7 Point and Click Horror Games That Will Keep You Up at Night

Five Nights At Freddy's

Let’s start with a cult classic from a couple of years ago. Five Nights at Freddy’s took the gaming world by storm with its simple gameplay blending point-and-click adventure games, survival horrors and a creepy atmosphere. Alright, security guard, will you complete your shift and make it out alive?

There are four animatronic characters that live in the restaurant and become homicidal at night. You need to use the security camera network to track their location. However, there are certain places that you can’t see using it and you need to check them by lights.

Remember that using the security measures consumes electrical power, which is limited. Once you exhaust it all, you’re done, the animatronics will get you and you’ll have to start again. There are five levels to complete in total. If you finish the game, you’ll get access to the sixth “night,” which is more difficult and then the seventh “night,” which allows you to customize the difficulty.

All in all, it’s a fun little game and a simple concept executed pretty much perfectly, even though it probably doesn’t necessarily fit the “point-and-click adventure” bill. It started an entire franchise, too. If you liked Five Nights At Freddy’s, you might consider picking up other games in the series, including a bunch of spin-offs.

Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2

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Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach

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Dark Fall: The Journal

This independent horror adventure game made waves back in 2002. It puts you in the shoes of an unnamed protagonist who rushes to help his brother and finds himself at odds with an ancient evil, the titular Dark Fall.

The game itself is a classic point-and-click adventure affair. To progress the story, you solve various puzzles of varying complexity. But there is one thing that makes Dark Fall stand out among its contemporaries and modern adventure productions: you need to keep track of the notes and clues you find yourself, the game doesn’t do it for you. Better have a pen and a sheet of paper at the ready!

If you liked Dark Fall, you might like the fact that the game has received several sequels, with plots mostly unrelated to the other entries in the series. They are Dark Fall II: Lights Out (originally released in 2004), Dark Fall: Lost Souls (released in 2009), and Dark Fall: Ghost Vigil (released in 2020).

Dark Fall: The Journal

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Sanitarium

Sanitarium is one of the greatest adventure games of all time, period. Full of surrealistic, disturbing imagery, this game will most likely freak you out, just like ASC’s executive, Travis Williams, once said. 

Your protagonist is a man named Max. A car accident leaves him in coma, but he eventually awakens in a dilapidated sanitarium without any recollection of who he is and what actually happened. Time to seek some answers!

This search takes you to some really otherworldly locations, including a town whose inhabitants are malformed children overseen by some strange alien, a circus, an alien hive crawling with cyborg insects, and an Aztec village. All these adventures bring you closer to uncovering who you are and why you ended up in a place like this.

Sanitarium

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Post Mortem

Before Still Life, there was Post Mortem. In this adventure game you play as Gustav McPherson, a former New York detective, who is tasked with investigating a gruesome murder. This quickly reveals that there is an even darker truth behind this.

Ah yes, the troubled detective with psychic abilities trope… In Post Mortem you get to explore Paris and see it through the eyes of Gus. The gameplay is a usual adventure fare: you walk around and investigate various environments, talk to a diverse cast of characters and solve puzzles. The plot involves dark rituals and artifacts, so there is some horror imbued in this detective story.

Post Mortem spawned two spin-offs, Still Life and Still Life 2, which focus on a new character: Gus’ granddaughter, Victoria McPherson. More on these games below.

Post Mortem

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Still Life

Post Mortem gave us an even better adventure game: Still Life. This spin-off/sequel lets you play as the granddaughter of Gus, Victoria, who followed her ancestor’s footsteps and became an FBI agent. Now, there’s a serial killer on the loose and it is up to McPherson to solve the case…

Still Life is basically Syberia turned into a murder mystery game with horror elements. What’s interesting about this title is that it offers two playable characters. As Victoria finds her grandfather’s old files, she quickly realizes that the case he was working on is very reminiscent of what she’s dealing with.

So you jump back and forth between the present day and the 1940s, solving puzzles, talking to characters and gathering clues as either Gus or Victoria. While not necessarily a straightforward horror game, it still features enough creepiness for fans of scary stuff to enjoy.

Still Life has also received a sequel, Still Life 2, released in 2009. What’s nice about these games is the fact that you don’t need to play Post Mortem beforehand to understand the plot.

Still Life

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Bad Dream: Coma

Now this one’s a unique piece. Bad Dream: Coma is a super creepy adventure game with hand-drawn graphics and enough disturbing stuff to haunt you after you’ve finished it.

The game transports you back to the dreamlike world known from the Bad Dream series (formerly Flash games). Creepy visual style and horrible things happening on screen perfectly build a memorable, nightmarish atmosphere.

The main feature of the game is that there are no obvious choices. You can try making different decisions to see totally different outcomes. This ensures that no two playthroughs are the same. Yup: this one is a point-and-click adventure game with high replayability. How many of them do that?

Bad Dream: Coma

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Stasis

This game seems to be a mixture of the above-mentioned Sanitarium and a film titled Event Horizon. You know, this cult classic science fiction horror from 1997.

Stasis is set in space on a spaceship called the Groomlake. The main character, John, awakens to find the whole crew dead. What happened here? What killed all these people? Where’s John’s wife and daughter? Figuring all this out will require you to tinker with onboard computers, combining items and solving all sorts of puzzles.

It’s hard not to think of DreamForge Intertainment’s masterpiece from 1998 when playing Stasis. Just look at the perspective and graphics! It’s a well-made horror piece that some have called one of the best adventure games in years.

Once you’ve finished this one, be sure to check out Cayne, a free-to-play spin-off set in the same universe, released in 2017. There’s also a sequel, Stasis: Bone Totem, in the works, slated for release in Q1 2023.

Stasis

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