The summer sun is relentlessly beating down as heatwave after heatwave sweeps through the Northern Hemisphere. In the midst of all the sunlight, it’s hard to imagine anything giving you the shivers. For some.
For others, there’s Summerween! Started as a gag in a Gravity Falls episode, it’s now an excuse to get spooky a whole four months early. Whether you prefer hauling out your decorations or just staying in the AC and binge-watching horror movies until the weather decides to be reasonable again, this is also the perfect time to look at some horror games!
This time, we’ve found a few that will fit the summer vibes and fulfill all your spooky cravings.
Beacon Pines
The story of Beacon Pines begins on the first day of summer vacation, following protagonist Luka and his friends Rolo and Beck as they uncover a strange conspiracy woven throughout their small town. It explicitly takes place within a storybook, a unique mechanic that allows the player to control the path of Luka’s story at crucial moments. The storybook will present a sentence that needs to be completed, and the player must select a word that will change what happens next. The more the player explores, the more words they find, and the more branches of the story they can unlock.
Beacon Pines is one of those games that looks like a quiet and cozy adventure game, but quickly reveals its darker side. Very quickly, players will find that the potential endings of Luka’s story can involve his death, his friends’ injury or death, or the destruction of the entire town. The reality that Luka and his friends are kids and have real limitations on their capabilities, their power to change things around them is impressed upon the player as well. Beyond the paranatural and malevolent forces at play, this lack of power is equally frightening in the face of danger to the kids’ loved ones and homes.
Rental
Rental is another game that puts up the cute and cozy facade only to smack players in the face with creepy ghosts and heavy metaphors. Available for free on Steam, this exploration game can be finished in about half an hour, but has left a big impression on its players, both for its style and its story.
The player takes control of Umi, a little rabbit girl whose family is going on summer vacation and renting a cabin near the beach. Her mother sends her inside the cabin to find the owner and get the keys from him, but the door locks behind Umi as soon as she goes inside. To escape the cabin, Umi will have to find specific artifacts and complete a ritual, but the beach house seems stranger and stranger the longer she’s inside.
The game does not go out of its way to explain itself, but lets players interpret its pieces as they will, even extending the story into a supporter’s zine you can purchase through Steam as DLC.
Camp Sunshine
Camp Sunshine is the first of several games on this list that take place at summer camp. This one in particular is a 16-bit Horror RPG that utilizes some classic survival horror mechanics: managing resources to keep your flashlight powered, hiding and sneaking to dodge the killer, and finding diary pages to discover their backstory.
This one leans into classic slasher movie themes as well, lots of blood-splatter and pixelated gore, and tension built up from creeping around in the dark with limited visibility. Although the game has been available on PC since 2016, it was released for consoles in late 2024, marking a resurgence in its popularity.
Midnight Swamp
Midnight Swamp is a point-and-click puzzle adventure, giving a dark twist to well-known fairytales. Taking place in the forests of Eastern Europe in the summer of 1980-something, the player controls a hapless tourist who, following the sound of laughter in the night, gets pulled through the lake and into a strange bog inhabited by magical creatures.
While there are a couple of jumpscare moments, the horror in Midnight Swamp is primarily atmospheric. With its hand-drawn art evoking the illustrations of Grimm’s fairytales and a soundtrack of deep, melancholic strings, an ominous air pervades each area and puzzle. However, like most point-and-click games, there is rarely any imminent danger, allowing the puzzles to be solved without any stress about timing or missing achievements.
Bad Summer
The second entry on the list to feature a summer camp, Bad Summer is a psychological horror visual novel with dual protagonists. Players will take on the roles of Jenny Lewis, an 18-year-old camp counselor, and Oliver Smith, a detective recently hired by the International Security of the Weird and Abnormal division. Both have multiple romance options, and both are in grave danger.
The demo of the game was released in March of 2025, and was fully funded on Kickstarter that August. While a release date for the full game has not been officially announced, the developer S&J Games has also released a shorter game in the same universe with Oliver as the protagonist called A Bad Christmas Story.
Clown Camp
The last summer camp-themed entry on the list, Clown Camp is the most recently released game on our list. Players take on the role of a camper who was (gasp) double-dog-dared to cross the lake from their (presumably normal) camp to the nearby Clown Camp. However, they lose one of their oars while docking and need to venture further and further into the camp, trying to find a way to get back.
With a colorful, low-poly style, the game begins as a fairly standard exploration game with the camp seeming almost abandoned. However, things go from 0 to a hundred instantly once a specific key item is retrieved. From that point forward, a modicum of melee combat is possible, but sneaking, avoiding noises, and resource management are the key strategies to surviving.
Fears to Fathom: Home Alone
Rounding out our list, a game where there are no camps, no vacations, but it’s summer all the same: Fears to Fathom: Home Alone. This chapter of the Fears to Fathom series puts the player in the shoes of 14-year-old Miles, left to fend for himself on a weekend in July 2017 while his parents are out of town on a work trip.
The conceit of Fears to Fathom is that these are games based on real stories from survivors, and many people can recount similar fears of being watched or seeing someone outside their house when alone, especially for the first time as a kid. Home invasion is its own subgenre of horror for a reason.
While this first entry to the series came out in 2021 and is still free to play, the latest was episode released in June this year: Fears to Fathom: Scratch Creek.
Did we deliver some delicious Summerween treats, or do you feel tricked because your favorite’s not here? Let us know in the comments!
ObserverCrew Picks
bserver
