Gothic is a mood before it is a mechanic. It arrived in fiction with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and hardened over the following century into a recognisable set of furniture: crumbling architecture, a bloodline with something to answer for, faith turned first ornamental and then sinister, and a landscape that seems to be watching the people crossing it. Games inherited the whole apparatus. When a title carries the Gothic tag it is usually describing the world you are standing in rather than the verbs available to you, which is why the tag sits equally well on a turn-based RPG, a side-scrolling action game and a first-person immersive sim.
In practice the style does most of its work through architecture and light. Corridors are tall and narrow, the ceiling is somewhere above the reach of your torch, and the building itself is usually older than anyone still living in it. Castlevania built a long-running series out of a single cursed castle that rearranges itself between visits. Darkest Dungeon put a ruined family estate at the centre of a campaign about inherited guilt. Bloodborne took a city of cathedral spires and let its congregation rot in place. The distinction from horror is worth holding onto: horror is defined by what it does to you, gothic by where it puts you. Plenty of gothic games never try to frighten anyone, and their dread is a property of the setting rather than a threat aimed at the player.
As a filter the tag is most useful for tone. It gathers games that take decay seriously, that treat the past as something still active rather than as backstory, and that tend to be slower and more deliberate than their genre labels suggest. Expect ornate art direction, a soundtrack doing real narrative work, and stories about institutions and families that have outlived their own purpose. If that register appeals, the games below share it regardless of whether they play as an RPG, a platformer or a dungeon crawl.
