AppMagic Halloween Edition: Horror Games
Have you started getting goosebumps and hearing otherworldly noises? No wonder: it's the spooky season after all! Perfect time to deep dive into the horror mobile games market and find out how mobile game developers are making our hair stand on end this year.
— by Diana Levintova
Have you started getting goosebumps and hearing otherworldly noises? No wonder: it's the spooky season after all! Perfect time to deep dive into the horror mobile games market and find out how mobile game developers are making our hair stand on end this year. No screamers coming up in the article; promise.
First, let’s brush over the market’s historical development, and then we will move on to the most popular games that you’d better not play in the dark.
As you can see, there weren't exactly too many exciting mobile titles in the horror niche until the very end of 2017, when the first part of Granny saw the light, as did NetEase’s Identity V (which is still a top-earner today). More titles began to emerge, and in July 2018 the total market by downloads was already at 30M. An unpronounced downtrend followed, only to be salvaged by Granny: Chapter Two released in September 2019. Soon COVID-19 strikes, and this brings the market up by 26%, peaking in June 2021 with a total of 67.5M downloads. The playmakers? Granny 3 (surprise, surprise!), Specimen Zero and The Baby in Yellow.
This brief historical perspective over, we are ready to move on to the top 10 games by downloads. As the segment is not dynamic (compared to, say, hypercasual games), we are reviewing a one-year period (from September 2020 to August 2021) in search of new names.
The first position firmly belongs to the original Granny of 2017; the game’s downloads grew by 20% on the previous year, reaching 55M downloads. (Side note: at the time of writing, Granny has clocked over 244M downloads in total over its lifetime; mental, isn’t it?!) The game actually pioneered the trend for the escape genre on mobile platforms. A player finds herself in a locked space, from which she has to escape by finding various items and activating certain objects in appropriate order in the house or space she’s locked in. In fact, the player is most likely not alone: there’ll be someone or something lurking that will be trying to kill her repeatedly; in this case, Granny.
The game originally boomed out of nowhere, mostly thanks to YouTube, where tons of viral overviews emerged spontaneously with their total number of views more than 1.5B. But then in Steam, for example, the Granny series isn’t harvesting that many installs. Seems like the success of the original title hasn’t helped the franchise at all; it’s as if Steam’s audience doesn’t need this game at all. As for the storyline, the player is told that she is the first victim of the old murderer who has perfect hearing: it’s essential to be very careful and quiet and not drop anything on the floor, otherwise Granny will come running to punish you. Did we mention she had designed and built a fully functioning guillotine all by herself? You have five days to escape the house. Boo.
While we’re at it, might as well continue with the overview of the game’s sequels. Granny: Chapter Two has secured its own market share and continues to support it with quite a stable downloads trend, earning an average of 3.5M monthly installs throughout the entire year. In this episode, a player finds herself locked in a cellar, and this time Granny is accompanied by Grandpa (probably used one of the dating apps from our article from earlier on). Here, you have a few mode options: no Granny and no Grandpa (training); just Granny or just Grandpa (pfff, amateur); and with both folks present (yeah, hardcore!). Keep in mind that Grandpa’s hearing is inferior to Granny’s, but man, he hits hard…!
Granny 3 is hot from the oven (of Hades probably); it was released in June 2021, but here’s the plot twist: it is not available for iOS. The series developer explains that Apple has considered the game to be “spam” due to its similarity to the two previous ones. Either way, here is a glimpse at the whole thing. You find yourself outside a mansion (yes, pensions are decent) with three floors and a huge backyard; seems like your car broke down, so you ended up looking for help in the nearest house you could find. Almost immediately, you’re spotted by Grandpa; he fires a shot at you and locks you in a cell in the basement, conveniently next to what seems to be the remains of some previous visitor. Ah, poor fella. This time, yet another character is helping Granny and Grandpa never let you leave: their granddaughter Slendrina hunts and scares the breath out of you. Despite the unfortunate iOS situation, for September 2021 (yes, outside of our review period, but still an interesting insight), Granny 3 is on the same page with original Granny with 4M installs each, while the second part acquired only 2.7M.
