Outlast 2

Outlast 2 strips horror down to its rawest form: no weapons, no combat, just a camcorder and your own legs. You're running through rural Arizona chased by a cult that makes the first Outlast's asylum look almost cozy by comparison. There's no puzzle to solve here, no inventory to manage, which works in the game's favor for anyone who wants horror without a system to learn first. I don't usually gravitate toward chase-based horror, since it tends to reward reflex over thought, but Outlast 2 keeps its hiding spots readable enough that panic never turns into random guessing. It ranks below several picks above it mainly because sustained pursuit runs out of new ideas by the midpoint. Short bursts work best. Anyone who wants their heart rate up in twenty-minute sessions rather than a slow-burn evening should start here.

There is a stretch in Outlast 2 where you are crawling through a cornfield at night with a camera that can barely see in the dark, and someone is hunting you, and you have no weapon and nowhere to hide, and the game just holds that feeling for longer than feels reasonable. It is extremely good at one thing: making you feel completely powerless. The story and the religious cult framing are more functional than meaningful, and the third act runs out of ideas before it runs out of runtime. But if your goal is to be genuinely frightened by a PS Plus game at ten in the evening with headphones on, this delivers that more consistently than almost anything else on the service.