We recently published an article about "Playing Versus Watching," exploring how much influence let's play videos and gameplay videos have on audiences, both people who play video games themselves and those who prefer to follow a story by watching their favorite YouTuber or streamer play. Here, we’ll take a closer look at one particular impact these videos have had, and continue to have, on the indie horror game industry, as well as the games that have found the most success in this format.A symbiotic relationshipIn biology, symbiosis is a lasting relationship between two forms of life. Think of bees pollinating flowers, birds eating insects off alligators’ backs, or even the parasitic fungus that turns ants into "zombies" and inspired The Last of Us. Symbiosis is a broad term that includes parasitism, in which one organism benefits at the other’s expense, and mutualism, in which both benefit.Why does that matter here? Games aren’t living things, of course, and a minority of people see gameplay videos as parasitic on games. But content creators and most developers agree that their relationship looks more like mutualism: creators play a game and produce entertainment from it (sometimes after receiving a free copy from the developer or studio), while the exposure helps the game reach more potential players.No genre illustrates this more clearly than horror. Ever since YouTubers such as PewDiePie, Markiplier and Jacksepticeye dominated YouTube’s homepage with videos of the latest horror game, complete with terrified faces in the thumbnails, screams and jump scares, a familiar cycle has played out every few years. A new game comes out, huge YouTubers play it, it catches on fast, and within months one of two things happens (or both).First come the clones. Some are well made and have interesting premises; others are clearly rushed out to cash in on an audience hungry for more of the same. The other response is a rapid wave of sequels, merchandise, other media and more, driven by the same goal.That isn’t all bad news. The waves of "clones" have included plenty of genuinely good games made by developers who care about their work, and it shows. Others took inspiration from a game that had exploded in popularity but brought their own vision and plot twists to the formula, developing the original idea into a game of their own.So let’s look at the games that became phenomena in their day and left legacies still felt across the industry and among fans. We’re focusing on indie games, so although they fit the description, you won’t find the likes of Resident Evil or Silent Hill here.A descent into jump scaresIf you were a teenager or young adult online in 2010 and 2011, chances are your ears still remember Felix Kjellberg—PewDiePie—screaming and swearing in Swedish as he played this game. Amnesia: The Dark Descent was one of the first horror games to become that big on the site. Seemingly every YouTuber was playing it, and creators already known for horror games posted hundreds (yes, hundreds) of videos covering the base game and the hugely popular Custom Stories. These were essentially mods built with the level editor and developer tools supplied by Frictional Games. The stories players created became enormously popular in their own right, keeping the community active and invested in the game for a long time.Partly because that modding community could create virtually new games using the same environments, and partly because it helped start the whole phenomenon, Amnesia: The Dark Descent didn’t spawn many direct clones. Its effect on the industry was much longer-lasting than the millions upon millions of views it racked up on YouTube in the short and medium term.In Amnesia, you can’t fight the monsters that pursue you through the corridors of Brennenburg Castle. All you can do is scavenge scarce healing items and sources of light to restore your sanity. Beyond the resource management that makes it a survival horror game, it’s fairly straightforward: move from place to place, collect items x and y to gain access to z, find a key to unlock one door, combine chemicals to set off an explosion elsewhere. Strip away that resource management, simplify the objectives, make the game much shorter and easier to run on a modest computer, and push the jump scares even further, and you get another phenomenon.In 2012, it was impossible to avoid watching someone play Slender: The Eight Pages. The game was everywhere. Its simplicity and its ability to frighten players and viewers alike, with a tense atmosphere inspired by Marble Hornets and, of course, the famous Slenderman, made it perfect for exaggerated reactions, screams, startled jumps and a great many views. This one inspired clone after clone, largely because its simplicity in every respect meant a reasonably experienced programmer could build something similar in Unity in a matter of days.The game also helped spread Slenderman even further across the internet, spawning countless meme games. