, believing that it’s better suited to be a cheesy slasher film, so watching a playthrough (in my opinion) actually improves the experience.

It’s not the scariest horror game out there — if anything, the sheer amount of camp and humour shoved into the story takes away a ton of the suspense it tried to build up. Gameplay can feel clunky, with pacing cut with a dull knife, so it’s really better all around to just watch someone else play instead.

The game wanted to be a movie so badly, it’s better to just treat it like one.

2

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

A YouTube Classic

The early days of YouTube Let’s Plays were filled to the brim with two games: Slender: The Eight Pages, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Seriously, you couldn’t dive into the gaming tag without seeing either game at least twice.

The virality of these games comes from the people who played them for entertainment. With creators like PewDiePie and Markiplier skyrocketing into fame from games like Amnesia, it helped bring horror games back into the limelight. This era of gaming, the early 2010s, was mostly full of AAA Action Horror and lacking in actual fear and substance, so seeing games prioritising atmosphere over jump-scares felt revolutionary.

Indie games were frequently overlooked, so big creators highlighting these titles not only helped raise awareness of these creators and show appreciation to them, but it cemented Amnesia as a horror icon. Seriously, I don’t know a single horror gamer that has never heard of the Amnesia games.

This is a rare game that’s just as much of a treat to play as it is to watch, but something about watching Let’s Players dive into Amnesia is outright historic.

1

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Popular Because of Let’s-Players

Speaking of Markiplier, I would dare to say that the only reason why Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) was noticed, much less got as popular as it has, was due to the King of FNAF himself. This would only be amplified with MatPat’s Game Theories for the franchise’s insanely complicated lore. To this day, I believe Scott Cawthon just kept adding to the games because he didn’t know what he wanted to do with it.

Story aside, the gameplay itself was actually unique and revolutionary for the time, being a concept that had never been executed in anything horror fans had seen prior. Did it get a bit big for its britches? Absolutely, but by this point, people don’t care about that as much as they care about watching their comfort content creators dive into the series.

Even if you’re like me and aren’t a fan of where the series went, it’s still taken the internet by storm, and players can’t help but wonder how others would react to these games. Spoiler alert: the reactions are hilarious.

Either way, Five Nights at Freddy’s has turned into a giant in the horror industry — hell, in gaming as a whole — that even if you don’t want to watch someone play the games, you can just jump into the movies instead.