THE BEST HORROR GAMES TO PLAY WITH FRIENDS

The first time I played Phasmophobia with friends, my buddy Marcus screamed so loud into his microphone that my dog ran out of the room. We were in a tiny suburban house, hunting for a ghost called something like Mary, and the lights had just cut out. Two seconds of silence. Then Marcus, at full volume, yelling words I cannot repeat here. We were dead inside of ten seconds. We laughed for about half an hour straight.

That's the magic of co-op horror. Alone, these games would crush me. I would not survive a single match of Phasmophobia solo. But put three or four idiots in a voice chat together and suddenly the scariest game ever made becomes the best comedy show on the internet. The fear doesn't go away. It just gets shared, and shared fear becomes something else entirely.

Here are the best horror games to play with friends right now, why each one works, and a quick note on the games where the formula starts to break down.

Phasmophobia

The king. Still the king. Has been the king since 2020 and shows no signs of giving up the crown.

Phasmophobia drops you and up to three friends into haunted locations as paranormal investigators. You bring equipment like EMF readers, spirit boxes, thermometers, UV lights, and crucifixes. The ghost sits somewhere in the building and your job is to figure out what type it is by looking for evidence. Then you write the answer in your journal and leave.

Easy, right? It would be, except the ghost is actively trying to kill you. It hunts. The lights flicker. Doors slam. You hear footsteps from the room you just left. You see a figure on a security camera that wasn't there a second ago. And when the hunt starts, you have to hide and stay completely silent while it walks the halls looking for you.

The voice recognition is what makes it special. The ghost can hear you. If you say its name, it gets angry. If you taunt it, it might hunt sooner. So when you're hiding in a closet and your friend in the basement screams "WHERE ARE YOU GOING IT'S COMING TOWARDS ME OH GOD," the ghost hears that. Real consequences for real panic.

Updates have kept it fresh for years. New maps, new ghost types, new equipment, the cursed possessions system, custom difficulty modes. If you've never tried it, start now. If you've played it but bounced off, the modern version is twice the game it was at launch. I wrote a whole post about games like Phasmophobia if you've already burned out on it and need something similar.

Lethal Company

Four scrappy little employees of a megacorporation, sent to abandoned moons to scavenge metal junk and meet a profit quota. If you fail the quota, you get fired into space. If you succeed, you get sent to a worse moon next time.

The genius of Lethal Company is that the horror is incidental to the job. You're not there to fight monsters. You're there to grab a fire extinguisher and bring it back to the ship so you can sell it for nine credits. The monsters are an obstacle, like traffic on the way to work. And when one of your friends gets eaten by a Bracken because they were too busy arguing about who has the flashlight, the laughter is automatic.

It runs on a budget engine that looks like a PlayStation 1 game and that aesthetic does so much heavy lifting. The lo-fi visuals make the monsters scarier because your brain fills in the details. The walkie talkie system means you can split up and still talk, which is a recipe for disaster every single time.

I have probably 200 hours in this game and most of those hours involve me dying in ways that were entirely my fault.

Content Warning

The pitch is perfect. You and your friends are amateur YouTubers in a world where the most popular content is footage of monsters from a dimension called the Old World. So you put on diving suits, climb into a portal, and try to film scary things to upload for views.

The video camera is the entire game. You have to actually point it at the scary stuff. You have to actually capture good footage. And then at the end of the run, you sit in your apartment and watch the playback together, scoring it for views.

This loop is incredible. The monsters are designed to look weird on camera. The footage you capture genuinely looks like found-footage horror, complete with your friend's screaming as the audio track. I have shown non-gamer friends videos of our Content Warning sessions and they've genuinely asked if the game was a real movie.

Shorter sessions than Phasmophobia or Lethal Company, which is great when you only have an hour to mess around.

Dead by Daylight

The grandfather of modern multiplayer horror. Asymmetric four-versus-one. Four survivors try to fix five generators and escape through a gate. One killer tries to murder them all and hang them on meat hooks.

