The Game Awards season is upon us, and the 2025 nominees have been announced to the usual mix of adulation and consternation. But right now, I’m not especially focused on who was or wasn’t nominated. Instead, I’m thinking about the awards themselves. How on Earth is Best Horror Game still not an award category at the annual “gaming Oscars”?
Horror is one of the most popular genres in gaming, with YouTubers and Twitch streamers like Markiplier and Jacksepticeye raking in millions of views playing the latest blood-curdling titles for their audiences. In particular, 2025 was a fantastic year for goosebump-inducing games. Silent Hill f sold over a million copies in its first 24 hours — a feat the Silent Hill 2 remake took three days to pull off — and is currently sitting at an 86 on Metacritic. The Steam reviews for Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn are “very positive,” with 87% of its 2,600 reviews giving it a thumbs-up. Dying Light: The Beast sold 1.5 million copies within the first five days of launch. More than 1 million of those sales came from Steam alone, where it’s also been deemed “very positive” by 86% of the 51,400 players who reviewed it. Like I said, it’s been a scary-good year for horror games.
In fact, horror had such a standout year that in October, we at Polygon even hosted an informal Best Horror Games of 2025 poll. The winner of that was Eyes of Hellfire: a little-known game based on an Irish urban legend, and one that, outside of this website, I’ve yet to hear anyone even mention with regard to The Game Awards. Silent Hill f is my personal Game of the Year, and took second place in our poll, despite not getting nominated for Game of the Year. Like our winner, Eyes of Hellfire, our third- and fourth-place titles — Hell is Us and Cronos: The New Dawn — didn’t receive any nominations at this year’s Game Awards.
Now, I’m not saying horror isn’t getting any love at The Game Awards. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 arguably falls under the horror umbrella, and it received a whopping 12 nominations, making it the most-nominated title in the history of the awards show. But while we’re on the topic of Game Awards history, it’s also worth pointing out that in the 11 years since The Game Awards’ inception, only one horror title ever has walked away with the big win: The Last of Us Part II, which won Game of the Year in 2020. Yes, The Game Awards has been kinder to the horror genre than, say, The Oscars. (In 96 years, the only horror film to ever win Best Picture was 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs.) But with so many incredible spine-chillers hitting consoles and Windows PC each year, I think there’s still room for improvement.
Horror games deserve space to shine, and while smaller, newer awards shows like The Horror Game Awards (established in 2022) certainly give the genre more recognition, I still think these beautiful, thought-provoking, heart-pounding games have earned the right to a dedicated category, especially given the existence of more nebulous awards (like Best Game Direction and Games for Impact), and awards that don’t have much to do with actual games at all (like Best Adaptation and Content Creator of the Year). Horror is a beloved genre, and “Best Horror Game” isn’t a category voters will have trouble defining.
As a genre, horror allows for incredibly flexible storytelling. Some games are like Clair Obscur — serious masterpieces that make many players misty-eyed — while “friendslop” titles like Phasmophobia can lead to shared tears of laughter. Silent Hill players experience stories that largely rely on a slowly building sense of impending doom, while Resident Evil games often elicit screams loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. Horror games are more than just cheap jumpscares. Sometimes they’re beautiful, sometimes they’re disgusting, sometimes they’re both at once. Horror is versatile enough that, when done right, it elicits a strong reaction from players. It’s high time we gave the genre its blood-red decomposing flowers.
