Summary

Every gamer out there knows the feeling of watching a movie, anime, or TV series and thinking to themselves: “I wish I could play this”. We’ve all thought long and hard at one point or another about what movies we’d like to see made into video games, and how we’d like them to play, but of all the genres we speculate about making video games for, horror always feels like the most exciting option.

In an era wheremore and more fan-favorite horror films are coming to life in video game form, it’s time the indie horror scene got some interactive adventures under its belt. If any indie horror films were going to get video game adaptations, these are the ones we’d want to play the most.

A cosmic spiral opens before two men on the poster for 2017’s The Endless, which itself is in front of a shot from the film showing a man walking through a desert toward a statue of a dragon.

6The Endless

An Interesting Mechanical Challenge

When done right, a game about looping through time can be a brilliant way to make usrethink video game design tropes, and that’s probably why, even though games about time loops aren’t exactly new, they still manage to feel new a surprising amount of the time.

Taking that idea of time loops and running with it, The Endless sees its protagonists take on the horror of countless microcosms of time, and that is a fascinating idea for a game, if you ask us.

A husband and wife stare into a concrete water tank.

It would be tough to figure out the mechanics of an Endless video game, but the core idea of a world where time moves normally that’s filled with tiny areas where time loops could make for an interesting gameplay experience.

5The Tank

More PS1 Survival Horror, Please

2023’s The Tank feels like everythingthe Resident Evil moviesshould have been. What feels at first like a haunted house film soon takes a slimy turn as the so-called “ghosts” haunting the film’s main characters turn out to be amphibious monsters with an appetite for blood.

The film is shot in a way that makes it obvious what every single camera angle in a fixed-camera Resident Evil style game would be, and the various puzzles that the film’s cast has to solve to confront the creatures tormenting their home feel straight out of an early survival horror title.Games like Crow Country have shown there’s still an audience for PS1 style horror, and we say The Tank needs to take advantage of that interest, ASAP.

A man in a hall of mirrors dressed in a strange red jumpsuit looks down under an eerie yellow glow from the lights above.

4Beyond The Black Rainbow

A Mind-Melting Horror Experience

Before you stop us, yes, we realize this would be really hard to get right. It would need to bea VR puzzle gamewith horror elements that used the bizarre imagery of the film to its favor, but if its developers were willing to take on those challenges and throw conventions to the wayside, Beyond The Black Rainbow could do a lot to push horror forward with experimental gameplay and psychedelic visuals.

With what’s possible in a visual and sensory sense thanks to improvements in haptic feedback and rendering technology, we’d really like to see a game that makes use of modern features to deliver a new kind of horror experience, and Beyond The Black Rainbow could give us just that.

Two scientists wearing masks stand in a field of red flowers on the poster for Little Joe, in front of a shot from the film which features more of the sinister red plants from the movie growing in a lab.

3Little Joe

The Anti-Stardew Valley

Little Joe was an innovation in flowers, or so it seemed at first. Designed by a biologist and lab grown, the new plant was meant to help those with depression and make the world a better place, but as the film goes on, it becomes clear that Little Joe is more dangerous than anyone could have realized.

Taking a concept likethe humble farm simand twisting it on its head, a game based on Little Joe could see you experience farming, harvesting, and selling your crops, but with a sinister twist. The game would feature similar gameplay toStardew Valley, only instead of getting to know the people as time goes on, things only grow less friendly with each passing day as Little Joe’s influence takes over.

A stylized high contrast image of a haunted house with a person standing in one of the windows.

2You Should Have Left

Just Let Us Play House Of Leaves Already

You Should Have Left is thus far the closest thing to a House Of Leaves feature film we’ve got, and as much as that pains us, we’ll take what we can get to feed the side of us that longs to explore a haunted house that’s bigger on the inside. Sure, you could argue that a film starring Kevin Bacon isn’t exactly indie, but You Should Have Left flew under the radar by just enough that we say it counts.

The viralDoommap, MyHouse, did a lot to satiate this hunger, but in order to play that you first need to mod Doom, then read the backstory, and after that do a bunch of other things that not every gamer is going to be able to figure out. Give us a stand-alone game that takes the concepts we saw in You Should Have Left and asks us to face them ourselves, and we’ll be very happy gamers.

A church building twisted and transformed into the shape of a cross is surrounded by crows beneath an overcast sky. A red logo is off to the right.

1Final Prayer

It’s Time To Go Deeper

Originally released as The Borderlands in the UK, Final Prayer is an English mockumentaryhorror filmabout a group of skeptics attempting to prove the existence of a demon in an ancient chapel, and ultimately uncoveringa much more sinister underlying evilwithin the old stone walls.

There are scenes in this movie that absolutely mystify us, and experiencing those in gameplay would be a truly one-of-a-kind experience. Things change when you don’t look at them, paranormal scares dot the old chapel walls, and the sudden realization of what lies below it all would make for an incredible finale if we had to be the ones to descend those ancient steps instead of merely watching it happen on film.