As much as i love bloodborne i really wouldn't consider it as a horror game
It really is though.
Would you say Lovecraft is horror? Of course you would, he's the author who coined cosmic horror after all. Bloodborne, even though it starts and was smartly marketed as a Van Helsing-esque monster slayer, is pure cosmic horror. Not just in its setting, but in its mechanics (Insight) and lore as well. This is where it seperates itself from games that just have a horror setting and horror as window dressing.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-10-how-bloodborne-honours-the-legacy-of-h-p-lovecraft
"Video games tend to have a rocky relationship with Lovecraft," Super Bunnyhop noted. "They love the imagery and style of his horror, but the underlying tones that set it apart are a bit hard to convey with traditional mechanics."
After all, defeating unknowable god-like creatures as a mere mortal is completely at odds with the fatalism Lovecraft was so known for. But Bloodborne handles this differently. Yes, you can slay giant monsters and unholy beasts, but ultimately mankind remains intrinsically screwed by its amoeba-like lot at the bottom of the cosmic food chain.
"Bloodborne manages to keep it subtle in a way even the official games do not," Super Bunnyhop stated. "Although mechanically you can still overcome the odds and defeat the villains in Bloodborne, the narrative endings reinforce that Lovecraftian sense of smallness, with each one revealing your character being played by the hands of greater powers."
"By having different names and rules than the official Cthulhu mythos, it can still work mysteries," Super Bunnyhop explained. "That descent from Bram Stoker to Lovecraft had me so excited because it seemed in an instant that the game's universe suddenly got larger and more complicated than before. And isn't that the point? Cosmic horror is all about realising how much more there is to the universe than can ever be experienced by all of mankind's accomplishments."
"The 'Souls' game's formula, with its brutal difficulty and its vague but concrete lore, does an excellent job at prodding the player's morbid curiosity. And so does Lovecraftian horror. In both cases, you're going to end up confused and terrified by what secrets you uncover."
Bloodborne deals with some seriously horrific and fucked up stuff. It's not just people being infected with contanimated blood and turning into beasts, as it also has - among other things - children being abducted and experimented upon, a village torched to the ground with everyone in it, beast or not, vampirism, people gouging out there own eyes to 'see' with their brains, people dying in Yharnam but with their consciousness trapped in an alternate dimension, infanticide and cosmic beings impregnating humans because they can't reproduce.
Now some people argue Bloodborne isn't horror because it isn't scary or because you have agency.
Now what is scary is subjective. I felt more unease and dread in Upper Cathedral Ward than in many other games in this list, with the Brainsuckers scuffling in the dark where you can hear them but not see them, a massive werewolf crashing through the window (its own Resident Evil dog moment), a chandelier falling down in the dark, you killing the abducted children that were turned into little cosmic beings by being experimented upon, and it all culminating in a fight against a Lovecraftian creature mourning the death of another Great One.
Seccondly, you have agency in most games on this list (you can fight back in Dead Space and Resident Evil as well, heck, the latter ends with you blowing up a monster with a rocket launcher for crying out loud). Just because ammo is more scarce, and it is actually pretty scarce in Bloodborne as well, doesn't make it more of a horror game.
And agency is kind of an illusion in Bloodborne anyway. You can't win the game. I'll get back to this in a second.
Would people argue that Romero's Dawn of the Dead is a horror movie? Of course it is, it's a zombie movie classic. But few, if any, would say it's scary (even though - as stated before - what is scary is entirely subjectie). I can't think of any jump scares or any scary moments really. It has nothing on the level of say Enemy, which many wouldn't even say is a horror movie though it has one of the scariest endings in movie history (I'd say it IS a horror movie, just an existential one).
And the characters have a lot of agency. Those slow moving zombies are killed en masse, they're not really a threat by themselves. They certainly put up less of a fight than the creatures in Bloodborne do. Yet, it is still horror and no matter what these survivors do, the world seems beyond saving.
Spoiler warning in case you haven't played the game!
Bloodborne is no different. You can't win the game, as I said before. Whatever you do, Yharnam is fucked. You can save NPCs, but in the end they'll suffer. They'll turn crazy, turn into a beast, die or birth a monstrosity. You can do the quests for Alfred or Gascoine's daughter, but the first will turn crazy and hack a vampire queen to bits who can't be killed anyway and the latter - will end up in the stomach of a massive pig (or turned into a cosmic being if you sent her to the clinic) and if you tell her sister what happend, the little girl will commit suicide.
Then there are the endings. In one ending you wake up, severed from the dream. This is what I call the 'ignorance is bliss' ending. Nothing is really saved after all. In the second ending you become a Great One's puppet, replacing Gehrman as host of the dream (and as we know from playing the game, that isn't exactly a fun existence) and in the third ending you become an infant Great One yourself.
This is why I feel BB is a horror game through and through and deserving of its place on any horror game list. I also think there is something to be said for the Souls games being survival horror, but that's a topic for another time.
Great choices all around, though I don't really consider Bloodborne horror, but I can see why some might.