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of games appeared with the same premise: "You’re in location X and need to collect Y objects while a monster chases you and instakills you if it catches you. Good luck". Together, they drew another good billion views across YouTube.Amnesia’s influence also took a different path, inspiring games acclaimed by critics and fans alike. Its most recent direct sequel, Amnesia: The Bunker, was a success too: a first-person game in which you play a First World War soldier trapped in a bunker with a monster that hunts you using adaptive AI. Other games that carry the spirit of Amnesia: The Dark Descent while standing as works of art in their own right include Outlast, Alien: Isolation and SOMA, the last of which was also developed by Frictional Games.Yes, you knew we’d get to this oneIn 2013, an independent developer received a flood of criticism saying his resource-management game was scarier than anything else. He nearly gave up on his career, but decided to give it one last shot, taking the criticism to heart and doubling down. A year later, in 2014, Five Nights At Freddy's was born.I’d bet there was a time when you couldn’t escape that name, either. It started with the games, which are still going strong: the latest came out in mid-2025, and there’s already speculation about another arriving in 2027. Today, the series spans 11 mainline games, seven spin-offs, six DLCs, around 56 books (yes, you read that right), two Hollywood-produced films featuring names such as Josh Hutcherson and the iconic duo Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich (Billy and Stu from Scream) and countless official merchandise items, not to mention unofficial ones, dedicated events, promotional tie-ins and a fandom of truly impressive size.It’s no exaggeration to call FNAF one of today’s biggest phenomena, and both outcomes we discussed earlier are on full display here. On the commercial side, that list largely speaks for itself. The series became a phenomenon among two groups that spend heavily on merchandise: children and teenagers, and young adults. Step into a fandom space such as Twitter, or visit a geek or anime event, and FNAF’s presence is hard to miss.YouTuber Markiplier is known as the King of FNAF because he has played so much of the seriesAs for copies and fan games, there are literally hundreds. FNAF’s extraordinary popularity, again, thanks in large part to YouTubers, prompted everything from well-made games that borrowed its mechanics, format and a very similar premise but tried to succeed on their own merits, to games plainly rushed out to cash in on FNAF and the new Mascot Horror genre. The former include Five Nights at Treasure Island, which used Disney characters to scare players (a breeze for Kingdom Hearts fans), and The Joy of Creation, a fan game that joined a partner program run by Scott Cawthon himself and became an "official", commercially viable fan game. The latter include the infamous Garten of BanBan.Speaking of Mascot Horror, FNAF was the game that cemented the genre, the one that haunted YouTube’s homepage, and perhaps the home of an unsuspecting relative whose child received a huggy wuggy doll, for years. Bendy and The Ink Machine, Poppy Playtime, Amanda the Adventurer and many other titles began appearing, following the same formula of mascots and a dark, complex story hidden beneath the surface. They fueled not only gameplay videos but also enormously popular theory videos, like those by MatPat on the famous Game Theory channel, which has more than 130 videos about FNAF alone.Who thought making a doll of this for children was a good idea?Kojima strikes againYou know those moments when people always remember where they were or what they were doing when they heard the news? For horror game fans, the release of the Silent Hills Playable Teaser (the famous P.T.) was one of them. Konami announced it with none other than Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro directing, Junji Ito involved, and Daryl from The Walking Dead as its protagonist.I was planning to start a Game Design degree the following year, and all I could think about was how much I wanted to make games like that when I grew up (and how eager I was to play that masterpiece). If the teaser was this good, just imagine the full game. Well, imagining it's all we can do…Everyone knows about the split between Kojima and Konami that followed, and the subsequent cancellation of Silent Hills, to everyone’s immense disappointment. Kojima moved on; so did Konami and the Silent Hill series. But P.T.’s impact on the industry can still be felt today.What made the teaser so innovative? A seemingly simple idea executed perfectly, with everything needed to create an immersive horror atmosphere, plus touches that made the experience uniquely terrifying, like having to answer a question aloud into your microphone to solve a puzzle. The teaser takes place in a spatial loop: you always start in the same place and return to it when you pass through the door at the other end of the hallway.Each time you go through the loop, something new happens: a jump scare, a puzzle you have to solve before moving on, or a change in your surroundings that leaves you on edge, waiting for a monster to appear at any moment. Every detail tells part of the story, and you have to piece it all together to begin to understand what’s happening.Sadly, what might've been the best Silent Hill ever made was canceled. But there's been no shortage of games inspired by the format that won so much praise from fans and critics, by the little we learned of P.T.’s story, and especially by its looping mechanic: being trapped in a single space.Considered by many to be P.T.’s "spiritual successor", Visage was released in 2020 and perfectly captures the oppressive terror of a haunted house. It openly draws on Konami’s teaser, with a similar atmosphere, setting, scares and puzzles, and even echoes its story in some respects. MADiSON, released in 2022, creates much the same sense of claustrophobia and relentless tension, though its premise and mechanics are quite different: you use a Polaroid camera to uncover secrets. Like Visage, it doesn’t rely on jump scares alone to frighten players.A scene from Visage. The P.T. influence is clear.Another major title heavily influenced by the teaser was Layers of Fear, though the general feeling among players is that it didn’t quite get the balance right. Its graphics are gorgeous, its story is interesting and its premise is strong. But many players said on social media that the developers focused so much on those elements and the looping structure (at times the game is a surreal