This one's been running since 2016 and the roster of killers is absurd at this point. Michael Myers. Pyramid Head. Pinhead. Pennywise. Chucky. The Xenomorph. Nicolas Cage as himself. Almost every major horror franchise has shown up at some point.

Where it works best is when you've got four friends in voice chat playing as the survivors together. The game intentionally limits in-game communication, so being able to coordinate by voice gives you a big advantage and lets you live the slasher movie fantasy of actually escaping the killer through teamwork.

Where it falls apart a little is the meta. After a decade, the player base is brutally good. Solo queue can be miserable because you'll get matched with veterans who have memorized every map and every killer's animations. Bring friends or don't bother.

The Outlast Trials

Red Barrels figured out how to make Outlast multiplayer without losing what made Outlast scary. You play as a test subject for a corrupt 1950s corporation called Murkoff, dropped into elaborate horror scenarios with one to three friends. Complete the trial, get extracted, level up, do another one.

What I love about Outlast Trials is that it doesn't pretend the horror is the same as it would be solo. It leans into the chaos. You get sleeping pills you can throw at enemies. You get glow sticks. You can heal each other. You can get separated and then panic-text your friends to come find you. The game knows you're playing with friends and designs around that.

The maps are incredible. The Police Station, the Orphanage, the Funhouse. Murkoff has a rotating cast of antagonists who chase you around with industrial tools while you try to complete tasks like burning evidence or grinding up bodies. It's grim, but it's also one of the most polished co-op horror games on the market.

If you want a horror co-op game that feels like a AAA production rather than an indie passion project, this is the one.

GTFO

GTFO is for the people who think Lethal Company is too forgiving. Four players. An underground complex called The Complex. Sleeping monsters everywhere. Almost no ammo. Almost no health. Almost no margin for error.

The whole game is about silence and planning. You have to creep through rooms full of dormant creatures, marking them with your tagger, deciding whether to sneak past or coordinate a takedown. One wrong sound wakes them all up and the run is usually over inside thirty seconds.

This is not a game for casual horror nights. This is a game for committed friend groups who want to spend two hours planning a single mission and feel genuine triumph when they pull it off. The expedition design is some of the best level design in any co-op game ever. The atmosphere is suffocating. The sound design will give you actual nightmares.

If your friend group has the patience for it, GTFO will become an obsession. If they don't, you'll all be back in Phasmophobia by the end of the first session.

REPO

REPO came out of nowhere and ate everyone's lunch. Six players, scrap collection, fragile valuables you have to physically carry out of haunted buildings without breaking them.

The physics is the hook. Every object in the game has weight and can be damaged. You're trying to extract a porcelain vase worth thousands of credits, but you have to carry it through narrow hallways while a nine-foot-tall monster called the Headman stalks you. Drop the vase, lose the value. Get hit by the Headman, drop the vase, lose the value, probably die.

The cooperative inventory management is genuinely funny. Coordinating two people to carry a piano while a third covers them with a stun gun feels like a heist movie. The roster of monsters is bizarre and creative. The little semi-deformed character models give it a unique visual identity that I have not seen anywhere else.

If you bounced off Lethal Company because four players felt cramped, REPO's six-player support is a great alternative.

No More Room in Hell

The grandfather of co-op zombie horror. A Half-Life 2 mod that became a free standalone game on Steam. Up to eight players, slow zombies, brutal scarcity. You're not a special forces operator. You're a guy who found a hammer.

NMRiH is old now and it shows. The graphics are dated. The animations are clunky. But the survival horror feeling is still better than almost anything else in the genre. You will run out of ammo. You will get bitten. You will accidentally shoot your friend in a panic and the game will not undo that.

The sequel has been in development for a long time and is finally playable. If you want a serious zombie survival co-op game without the Hollywood action movie vibe, this scratches an itch nothing else does.

Pacify

Old school but still great. You play as paranormal investigators sent to deal with a haunted funeral home. There's a creepy little ghost girl. You have to find dolls and burn them in the fireplace to weaken her. She gets faster and angrier as you progress.

