The SCP Foundation is one of the internet’s best-known horror projects. The site is set out as the internal catalog of anomalies held by the titular SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) Foundation. These range from the benign (a sentient blob of goo that makes everyone happy) to the world-ending (a colossal being contained by seven chains that will eventually break free and devour everything). The SCP Foundation has already turned up in a number of different games, and even influenced Remedy’s smash hit Control. Here are the top 10 SCPs that deserve their own video games.
SCP-024 is an abandoned soundstage – at least, until there are intruders. If a group of people enter the soundstage, they’ll be greeted by the announcer. The announcer offers them the chance to take part in a game with the hopes of winning the grand prize. If they say no, they’re forcibly ejected from the building and can never return.
The catch, of course, is that it turns out you can’t trust disembodied voices squatting in abandoned buildings. The game takes the form of an obstacle course filled with dangers, and there can only be one winner. Whether you die, or simply come second, you’ll never leave the soundstage. Instead, you’ll be nothing but a ghost that appears on the recordings in the mailbox outside the entrance.
A game based on SCP-2132 would play like a mash-up of Squid Game and Fall Guys. Nothing revolutionary, of course, but the added gore would put a unique spin on the concept. Add in a commentator, or even assign that role to a spectator, and there’s the opportunity for a fun, albeit insanely gory, party game.
SCP-2132 – or, to give it its full title, “Misters Marshall, Carter, and Dark’s Most Dangerous Fighting Exhibition and Obstacle Resort”, is a farmhouse in Oklahoma. Every Friday, at least three people will be invited (or forced) to enter the Farmhouse to await the game.
The game will see the inhabitants transported into a new environment such as a desert, tundra, or jungle. The players’ goal is to find and enter the farmhouse before time runs out. The good news is that they receive supplies. The bad news is that these supplies are random, and can include everything from guns to pasta strainers.
SCP-2132 would make for a perfect PVE game, offering a range of different environments and hazards for players to tackle. There are plenty of opportunities for randomization and creativity, and the strange starting equipment would necessitate different strategies every match.
SCP-1165 is an ordinary alleyway in an unknown city. Traveling through the alley in one direction has no strange effects. Going the other way has a 36% chance of depositing you into, well, the Minus Level.
The Minus Level is a plane where physics breaks down. The streets stretch out in no discernable pattern. It’s impossible to reach the Eiffel Tower replica in the center. The stores are filled with gear that is never replenished but never runs out. Interestingly, one attempt to explore the location via a helicopter resulted in the ground itself going missing.
SCP-1165 would make the perfect setting for a Battle Royale-style game. After all, anyone can get in, and there are plenty of resources lying around. We know that there are already a few inhabitants, albeit those that wandered in. The area could easily become a warfield for different groups within the SCP universe, using the unique properties of the space to their benefit.
SCP-3935 is Salvation, Indiana – an ordinary town like any other, until it wasn’t. The town became a hotbed of paranormal activity, centered around an extra-special anomaly in the basement of the high school. This anomaly takes the form of ten copies of the building above descending into the earth.
This game would work best as a game in the vein of Outlast or They Are Here. Imagine a journalist exploring the town, recording floating figures or their friends being sucked into walls as they uncover Salvation’s dark history. Eventually, of course, their path would lead to the school itself, and the anomaly beneath it. In true SCP fashion, we’re not likely to see a happy ending. However, the journey to that ending has the potential to be terrifying.
The Guest is a traditional bedsheet ghost that’s usually passive, but occasionally enters an active state. When this happens, it fixates on a random human being somewhere on the planet. Once this happens, SCP-6096 is allowed out of containment. The reason for this is that any attempts to hurt or impede it will inevitably fail. Worse, anyone who encounters The Guest is compelled to help it in its mission. This ranges from giving it a lift to its destination or holding the person down so it can consume them. They’re fully aware of what the SCP will do, and that it’s intensely painful, but impossible to resist.
This isn’t a game that would be winnable. This would be a game where death is inevitable, and the only goal would to be to survive for as long as possible. The Guest knows where you are, gathers an army of followers, and you can only run so far. Even fighting back is unlikely to work, as its army of followers will do whatever it takes to help it in its mission. The best you could hope for is to buy some breathing room.
SCP-001 is a designation with a few different items behind it. Listed as proposals, any one of them could be the true SCP-001, or they could all be fake.
