Little monsters: why indie developers make the best horror games

In gaming as in cinema, all of the most personal, creative and risk-taking horror can be found away from the mainstream. And happily it's also a genre in which budget constraints can be turned into an advantage

Leaf through the history of independent video games and the pages are drenched in horror. It was there in the 1990s shareware era of Doom and Hugo's House of Horrors. It was there too in the Flash games of the early 2000s: Exmortis, the House series, the now lost Hotel 626. And it is here now, in the modern indie age. Lone coders and small development studios have always explored dark stories in haunted houses, lonely forests and seemingly abandoned spacecraft populated by demonic entities. Some of the greatest ever horror games are indies: Amnesia: Dark Descent, Devotion, Slender, Iron Lung. And of course there's Five Nights at Freddy's, one of the most successful indie games of the past decade, which took hold initially as a playground legend.

They're not as polished or widely known as Resident Evil or Dead Space, but their very obscurity adds to the terror and uncertainty they instil. So why is horror so popular among independent developers? Why do so many of them set out to terrify?