Pacify is the kind of game that's mostly fun for one or two playthroughs and then you've seen it all, but those first couple of nights with friends are gold. The little girl appearing around corners. Sprinting through the basement carrying a doll while she chases you. Locking yourself in a closet and listening to her giggle on the other side of the door.

Cheap, short, perfect for a weekend.

Devour

A spiritual successor to Pacify with much more polish. You're trying to perform exorcisms on cult members possessed by demons. Each map has a unique boss with unique mechanics. The Hag, Anna, Azazel, Molly, each one feels different.

Devour leans into the panic loop better than almost any game on this list. You're constantly running, constantly looking for items, constantly making mistakes. Death comes fast. Restarts are quick. You'll fail a map five times in a row and then beat it on the sixth and feel like you climbed a mountain.

Goofy fun with friends. Genuinely scary if you let it be.

In Silence

The premise is great. There's a blind monster in the woods. It can't see you, but it can hear everything. Your microphone is the input. If you breathe too loud, it knows where you are. If you scream, you're dead. One survivor has to stay quiet while the others coordinate around a beast that will absolutely murder you the second you laugh.

In Silence is more of a party game than a serious horror experience, and that's the point. The mechanic of trying not to scream is comedy at its purest. Watching a friend stuff their face into a pillow while the monster sniffs at them is genuinely incredible.

It's not deep. It's not long. It's a perfect one-hour distraction.

Forewarned

Egyptian tombs, ancient curses, and a creature called a Mejai. You're an archaeology team documenting the tomb, identifying the type of Mejai inside by collecting clues. Sound familiar? It should. This is Phasmophobia in pyramids.

What makes Forewarned interesting is the puzzle layer. The tombs have actual hieroglyphic puzzles you have to translate. There's a real archaeology simulation underneath the horror. When the Mejai shows up and starts hunting you, the game pivots into something closer to action horror.

It hasn't gotten the steady update treatment Phasmophobia has, but it's worth playing through at least once with friends.

When co-op horror works and when it doesn't

The dynamic of horror with friends is fundamentally different from horror alone. Alone, the goal is to make you scared. With friends, the goal is to put you in a scary situation and let the social dynamics do their work.

This is why solo horror masterpieces don't always translate. Resident Evil 5 has co-op and it's a fun action game, but it stops being scary the second a second player joins. The Evil Within doesn't have multiplayer for a reason. Silent Hill would be ruined by it. The kind of slow, creeping dread that defines great single-player horror needs you to be alone with your thoughts. Add a friend and your brain stops projecting fear into the silence because there's no silence anymore.

If you want to understand why solitude matters so much to certain horror games, I dug into that in my post on why isolation horror works.

Co-op horror works when the design embraces the chaos. Phasmophobia knows you'll panic and yell. Lethal Company knows you'll abandon your friends to save your own skin. Content Warning knows you'll do stupid things on camera for views. These games are designed around human behavior under stress, not around generating dread.

Co-op horror loses its teeth when developers try to maintain serious atmosphere with multiple players in voice chat. You can't. It's not possible. Four people in Discord will always find a way to make a haunted asylum funny. Either lean into that, or design for solo play.

The other failure mode is when the game is too punishing. GTFO walks this line carefully. If failure feels arbitrary or if the game wastes huge amounts of your time after a single mistake, the social fun curdles into frustration. Phasmophobia gets this right by keeping rounds short and making death feel earned.

The friends part is the point

I've played all of these games solo. Every single one. They're all worse alone. Not because the design is bad, but because horror with friends is a different genre than horror alone. It's more like a haunted house attraction with your buddies than a horror movie you watch by yourself.

The best night of co-op horror I've had recently was a four-hour Phasmophobia session that ended with all of us crying laughing because my friend Sarah, who had never played before, accidentally summoned a Demon by saying its name out loud and got hunted within thirty seconds of joining the lobby. That moment will live in our group chat forever.

Pick one of these games. Get three friends. Get on Discord. Lose your minds together. That's the whole point.