This version of SCP-001 describes what happens when day breaks in the most literal sense. Sunlight mutates any organic matter it touches into a twisted mass of flesh that hunts down anyone uninfected in an attempt to show them the light.
There are a few different directions a game based on When Day Breaks could take, but our choice for the best option would be an open-world game with a day-night cycle. This would bring not just an element of strategy into the game, as you’d need to split your time between scavenging, fortifying your base, and plain-old survival. Meanwhile, traveling during the day would put a strong emphasis on stealth, but give the player greater rewards for their scavenging.
SCP-093 is a red disk that will seek out any mirror. Upon contact, it will transform that mirror into a portal to an alternate universe. Pretty standard fare, at least by the standards of the Foundation. Exploring this alternate universe reveals a world driven mad by religion that used the tears of a being claiming to be God to treat everything from illness to adultery. The twist, however, is that the being used these tears to enslave mankind, mutating them into the Unclean. These are essentially zombies, ranging from “regularly sized and invisible to the naked eye” to “sixty feet tall and deadly”.
By the time the foundation contains this SCP, this alternate universe is all but abandoned, which offers up plenty of opportunities for a good horror. We’d be entering the story after it has ended, alone and defenseless, desperately trying to figure out what happened and how we can stay out of reach of the Unclean.
SCP-7819 is a chain of anomalous hotels that appear to Foundation staff under specific circumstances – namely they have to be driving alone at night for more than five hours. If this happens, there’s a chance that they’ll be hit with a wave of tiredness, with the only option being a hotel that will always appear again, no matter how far they drive.
Unfortunately for them, the hotel is best described as uncanny valley as a location. Even the entry itself describes it as “predatory”. Once you exit your car, the only way to leave is to follow an obscure set of rules. You have to block the right doors, interact with the right items, and give the right responses to the right people.
As with many SCPs, we get as much horror from the unknown as anything else. A game based on it would excel in the subtle elements of horror that made Silent Hill so famous, but the genius is that if we play by the rules, at least, we should be safe. Of course, there’s always the temptation to open the wrong door, just to see what happens.
AI is a big deal in video games. The reason Alien: Isolation worked so well is that the AI was sophisticated, and learned from our tactics. SCP-1633 takes this up to eleven with a truly sentient AI that gradually adapted to attack not just the characters, but the players themselves. After eight hours, the enemies start to block the camera, or lull them into a false sense of security. After 12, they begin to engage in psychological warfare, ranging from stunlocking a character with no intention of killing them to kidnapping and torturing the character they prefer to play as.
Of course, a truly sentient AI is impossible, at least right now, but a game that could simulate that while breaking the fourth wall would make for a singularly disturbing experience. Give us a game where we could almost believe the characters are learning, and where they’re willing to play dirty. The idea itself would need some refinement, though (if nothing else, a game intentionally taunting the player about past traumas would be taking it too far), but this has the potential to be a truly great game.
Of course, it’s worth noting that games literally playing with the player aren’t new. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem has routinely been praised for its sanity mechanics, which include everything from faking glitches to gradually losing volume. More recently, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice claimed that the game would end permanently if Senua died too many times, which turned out to be untrue. Putting a meta twist on an already meta concept would make for a truly unique game.
The SCP Foundation lives by the motto “We fight in the dark, so you can live in the light”. Despite their questionable methods, the foundation is firmly on the side of good, and everything they do is to preserve humanity.
SCP-5000 turns that on its head. It’s a suit that allows you to move around unobserved that appeared in containment one day, holding the corpse of an SCP employee from another timeline. It only gets stranger with the revelation that the suit comes from another timeline, where the SCP Foundation learned something about humanity so disturbing, it decided the only ethical course of action was engineering the extinction of the human race.
A game based on Why? would be a grand, epic, narrative-driven game in the vein of The Last of Us as we make our way through a ruined world, dodging everything from giant teddy bears to indestructible reptiles on our mission. We could play as an SCP Foundation employee trying to fix things, or a lone survivor trying to survive a world gone mad – and perhaps after learning the Foundation’s motives, we may be forced to choose whether humanity is even worth saving.
In the interest of full disclosure, it’s worth noting that there’s already a game based on Why? – SCP: 5K, a co-op FPS where numerous groups carry out missions against the Foundation. However, with an SCP that literally encompasses a whole planet, there’s space for more than one game adaptation.
Looking for another horror fix? Here’s our tierlist of every mori in Dead by Daylight.
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