Best Horror Games for Ubuntu – 28 Picks to Play in the Dark

You are alone on a decaying space station with one creature that cannot be killed, only avoided.

Nothing else has matched this. The alien is not following a script, so you cannot learn its route and beat it the way you beat most games. It hears the noise you make and it comes to look, which means every plan you have is one bad decision away from ending. It runs natively on Linux and it looks far better than a game from 2014 has any right to.

A journalist walks into an asylum with a camcorder and no weapon, and the battery is always running down.

Taking the weapons away changes everything. You cannot solve a single problem here by fighting, so you spend the game looking for a locker, a gap under a desk, a door you can hold shut. The camcorder night vision eats batteries, which turns even seeing where you are into something you have to spend. It is short, it is native on Linux, and it is still one of the most stressful hours in the genre.

A First World War bunker, one revolver, one noisy generator, and something living in the walls.

The generator keeps the lights on and the lights keep the thing away, so fuel becomes the most valuable object in your life. There is no fixed path through it. You get a bunker, a set of tools and a monster that reacts to noise, and how you get through is your problem. That freedom is what makes it frightening, because a mistake is genuinely yours.

You walk around a large suburban house at night while it slowly stops behaving like a house.

This one works by patience. You get long stretches where nothing happens and you start to relax, and that is exactly when it moves a door or changes a room you already walked through. Keeping a light source with you is a real mechanic rather than a setting. If you like horror that takes its time and trusts you to notice things, this is the one.

A free horror game built by a small team on an old Half-Life engine, and it is still genuinely nasty.

This started as a mod and it never lost that homemade edge, which is a big part of why it works. The city is dark and empty, the inventory is small and awkward on purpose, and the game is happy to be unfair. It costs nothing, so there is no reason not to try it, and it holds up far better than its age suggests.

You escape a research facility full of contained anomalies, including one statue that only moves when you blink.

The famous one here is a statue that cannot move while you are looking at it, so blinking becomes the scariest thing you do. The facility is generated fresh each run, which means nobody can hand you a route and you cannot memorise your way out. This is the current Steam release of a long running free project, and it costs nothing.

A man gets a letter from his dead wife telling him to meet her in a town that should not exist.

This is a sad game before it is a frightening one, and that is why people have not let it go for twenty years. The monsters mean something specific about the man you are playing, and once that lands you cannot unsee it. The remake keeps the writing and rebuilds everything around it. It sits at Platinum on Proton with a large number of reports, so it is a safe buy on Linux.

An underwater research station where the machines think they are people, and some of them are right.

The horror here is an idea rather than a monster. It asks what actually makes you you, and then it puts you in situations where you have to answer it with a decision instead of an opinion. There are creatures and they are unpleasant, but the part that stays with you is a conversation with something that is not alive. Native on Linux, and there is a safe mode if the chases are not for you.

Note: Safe mode turns off the monster threat entirely, so you can play it for the story alone.

A small android searches a frozen facility for someone she has lost, in tight rooms and fixed camera angles.

It looks like an old survival horror game on purpose, with limited inventory and puzzles that expect you to take notes. What lifts it is the story underneath, which is about grief and obligation and does not explain itself. You put it together yourself over the course of a night, and the ending changes depending on how you played. It is the best looking small budget horror game in years.

A cargo ship is stranded in space after a crash, and the crew has to work out what happened to it.

This takes about two hours and it uses every one of them. There is no monster chasing you. The horror is what the people on the ship did and are still doing to each other, told out of order so you understand it in the wrong sequence. It is genuinely upsetting rather than scary, and it is the one on this page most likely to make you sit still afterwards.

A top down survival game in a Polish forest, where you scavenge in daylight and barricade yourself in at night.

Splitting the day in two is what makes this work. Daytime is tense but productive, and then night falls, you nail boards over the windows, and you sit in one room listening. You can see very little because the view is limited to your line of sight, so most of the fear is sound. It is native on Linux and it does more with a top down view than most first person horror manages.

The newest Resident Evil, and the one to start with if you have never played any of them.

This is the most polished the series has ever been, and it does not need you to know the previous games. You get the puzzles, the tight ammunition and the slow map opening that Resident Evil has always done, with none of the awkwardness of the older entries. It sits at Platinum on Proton with hundreds of reports behind it, which for a game this new is unusually reassuring.

A rookie police officer and a college student spend one night in a police station that has gone very wrong.

The police station is the best designed space in horror games. It is a loop you slowly unlock, and by the end you know it well enough to plan routes under pressure. Then the game sends a man in a coat who follows you through it and takes the map away from you again. It has the highest report count of anything on this page and it runs at Platinum.

A mining ship, an engineer with cutting tools, and creatures you have to take apart limb by limb.

You are not a soldier here, you are an engineer with industrial equipment, and the game is built around that. Shooting a creature in the chest does very little. You have to cut its legs off, which takes time you often do not have. The remake keeps the ship as one continuous space with no loading, so the pressure never really lifts.

