10 Spooky Video Game Locations To Visit This Halloween

All Hallow’s Eve is upon us, and for many that means seeking out the best scares the holiday has to offer. If you’re one of those brave people who walk unfazed through haunted houses and yawn at the spookiest horror films, then why not try getting your scares at these video game locations?

As with our previous vacation features, we know that you can’t actually go to any of the haunts on this list. In the spirit of the holiday we ask you to suspend your disbelief a little bit and delight at the thought of visiting these morbid hotspots.

All God’s Village (Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly)

Also known as Minakami Village, you can’t find this Japanese settlement unless it wants to find you. The village vanished at the behest of evil forces and only makes itself known to an unlucky few. Located on top of the aptly named Hellish Abyss, All God’s Village is filled with ghosts that certainly don’t have your best interests at heart. They were an unsavory lot when they were alive, too.

As villagers, they routinely participated in sacrificial rituals to appease the nefarious abyss. But nothing good lasts forever, not even tenuous détentes with sentient hell portals. Eventually a sacrifice went awry (as they so often do), and the abyss slaughtered the villagers, shrouding All God’s Village in eternal darkness. Now specters haunt the settlement, looking for a sacrifice to reverse the curse.

Spencer Mansion (Resident Evil)

Coming to you from the minds of deranged millionaire Oswell E. Spencer and architect George Trevor, Spencer Mansion is the most ornate bioweapons manufacturing facility in video games. With its imposing grand staircase, claustrophobic rooms, and labyrinthine halls, this home feels like it was pulled directly from a classic horror film.

This gothic mansion’s size may belie its number of living residents, but that doesn’t mean its many traps and undead inhabitants won’t get the best of you on your moribund tour. The mansion features an eclectic array of bio-organic weapons, nearly all of which are animals that were scary even before they were mutated. You’d do well not to linger for too long; the whole place is rigged to explode by the end of your trip.

Silent Hill (Silent Hill Series)

If you want scares tailor-made for you, then there’s no better place to look than Silent Hill. Whereas Spencer Mansion revels in its own ostentatious package, Silent Hill specializes in a quaint, personalized atmosphere. The denizens of this foggy northeastern town go to great lengths just to make your skin crawl. They warp their appearance – and that of the town – to give form to your repressed guilt and psychosexual desires.

Up next: A ghost town, a park, and an asylum.

Ravenholm (Half-Life 2)

If figurative ghost towns suit your fancy more than literal ones, then Ravenholm is more your speed. A mining town with a distinct eastern European aesthetic, Ravenholm was a base of operations for the Resistance, the rebel opponents of the Combine empire. Of course, once the Combine discovered the existence of this outpost, it bombed it to high heaven with a headcrab shell. Now only zombies and headcrabs populate its brick buildings. 

You might be inclined to run when you hear the moans of the zombies at night, but be careful as you make your way through the town. As if it wasn’t deadly enough, nearly every corner of Ravenholm is rigged with traps. Just one wrong step and you could find yourself crushed by a falling car or bisected by spinning blades. 

Oakside  (Slender: The Arrival)

If you plan on making a trip to Oakside Park, be sure to come by during the day first. Oakside offers a gorgeous lake for canoeing and a hilly trail that will get your blood pumping. You’d be a fool not to make this last, pleasant memory before the sun disappears into the horizon. 

At night, you’ll find yourself stalked by Slender Man, a tall, humanoid creature with a keen eye for fashion. At first, your pursuer lingers erect in the distance, barely noticeable amongst the pine trees. As the night wears on, he becomes more aggressive, curtailing your attempts to flee by warping in front of you. Scattered around the park you find notes left behind for you. “Follows” one reads in vertical lettering next to a hastily scrawled picture of the thin predator. Suddenly, that lake looks more like a dead end, and those hills feel so much harder to scale. There’s nowhere to run where Slender Man can’t find you.

Mount Massive Asylum (Outlast)

Situated high up in the Colorado mountains, Mount Massive Asylum keeps the horror trope of healthcare facilities being grisly death factories alive and well. Although it was shut down in the early ‘60s after the murder of three of its staff, the benevolent, in-no-way-corrupt Murkoff Corporation reopened Mount Massive some 50 years later with a renewed vigor. 

When it came time for renovations, the new benefactor chose not to replace the facility’s peeling wallpaper and cracked floors, opting instead to conduct abhorrent experiments on the Variants, the patients of Mount Massive. Some of the Variants clearly had redecoration ideas in mind though; soon after escaping their cells, they coated the asylum with a splotchy, blood-red paint job. The inmates are running the asylum now, and it’s never looked better.

Brennenburg Castle (Amnesia: Dark Descent)

Built in the middle ages, Brennenburg Castle looked rough even before an intangible, malevolent force started eroding it from the inside. Screams of anguish reverberate throughout the stronghold’s dimly lit corridors and palatial halls, but you’ll be hard pressed to find where they originate.

The castle was originally meant to accommodate Prussian royalty, but the presence of a personal prison and torture chamber tells of its former tenants’ dark side. You may want to grab a drink from the cellar once you start picturing the horrors that transpired within Brennenburg’s stone walls, but be forewarned, Lovecraftian fiends roam every inch of the castle’s floor plan, and they’d love to tear you limb from limb.

Up next: space ship and an undersea metropolis.

Sevastopol Station (Alien: Isolation)

They say in space no one can hear you scream, but you should probably charter a rocket to Sevastopol Station to test that hypothesis yourself. At its peak, this space station was a dump. Sevastopol failed to attract many residents, and mismanagement lead to its decommissioning shortly thereafter. The sudden appearance of a murderous alien only added insult to injury. Unclouded by remorse and delusions of morality, the Xenomorph made quick work of the station’s remaining skeleton crew, leaving a hell of a mess in its wake. The clutter serves to your advantage though, as you’ll spend most of your time huddled behind it, praying the alien doesn’t find you.

USG Ishimura (Dead Space)

While you’re out on your interstellar excursion, why not swing by the USG Ishimura? The “planet cracker” spacecraft was once deemed humanity’s savior as it mined other worlds for resources long since depleted on Earth. How anybody got any work done on the ship is an eternal mystery, as it has the worst possible lighting scheme for a large-scale industrial setting. But there are bigger things to worry about on the Ishimura than work safety – namely its infestation of grotesque space mutants that defy any sense of logical anatomy. More akin to zombies than aliens, the Necromorphs boast sharp limbs and a thirst for your flesh. These nightmarish creatures like to hide in the Ishimura’s ventilation ducts, waiting for unwitting prey to pass by. Even when the coast is clear, you’ll never quite feel safe walking through the planet cracker’s metallic hallways.

Rapture (BioShock series)

Andrew Ryan may have intended Rapture to be a nautical utopia, but a war for the heart of the city cemented its status as an undersea prison. Sure, you may gape at the city’s wondrous skyline (sealine?) as your bathysphere brings you closer to its heart, but you’ll be singing a different tune once you set foot on its cold, uninviting floor. Nearly everything in Rapture wants to kill you, from its own decaying infrastructure to the gene-spliced psychopaths who call it home. The Rapture of today has seen better days, but the metropolis’ neon lit shops and iconoclastic busts of its founder came across as creepy even before Splicers ravaged it. Keep in mind this was a city of people that had no problem turning small girls into monsters just to keep the lights on.