As 2023 winds to a close, one of the most common refrains from those in and around the video game industry is how this year was one for the history books, and gave us one of the very best game release calendars we've ever seen. While this is true regardless of genre, with highly anticipated sequels like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 being some of this year’s best-reviewed games on Metacritic, it's especially true for horror games.

It wasn't that long ago that horror fans didn't have a lot to get excited about--I recall the Xbox 360/PS3 era being particularly barren, with only a few notable exceptions. But as major studios learn to make the age of high-fidelity gaming work for the genre and indie studios continue to innovate in haunting new ways, 2023 will go down as perhaps the best calendar year for horror video games we've ever seen.

Don't believe me? Just crunch the numbers. Looking at the top of Metacritic's aggregate scores for 2023, three horror games boast 90+ scores, with nine total games garnering scores of 73 or higher. I've tried to find a year that competes with that and I came up empty. That's because not only were this year's horror games really good, but there were also many of them. Horror is not a tentpole genre the way shooters, action-adventure games, and sports are. It's more of a dressing for some major genres, which usually means only a handful of horror games rise to the middle or top each year. Yes, Steam is loaded with new horror games every single month, but many of those are games churning through early access and often aren't ready to be enjoyed yet, if ever.