A father goes back into a simulated town to find his daughter, and the town is coming apart.

This one opens up. Instead of a corridor, you get a town you can approach from several directions, so you decide whether to sneak past a fight or set it up on your terms. Resources are tight enough that avoiding a fight is often the smart call. It is the most flexible game in this section and one of the most underrated horror games of its decade.

A traveller moves between a ruined future and 1980s Poland, burning corpses so they cannot be reused.

The idea that carries this is simple and horrible. If you leave a body lying around, something else merges with it and comes back bigger, so burning the dead becomes part of how you fight. The 1980s apartment blocks are a setting nobody else uses and they are a real part of why it lands. It ships a Linux build and it is the freshest thing in this section.

You pilot a tiny submarine through an ocean of blood, with no windows, taking photographs.

You never see outside the submarine. You navigate on a rough map and a coordinate readout, and you take photographs of places you cannot look at directly. It costs very little and takes about an hour, and it gets more out of that hour than games twenty times the size. The lack of a window is the entire trick and it works completely.

A game of Russian roulette with a shotgun, played across a table against a dealer who is not human.

One room, one table, one shotgun with a mix of live and blank shells, and you have to decide whether to shoot the dealer or yourself. That is the whole game and it is more tense than things a hundred times its size. It costs about the same as a coffee, runs natively on Linux, and a session fits in the time you have.

An abandoned theme park in 1990, explored by a small blocky character who is looking for its owner.

This looks like a PlayStation game from 1997 and it plays like one, but the design underneath is modern and fair. The puzzles are good, the park is a genuinely enjoyable place to explore, and there is a mode that removes the enemies if you only want the mystery. It is the gentlest way into old fashioned survival horror on this page.

Note: There is an exploration mode with no enemies at all, which is a good first run.

An oil rig off the coast of Scotland in 1975, after the drill hits something it should not have.

The rig is the star. It is cold, loud and industrial, and you climb around it in weather that would be dangerous on its own before anything else is involved. You are an electrician, not a hero, so you cannot fight any of it. It takes about five hours and the writing and voice work are far above what this kind of game usually gets.

A smuggler crash lands in a quarantined British city that was abandoned after something went wrong there.

Made largely by one person, and it is a clear love letter to Silent Hill without being a copy. The exclusion zone is a convincing near future British city, all damp concrete and dead streets, and the fog is hiding the edges of a small game very cleverly. It runs about four hours. Fewer people have reported on it than the big names here, but those reports are Platinum.

Note: This one has fewer Proton reports than most of the page, so treat the rating as less settled.

A card game played in a dark cabin against an opponent who will not let you leave the table.

It begins as a card game and it is a good one. Then it starts doing things a card game should not do, and the room around the table turns out to matter. The scares are structural rather than loud, so there is very little here to make you jump. It is native on Linux and it is the best way onto this page for somebody who does not think they like horror.

You are the creature. You escape the facility, and the people in it are the ones who are frightened.

Flipping it around takes all the tension out and replaces it with something much more enjoyable. You are a mass of red tissue moving through vents and pulling people out of rooms, and the game is generous and fast rather than punishing. It is the least stressful thing on this page by a wide margin. Native on Linux, and about five hours.

A small child in a paper bag mask crosses a world where everything is built far too large.

Nothing here is gory and there is very little in the way of shock. The discomfort comes from size. Doorknobs are at head height, adults are enormous and wrong, and you are always small and quiet. It plays as a side on puzzle platformer, so it is approachable, and it is genuinely beautiful. Good for playing with somebody watching.

A free school club story about writing poems, which is not what it turns out to be about.

Going in without knowing anything is the whole experience, so that is all we will say about what happens. It looks cheerful, it costs nothing, and it opens with a content warning that is there for a real reason rather than for effect. Take that warning seriously. If the subject matter is difficult for you personally, skip this one and pick anything else on the page.

Note: This one deals with self harm and suicide directly. If that is difficult for you, choose something else here instead.

Cold War test subjects are sent through cruel experiments, alone or with up to three other people.

This keeps the helplessness of Outlast and adds people to share it with, which changes the tone without ruining it. You still cannot fight, so a run is four people trying to finish a task while being hunted, and it stays tense in a way most group horror does not. It carries no anti cheat that blocks Linux and it runs at Platinum.

Up to four of you try to stop a possessed cult member, in a farmhouse that keeps getting darker.

A round lasts about twenty minutes, which is exactly right for this. You are collecting things and putting them in the right place while somebody hunts you, the lights keep failing, and the shouting is half the point. It is cheap, it works with two people as well as four, and nobody has to commit an evening to it.

You and your friends dive to hide the evidence of something a company would rather nobody found.

This is the lightest thing on the page and it knows it. You are in a submarine with people who are bad at their jobs, the water is dark, and the creatures down there are unpleasant enough to keep everyone honest. Much better looking than most games in this bracket, and the colour under the water makes it easy to see what is happening.