As I get older, I find I have no interest in playing the cutesy/silly games that are everywhere on retro consoles (obviously, they were targeted towards kids). But I also don't have the patience for survival horror games like the resident evil or silent hill series. I'm just looking for a fun spooky game that I can jump into and start playing.
So what are your favorite action-oriented games featuring skeletons and bats and horror movie monsters that aren't actually trying to scare you? Any platform, any year. I'm looking for games whose entire theme is spooky, not just a single haunted house or graveyard level.
I'm not so much concerned with the gore or being too scary, it's the slowness of the SH games that I don't have the patience for right now. I'm not looking for a game I need to spend hours immersing myself into, I'm hoping to find some fun games I can jump into for 20 minutes at a time.
Ghost n Goblins is a good call, although I'm terrible at that game. I'll definitely need to checkout Rusty, I've played all the Castlevania games so Rusty sounds perfect.
MedEvil definitely fits my criteria, although I find that game too clunky. There's a new(ish) game called Pumpkin Jack which was heavily inspired by MedEvil but uses more modern game mechanics. It's a fun one.
Luigi's Mansion leans a bit too far into the cutesy/silly territory for me, but it's definitely a good choice.
I didn't realize Dead By Daylight had a bunch of characters from various horror franchises, that's really cool! I think I'm probably more likely to play Left4Dead if I wanted an action-y spooky multiplayer game but I'll definitely give Dead By Daylight more attention.
I've never heard of Pascal's Wager and the reviews on steam don't look great, but I'll look into it.
Thanks for the list with so many varied options!
Horror tends to be "slow" because you need to build an immersive experience for the audience in order for the horror elements to have their intended effect.
I totally agree that good horror needs to gradually ramp up the tension. But that's why I'm not looking for horror games, I'm just looking for some fun spooky games i can jump into real quick without really dedicating a lot of time to it.
No worries, I figure maybe one of them might help you pick something. I enjoy all sorts of games, including horror, but my favorites with horror tend to be the very slow survival horror games. To me, the game is basically a giant puzzle box, having multiple smaller puzzles that need to be solved for the whole thing to unlock and reveal its secret.
Kuon, Rule of Rose, Haunting Ground, Silent Hill (in this order: 2,1,3,4 and nothing else exists), Resident Evil (only the original one), Dino Crisis, Onimusha, Parasite Eve, Clock Tower and the like are my favorites. I even liked Cold Fear and the PS2 X-Files game.
Dino Crisis was a dinosaur version of Resident Evil made by the same developers. They called it "Panic Horror," because it was a much faster, action oriented version of Resident Evil, where the dinosaurs would actually follow you room to room if you didn't desl with them, you could also use tranquilizers instead of bullets to temporarily knock them out but that meant you had to deal with them again when you came back. It was a great game, and they only made two of them. DC3 doesn't exist.
Maybe you might have interest in Illbleed? Its a Sega Dreamcast game that is like a theme park with different lands based on horror movie tropes. Its a pretty whacky game, and is very experiemental. But it is certainly anything but scary. Maybe it may interest you?