There are almost 1,000 games on itch.io currently tagged as both horror and roguelike. Add roguelites into the search and you’ve suddenly got hundreds more games to dig through. The amount of choice is great, but it can be overwhelming is you’re just looking for something to play right now.
You’ll find pretty much every kind of horror hiding in there too. Some games throw you into dark dungeons with something horrible chasing you, others involve zombies, occult rituals, or Lovecraftian monsters, and then there’s the ones that are just outright bizarre.
We’ve decided to go down an Itch horror rabbit hole to help you find the best games currently available. Now there’s far too many for a single feature, so we’ll be digging further down the rabbit hole in future parts. For now, here are the first 10 horror rogue games we recommend checking out…
1. Receiver
Receiver arms you with a handgun, an audio cassette player, and very little else before dropping you into a randomly generated high-rise crawling with automated turrets and hovering shock drones. You’re hunting for cassette tapes that explain something called the Mindkill, but actually surviving long enough to find them turns out to be the real challenge.
Developer Wolfire Games built it for the 7-Day FPS Challenge back in 2012, and its defining feature is still how uncompromisingly it treats its one weapon. There’s no simple reload button here. You eject the magazine, check the chamber, load a fresh round, and flick the safety off as separate, deliberate actions, and getting any of it wrong while something with a gun is bearing down on you tends to end badly. Every level is procedurally generated, and every death sends you straight back to the start.
It’s a strange, slow game to describe, and a genuinely stressful one to play, mostly because the thing standing between you and survival usually isn’t the drones, it’s you fumbling your own gun. Receiver eventually got a full sequel on Steam, but the original seven-day prototype is still sitting on itch.io, and it’s aged into something closer to a cult classic than a jam curiosity.
2. Eldritch
Eldritch has been sitting on itch.io since 2013, combining first-person exploration with roguelike dungeon crawling and a considerable amount of H.P. Lovecraft. Developer Minor Key Games sends you into randomly generated worlds filled with strange creatures, ancient secrets, and books that can take you even deeper into them.
You can sneak past enemies, fight them with whatever weapons you manage to find, or use mystical powers that give you different ways to move through each dungeon. Death sends you back to the beginning, although shortcuts can eventually be unlocked to reach some of the deeper areas more quickly.
More than a decade later, its chunky visuals are inevitably showing their age, but the combination of immersive sim-style freedom and procedural Lovecraftian dungeons still works surprisingly well. If your preferred response to discovering an ancient cosmic horror is crouching behind something and hoping it hasn’t noticed you, Eldritch has you covered.
3. Twilight Tower (post jam version)
Twilight Tower strands you somewhere it simply calls “the sand,” handing you a deck of cards and a set of decisions that determine whether you make it through each day with your morals still intact. Every choice pulls you one way or another between staying alive and staying decent, and the game is more than happy to let you fail at either.
Developer Boz of Aesth built it as a card-based roguelite where each day plays out through careful resource management, punctuated by dream sequences that hint at something considerably stranger going on underneath the survival mechanics. Getting through even a handful of days means constantly weighing what you’re willing to sacrifice, and no two runs manage the balance between morality and survival in quite the same way.
It’s still labeled an alpha, and the developer has said funding is currently on hold until the market improves, so a full release isn’t guaranteed any time soon. What’s already there, though, has built a small but devoted following of players who’ve spent hours picking apart its combination of moral puzzle and rogue-style structure, and it’s more than worth the time it takes to reach day seven and see how far you can push it.
4. Dungeon Nightmares II: The Memory
Dungeon Nightmares II: The Memory takes the procedural generation and permadeath of a traditional roguelike and puts them inside a first-person psychological horror game. Developer K Monkey released it in 2015 as the follow-up to the original Dungeon Nightmares, with every trip underground creating a new dungeon to survive.
There’s no combat to fall back on when something finds you. Instead, you explore dark corridors, search for useful items, use candles to see what’s around you, and try to find the exit before whatever is wandering through the dungeon finds you first. Maps are completely procedurally generated, so memorizing a safe route isn’t going to help much on the next attempt.
Procedural generation can be particularly effective in horror because you never get completely comfortable with what’s around the next corner. Dungeon Nightmares II leans heavily into that uncertainty, and its simple combination of random dungeons, limited light, and absolutely no way to fight back still makes for a fairly unpleasant walk in the dark.
5. Death is Random – D.I.R.
Death is Random: D.I.R. drops you into a zombie-filled city with one simple objective…find the parts needed to repair a vehicle and get out. Unfortunately, those parts are shuffled between seven different maps every time you play, so there’s no reliable route to follow.
Galope Studios describes it as an entry-level post-apocalyptic RPG randomizer, combining exploration and survival elements with automatic battles. You can choose between four classes, including the Policeman, Fireman, Nurse, and Mechanic, while stamina affects everything from your movement speed to how likely you are to run into another group of zombies.
It’s a much smaller game than some of the others here, and you can currently download it from itch.io for whatever price you want. The randomized key items give a familiar zombie escape story a good reason to be replayed, particularly when the quickest route out of the city changes every time you head back in.
