
When video games were first made, they werenโt made with storytelling in mind. The earliest video games that we know of, such as Tennis for Two and Spacewar!, had simple rules and simple mechanics all revolving around defeating a tangible enemy. Years later, video games have become a multi-billion dollar industry with games such as The Witcher 3 and Disco Elysium being lauded specifically for their ability to tell a deeper story that, as pretentious as it sounds, connects with players on a human level.
And where thereโs human-level connection, thereโs room for human-level fears.
Stanley Parable, a game thatโs practically a walking simulator that takes you through an office with a narrator that tries to dictate your choices, has been called โcreepyโ and โdeeply unsettling by players. Instead of presenting players with gore, the narratorโs constant questioning of reality rattles players by putting them in the headspace to think about whether their real lives are similar to Stanleyโs.
Whatโs Existential Horror?

To call Stanley Parable a horror game would be a stretch, but thereโs a strong undercurrent of existential horror within the game.
Existential horror evokes fear by making its audience question the foundations of their reality โ the meaning of life, whether thereโs a point to whatever theyโre doing every day, the existence of the self, etc. Where body horror destabilizes the mind by destabilizing the body, existential horror destabilizes the mind by questioning everything outside and within it. To borrow a word philosopher Albert Camus used in The Myth of Sisyphus, it undermines the person.
Other people will put it differently or add and subtract some ideas, but more or less, it suffices for giving us a rough mental picture of what existential horror is. Outside of that, it has many changing faces. American Psycho has existential horror themes because it picks at whether Patrick Bateman, as a person and concept of self, exists.
You donโt have to go turn to video games and films to see existential horror at work. Youโll find it looming over the quiet moments when you really think about your life or at the bus stop where you start your exhausting commute to work. Existential horror games just amplify this feeling by addressing it more directly โ like how Soma hits you with the question โIf you are a copy of the original (and now dead) youโs mind, are you really you, and are you really alive?โ
The Experiential Horror of Video Games: How Video Games (Literally) Put Us in Horrific Situations

For a long time, film and literature have been the foremost mediums for existential horror, but video games are starting to develop their narratives in ways that wouldnโt be possible in the mediums that came before it. Think of how films canโt give you the level of intimacy with a character that books, which often tell their story wholly from the charactersโ perspective, can and, conversely, how books canโt pull off the visual storytelling that films are able to.
Video games, on the other hand, are able to offer a mix of both. It puts you in the shoes of the character, hence making the experience as intimate as a book while giving you the visual aspects of a film. It also adds a third thing that neither medium can โ your ability to provide your input. Films and literature are pretty much fixed.
Thereโs no room for you to make the nerve-wracking choices that you can be forced to make in a video game unless weโre talking about a choose your own adventure type of thing, in which case you lose the immediacy that makes video games so effective for horror.

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Okay, sure, fine โ but what about existential horror games specifically?
Well, youโd be surprised at how that first-person perspective and ability to choose can psychologically connect you to the character youโre playing.
Thereโs a phenomenon in psychology called the โbody transfer illusionโ. Itโs got nothing to do with transferring your consciousness ร la Soma to a new body, but it does microdose the experience of it. In the experiment, researchers hide a subjectโs hand while substituting it with a fake rubber hand. Both hands would be given the same stimulus of a brush stroking it except only the real hand truly feels whatโs happening.
When done consistently, subjects would begin to experience the rubber hand as if it were their own hand. They would identify it as them and of them, connecting whatever happened to the fake hand to their own real experiences.
This phenomenon has been observed in virtual reality experiences. Spanlang, Sanchez-Vives, and Blanke were able to make male subjects identify with a female presenting virtual body. When the virtual body responded as their real one would in the real world, they would begin to associate the virtual body with themselves. The researchers even observed that subjects would exhibit physiological changes in their real, physical bodies as a response to a threat to the virtual body.
The mental mechanisms at play in the body transfer illusion could have similarities to the ones we experience when we play video games. By getting us to identify with our in-game persona on a psychological level, not just an โIโm controlling this virtual characterโ level, an existential horror video game has the potential to horrify us to a greater magnitude than any other medium.
Why Existential Horror Video Games Terrify Us, According to a Counselor

Jessica Frick, a licensed professional counselor at Metamorphosis Counseling says existential horrorโs ability to root into our brains and leverage our deepest fears comes from our own evolutionary fear of death.
โIt’s evolution – we’re all scared of the idea of our own mortality, our species’ extinction, and what will happen after all of it is over.โ Frick tells us, โOur brains are designed to keep us safe, so thinking about how we will eventually die despite their best efforts is scary on a primal level. Other horror depends on our culture, where society is – but existential fears will always cause that deep biological fear. Animals fear death, but they’re only faced with it when it is immediate – like when they’re being chased by a predator. With our higher intelligence, we as humans can comprehend that death is inevitable – which is what makes existential horror scary.โ
Aside from our animal fears of death, Frick also says existential horror digs up our fears of life being meaningless, โOur brains are constantly trying to make sense of things so we can learn, grow and live a full life. They crave meaning, even if there is none. Learning that there might be no meaning to life – that we may not leave a mark, or make a difference, is a shock not just to our conscious mind, but to our core systems.โ
Existential horror video games play on our fears of lack of meaning and sense in our lives and larger reality. Unlike survival horror games or body horror games where the source of fear is tangible and easily identifiable, existential horror games leave us with an inexplicable (and unexplainable) feeling of dread, mainly because the sheer conceptual size of the source of our fears is so far beyond what we can easily define. Worse, we canโt even shoot the fear of meaninglessness like we can a zombie in a survival horror game.
Itโs this lack of specific direction that makes the horrific aspect of existential horror video games rooted in anxiety rather than fear. The difference between the two emotions is that fear is a specific response to a specific stimulus, while anxiety just keeps us in a constant state of tension because there is no identifiable source of fear and a direct target of it.
โThese parts of our brain are what causes anxiety (whether “normal” or clinical), so it is only natural that they would trigger significant fear and anxiety when faced with a problem that they cannot solve or make sense of.โ Frick explained.
Existential Horror Games Donโt Have A Fixed Shape or Form

Gamers canโt seem to agree on what counts as part of a subgenre when comes to the more subjective subgenres of horror like psychological horror and existential horror. While this may be because the conventions and tropes of these genres arenโt fully cemented yet, it could also be chalked up to how different games will inspire feelings of existential horror in us. Stanley Parable, the game Iโve been using a lot as an example of existential horror, wasnโt anywhere near scary for other players.
โIt might sound strange, but hear me out on this one. Firewatch.โ Long-time gamer Alex Cosenza of Mendez & Sanchez APC shared with us. Firewatch isnโt a mystery game. Log into Steam and youโll see it called a mystery and/or adventure game first and foremost. And yet, one of the top questions about Firewatch is โIs Firewatch a horror game?โ
The current top result for whether Firewatch is a horror game says it isnโt, but Cosenza insists Firewatch is an existential horror game. โThe mystery within the story, the secrets you begin to uncover and subsequently become involved in due to your curiosity, and the only friendly voice you communicate with which never is revealed as a physical person makes for an amazing existential horror. You think you are a simple man doing a simple job, but there’s so much more to your surroundings that really makes your mind imagine all the dark possibilities behind it.โ
The silence and lack of clarity that Firewatch throws us into make it terrifying for him and itโs that silence โ a lack of answers and a lack of knowing what questions to even ask to know what those answers are โ that make real life existentially horrifying.