journey, at others it’s a spatial loop resembling P.T., and elsewhere it’s about exploration) that they neglected the terrifying atmosphere that made P.T. and the other games mentioned above so memorable. It can feel a little monotonous at times and leans too heavily on jump scares to build tension, but the potential is certainly there.The nostalgia effectIn recent years, nostalgia has driven countless remakes, remasters, live-action adaptations and other projects the entertainment industry has built around beloved older franchises. People are using Walkmans, demand has pushed up the prices of old consoles, 2000s Y2K fashion is back among today’s trendiest teen TikTokers, and all things vintage are in style again. Games are no exception.Developer Puppet Combo first released Power Drill Massacre as a smaller demo in 2015, then put out a much-improved second demo in 2023. That remains the latest version, with no firm release date announced. The game set off a domino effect in indie horror that began in 2015 but gathered far more momentum with the newer release.In Power Drill Massacre, you play a young woman who crashes her car, goes looking for help in the middle of nowhere and ends up trapped in an abandoned building with a deranged serial killer. He hunts you as you try to escape, preferably alive. It’s a premise straight out of a 2000s slasher movie, complete with classic PS1-style graphics and a VHS filter to heighten the nostalgia.There are chases, dark and cramped spaces, and a relentless enemy whose loud attacks deliver just the sort of jump scare that draws views on YouTube. The game quickly gained a substantial following, not on the scale of FNAF or P.T., but substantial nonetheless. Its many escape routes, places to explore and secrets to uncover also gave players plenty of reasons to replay it.From there, the dominoes began to fall. Puppet Combo already had another game with a very similar premise, Babysitter Bloodbath, and went on to make more titles. Each has its own twists, but all share that retro feel, the now-familiar jump scares and relentless pursuits. The threats range from a demonic nun to a terrifying pink rabbit mascot suit to a demonic Santa Claus.Several of the studio’s titles became hugely popular, thanks in large part to YouTubers playing through the entire series so they could claim to have "beaten them all". But what endured, and strongly influenced the next wave of games, was the PS1-meets-VHS look and, of course, the jump scares featuring deliberately low-resolution, frightening textures.Beyond your home, an abandoned building or, for some reason, an abandoned convent, what other situation turns up again and again in the slasher movies of that era? People being attacked at work by masked villains with sinister motives that don’t always make sense, as if workers didn’t have enough to deal with already.And that’s exactly what these games build on: the horrors of working life under the daily lives. Imagine running a convenience store, serving the occasional customer, keeping the place clean and restocking shelves, while also dealing with supernatural creatures posing as humans at the counter. Your employer’s instructions? Shoot them with the gun left in the drawer beneath it. Or imagine having to keep an entire coffee shop running, getting every order right and cleaning the bathroom, while some random maniac stalks you because he’s decided you’re his next target. There are countless games built around scenarios like these, including The Convenience Store, Shift at Midnight, Hellmart and The Closing Shift.As horror games shifted back toward psychological scares (with new releases from giants Silent Hill and Resident Evil leaning heavily in that direction and toward survival horror, and pulling the rest of the industry along) the latest development in the trend Puppet Combo started with its PS1-style, slasher-inspired games drew on another kind of fear that had received far less attention: true stories.Fears to Fathom is a series with its own take on the graphical and visual style of the games that came before it. Its episodes are standalone stories with no direct narrative connection. What sets them apart? The events they depict, including a home invasion while someone is alone late at night, and a person being stalked by a violent ex who refuses to accept the breakup, happened to real people. Those people sent their stories to the developers and later spoke with them to provide more details.The series has become another YouTube gameplay phenomenon. Virtually every channel that covers horror games has played at least a few episodes, generally with positive things to say. The first game in the series, Home Alone, came out in 2021, and the latest, Scratch Creek, was released in 2026.For now, that’s where the trail ends, but the influence of Puppet Combo’s style and the popularity its games achieved can still be felt today. Someone will surely take inspiration from Fears to Fathom (or combine it with some other influence) and create something entirely new that still carries a trace of that DNA.ConclusionAs noted at the start of this article, this pattern has been around for years, and it extends well beyond horror games. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with one game inspiring another, or with a developer putting their own spin on a particular mechanic. Of course, some games will always be thrown together just to cash in on a trend. Fortunately, the indie game community rarely disappoints: for every title like that, there are dozens that may not be perfect but try to build on something popular and offer fun, frightening experiences of their own.Which of these games had the biggest impact on you? Tell us in the comments!Thanks for reading, and see you next time.
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