To wrap up this grandparenting fail for your mobile devices, let’s just emphasize that the Granny franchise is one of the most successful not only in terms of its position in top charts, but also because of the ongoing success of its more recent additions that do not appear short-lived at all, as is the case with so many other sequels and follow-ups of mobile game titles on the market.
Finally, the Scary Teacher! second most downloaded, this game occupies about 12% of the market with its 3M monthly downloads. Here the story tells us about a teacher that punishes and tortures children, and one little kid (the player) decides to take revenge. It is kind of like a modern version of Neighbours from Hell, but in first person. The player breaks into the teacher’s house on her own and manipulates various objects there, hiding from the owner and trying to get back at him at the same time by staging all sorts of unpleasant events. In Scary Teacher, you have the whole 15 rooms to have fun.
Our next horror come mobile fun is Dark Riddle with 9% of the market accounting for around 2M monthly downloads. Its architecture is similar to Scary Teacher, as you are getting into someone else’s house on purpose. No major spoilers or anything, but the fans of the alien and supernatural theme will find this game very entertaining.
In fifth position comes Hello Neighbor with 7% of the market and 1.6M monthly downloads. Just like for Granny before, YouTube has become a great marketing platform for this game, too: you’ll find a huge number of reviews and walkthroughs with total views exceeding 1B. However, there is a good chance with Hello Neighbour that this is no coincidence but a carefully chosen advertising method (promotion through influencers) because the game’s publisher, TinyBuild, is well-known for successfully promoting their products through letsplayers and streamers. The idea of Hello Neighbour is quite similar to the Dark Riddle and Scary Teacher, however, it is more focused on solving mysteries rather than doing tricks. There’s a fresh and somewhat creepy twist to the game, too: when a player is hurt, she sees nightmares and visions that shed light on the story. (Minor spoiler alert! Once a happy family with two kids, it all comes to an end when the mother has a car accident; this ends with the undoing of the entire family, the father keeping a gruesome secret in a dungeon maze engineered in the basement of the house next door. Mr. Petersen, the creepy neighbor, is the one to watch out for!)
The sixth and tenth positions are taken by Ice Cream 1: Horror Neighborhood and Ice Cream 3: Horror Neighborhood that account for 5% and 4% of the market respectively. This series is a clone of Granny: a player meets an eerie ice-cream seller that freezes her friend and kidnaps him. The player’s mission is to find and free the friend without getting caught.
No One Escapes with its 2% market share sits at number 8 in the chart. It is a hypercasual interpretation of horror, where a player first chooses to be the hunter (we mean, a crazy killer) or the prey (the sweetest animal). Running around the maze, the player will either have to survive or to track down and “take care” of a victim. Character options aplenty here! Our personal favorite hunter is Billy from Saw.
Last, but not least, we’ve got Specimen Zero to give credit to. It was released not that long ago, in May 2021, and for the last months of the chosen period, August 2021, it has already occupied 17% of the market; we’ll keep an eye on it and see if it slides into a downtrend using our app tracker. Okay, so the narrator here is scared as hell, but let’s just say that the game is quite an original by the genre standards: it’s packed with different mutants, and it’s a full-fledged multiplayer. General goals are the same as in Granny though: find objects, understand how to use them, and escape. The basic storyline is that you wake up in an unknown place and understand that you’ve been kidnapped; as you may find out next, some experiments on real people must have taken place here. Uncannily (and typically), something went wrong, so they all became the monsters you have to run away from.
So, what do you think? Takeaway one: we might be having nightmares tonight. Takeaway two: users that are interested in the horror category prefer to play games with a well-structured storyline that opens up mysteries as the game progresses. Also, games that can be played on other platforms secure their popularity quite nicely: Granny is available for PC, while Hello Neighbor and Specimen Zero are multiplatform. Wait, did you hear that? Why is the door open? Surely you locked it as you came in...? Aaah!