Leon Kennedy's adventures in gunplay are rightly famous, the feedback-heavy combat making every situation a shaky joy. So in Resident Evil 4, he invented the modern third-person shooting, just for fun. This is the series that invented modern survival horror, but that wasn't good enough for director Shinji Mikami. Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC You'll laugh as much as you scream, if not more, and few horror games capture that sense of grisly fun so well. It's packed with winks to the slasher genre, and you'll still love the ridiculous twists even if you see them coming from a mile away.
While many games on this list are here because of their fear-factor alone, Until Dawn earns a spot for more meta reasons, too - it's wilfully, soulfully entrenched in horror tradition, and uses those tropes brilliantly.
But it's not all fun and games: the characters will die gruesome deaths if you can't navigate Until Dawn's horror movie logic, and it takes every opportunity to scare the bejaysus out of you. Or rather, Until Dawn (zing), a 2015 survival-horror game about a pack of randy teens going on vacation to an isolated mountain cabin, only to find that some heinous entity is set on killing them off. Teen slashers have been around for nearly four decades now, but aside from the abysmal Friday the 13th on NES, games haven't really been brave enough to venture into that territory.