6. Visceral
Visceral begins with Bernhardt Godfrey being pulled from a river after trying to end his life. The farmer who saves him claims he can bring Bernhardt’s dead daughter back, invites him to his farmhouse, and then leaves him surrounded by creatures that would quite like to remove most of the meat from his body.
Despite being presented like a first-person survival horror game, Visceral is actually turn-based. You get three action points each turn to attack, study creatures, move your flashlight, or run, with anything outside the light becoming considerably harder to hit and more dangerous. Studying monsters reveals their weaknesses and permanently records information about them for future runs.
It’s also the newest game in this list by quite some distance, having only appeared on itch.io in August 2026. The current build covers the first of three planned acts, but there are already dozens of weapons and more than 60 omens to find. Turning the flashlight into an actual part of turn-based combat is a particularly clever idea, and we’re interested to see where the remaining two acts take it.
7. Sorry We’re Open
Sorry We’re Open makes you the new manager of a supermarket, which turns out to involve considerably more horror than dealing with customers who arrive two minutes before closing. Developer Oates describes it as a roguelite supermarket management horror RPG, with your responsibilities covering employees, day and night shifts, and keeping the store running.
Shifts are procedurally generated, while combat uses money as one of its central resources. You’ll also have to make decisions involving your employees and the reputation of the store, with the corporate language surrounding everything making the supermarket itself feel increasingly unpleasant the longer you work there.
The full game arrived on itch.io in 2023 after beginning with a demo the previous year. Horror games have done plenty with abandoned shops and empty supermarkets, but Sorry We’re Open is more interested in the horror of actually working in one. Apparently surviving the night is only part of the problem when somebody still expects you to manage the branch.
8. Hellscaper
Hellscaper asks you to serve the demon lord Balfazor by building him a city, combining an occult roguelike with the sort of tile placement you’d normally expect from something considerably more relaxing.
Developers Ezra Szanton and Fergus Ferguson built it around placing Tetris-shaped groups of tiles, with each tile following its own rules and interacting with the things around it. You gradually build a deck containing different tiles, choosing upgrades and trying to create combinations that make your increasingly unpleasant little city work properly.
The developers have admitted themselves that calling it a roguelike is a bit of a stretch, but between the randomized runs and the permadeath waiting at the end of every failed city, it’s close enough for our purposes.
The developers describe it as what might happen if Slay the Spire and Dorfromantik had a very weird baby, which gets surprisingly close to explaining it. Hellscaper is still playable directly in your browser, and while development has now moved elsewhere, its mixture of deckbuilding, city planning, and demon worship is exactly the sort of thing we were hoping to find this far down the itch.io rabbit hole.
9. No Delivery
Before Sorry We’re Open, developer Oates created another game about the horrors of having a terrible job. No Delivery puts you on the night shift at Stezzoni Pizza, a run-down pizzeria with a shady history, several missing-person cases, and apparently enough trouble keeping employees that hiring you seemed like a good idea.
It’s a procedurally generated CRPG with turn-based combat, dungeon crawling, and restaurant management all squeezed together. Employees aren’t particularly permanent, so you’ll gradually work your way through different members of staff while exploring the restaurant, fighting whatever is hiding inside it, and trying to keep the business running.
No Delivery first appeared on itch.io in 2019, several years before eventually reaching Steam. Its combination of retro RPG mechanics and grim workplace horror would later be expanded in different directions with Sorry We’re Open, but there’s something particularly effective about turning a haunted pizza restaurant into a place you’re still somehow expected to show up for work.
10. Dead Finger Dice: A Billionaire Killing Game
Dead Finger Dice: A Billionaire Killing Game traps you aboard a mega yacht with a group of demon billionaires and gives you a set of dice. Getting off the yacht means beating them at their own game, although losing can involve considerably more than watching somebody else take your chips.
Rocket Adrift Games built it around poker dice, with different combinations producing attacks and other effects as you work through each opponent. New dice and abilities gradually give you more ways to change your build, while a betting system lets you put even more on the line when you’re feeling particularly confident.
A demo first appeared on itch.io in 2025, followed by the full DRM-free version in April 2026.
Down the Rabbit Hole, and Not Coming Back Up Yet
Ten games in, and we’ve still only scratched the surface. This first batch alone stretched from cosmic horror to zombie apocalypse to the surprisingly specific horror of working retail. We haven’t even touched folk horror, slashers, found footage, or the kind of slow-burn psychological dread that doesn’t need a single monster to unsettle you. itch.io has all of that too, buried somewhere in those thousand-plus tagged listings, waiting for someone with too much free time and a high tolerance for jump scares to go digging.
Part 2 is already taking shape, and it won’t be the last, so if there’s a horror rogue you think deserves a spot, or a subgenre we skipped entirely, let us know in the comments.
Until then, keep a candle lit, watch your action points, and maybe don’t play any of these with the lights off… actually, who are we kidding, that’s half the fun!