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.
Not action oriented, but just wanted to give Maniac Mansion a shout out…
You’re right, Maniac Mansion definitely has the vibe I’m looking for but there’s no way I’ve got the patience for a point-and-click game.
Also Shadowgate & The Uninvited from the NES era
Monster Party
I play the crap out of this game when I was a kid. What an absolute fever dream. You find bosses that are already dead, angry tempura shrimp, you want some zombies dance… You turn into a monster for some reason… Trees have faces. It’s wild. Highly recommend.
Well that looks perfect, thanks!
Fun, spooky, action-oriented*, skeletons, bats: Temple of Apshai from 1983 on the Commodore 64. About two minutes fifteen seconds into the video you’ll see and hear its unique spooky atmosphere.
*for a role-playing game of this vintage, anyway.
Can’t go wrong with Castlevania, Devil’s Crush also comes to mind as my favorite pinball game. I don’t know why spooky games have OSTs that go so hard, but I’m glad they do!
I only just played Symphony of the Night this last winter and was treated to an unforgettable experience. Then felt the same way all over again the next month when my wife picked up Hollow Knight. Both highly recommended.
Oh boy, if you haven’t played Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, then you’ve got another treat to look forward to!
Since Konami doesn’t make many games anymore, the director of Symphony took a lot of the big names involved in making it and made his own studio. They crowdfunded Ritual of the Night as a spiritual successor to Symphony. It’s a modern SoTN done right by the people who made the original.
I will say that it does have some of the same jank in its blood though, with stuff like overpowered rare item drops and some requirements for the true ending practically requiring a guide. It also hides the fastest movement ability (think the wolf dash in Symphony) in a side challenge in literally the final area of the castle before the true final boss, which is kind of shitty.
But if you enjoyed Symphony, warts and all, you’ll probably love it.
I’m around 35 hours in, just about to get the true ending on normal difficulty. There’s something like three more characters I can play through with, a classic (Castlevania 1) mode, a built in randomizer mode, and a Simon’s Quest style classic mode 2 dlc that I’m probably going to play through before I call it done, so good value for the price too.
Yeah, that’s on the list too! Thanks for the writeup.
With you one hundred percent – Devil’s Crush features one of the best and longest tunes on the Turbografx-16!
Alien 3 on snes
Ooooo. Zombies ate my neighbours! Absolutely a gem to play with your best friend. Good memories of that.
Level password VXBB for level ~30ish is forever burned into my memory.
Dude, nice. I totally forgot about the codes. Oooof. Fav weapon… Hmm… damnit, I liked chucking the 6-pack. It sucks I don’t recall fine details. I know the mummy levels throughout drove me nuts. I wanna play… Music was fantastic.
Splatterhouse:
Decap Attack:
Ghosts N Goblins series;
Don’t know if this would count, but there’s the difficult game of Fester’s Quest on NES. Aliens invade, monsters (possibly aliens, I don’t remember) take over the town/sewers, and Fester of the Adam’s family has to stop them.
It’s been a while since I last played. Only knew it existed when one day mid-2010s my brother got it from either a pawn shop or thrift store. Definitely a game I sucked at and never got far in at all.
the difficult game of Fester’s Quest on NES
Fun fact, the European release is vastly easier due to the simple fact that you can shoot through walls!
All enemies and bosses take less hits for them to be killed. The projectiles fired from the gun can go through walls and obstacles.
https://tcrf.net/Fester's_Quest
It still makes me angry for what we got in the US! 😤😅
Honestly, Silent Hill 2 isn’t really scary. SH2 is like a suspense film such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window or The X-Files, not a horror film like The Exorcist or Poltergeist. It goes for a spooky horror atmosphere, but there is nothing in the game that is scary or makes you jump out of your seat in fear or anything. Similar vibe to the X-Files PS2 survival horror game, if that one was a little goofy. Its not like the first Silent Hill, which had jumpscares and an over-reliance on blood/gore/grotesque in order to create its horror. SH2 does have some of that, but compared to the first game it is toned down very significantly. And this is one of the reasons I say SH3 was such a massive step backwards. Like, from a technical standpoint SH3 is better than SH2, but from a narrative standpoint the game is worse than the first game in my opinion. Still better than 4 and later though.
Silent Hill 2 is SLOW. Which is one of its great strengths in creating tension. Similar to an Alfred Hitchcock film, it doesn’t try to jump scare you, but rather it wants to make you feel anxiety or nervous about what could happen next. Some people confuse this with fear, as they are similar.
I can kinda describe it like the original Nightmare on Elm Street (not the bad 2012 or whatever reboot), since that movie also wasn’t really that scary. It was hard to be scared of Freddy Kruger when he had such goofy one-liners constantly in the film.
Overall SH2 is a high recommendation from me, but it may not fit your exact criteria.
Ironically, every Resident Evil starting from RE2 is an action horror game, not a survival horror like the original game.
Other games that are macabre themed would be games like Castlevania, Ghosts n Goblins, etc. I liked Rusty, which was a Japan only PC9800 game which cloned the gameplay of Castlevania. Anyone that likes Castlevania owes it to themselves to play Rusty.
MedEvil I think is a 3d platformer, but I never played it so I can’t speak to its horror strength.
Luigi’s Mansion is obviously a goofy pick here.
Dead By Daylight (I can’t believe I am recommending this since it has such a toxic community) is a horror themed 4v1 multiplayer game that, once you play a few games, becomes not scary at all except for certain moments when you aren’t paying attention and you get jumpscared by another player walking onto your screen. It features a wide collection of characters from popular horror franchises, as well as characters from Dungeons and Dragons and Lara Croft for some reason. Just watch out for the toxuc community on this one. Most of my matches end before 20 minutes, and finding a match is usually pretty fast but I mainly play Killer and apparently less than 20% of the entire playerbase plays Killer.
There is also Pascal’s Wager, which is a soulslike but I haven’t played a whole lot of it, just 10 minutes. Seems to play similar to Bloodborne.
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?
I find it a bit amusing that you chose two horror films which I have always found to be not remotely scary as your go-to horror examples. I enjoyed them growing up, but I think they were only scary to older generations (I am an older Millennial).
Well, I don’t think they are necessarily scary either, but they obviously try to be “scary horror” as opposed to Rear Window or the X-Files, which while they can be scary to some, they have a pretty clear difference of tone to them.
I wasn’t sure how old of movies to pick, because while Nosferatu (1922) was certainly scary in its time, it is almost a laughably funny movie now, if one can sit through its rather slow presentation.
I really liked Haunting Starring Polterguy.
Holy cow I thought I was the only person that played that. Excellent game.
In a similar vein, Ghost Master. Some of the levels are fiddly but it’s a ton of fun.
Have you ever played Sweet Home for the NES? It’s like Luigi’s mansion crossed with Final Fantasy themed after a Japanese horror movie.
I’ve never even heard of this! Looks like it’s a turn-based RPG though. Those are typically pretty rough on the NES. Do you like the game?
I have fond memories of playing it, but I never beat it and never even really understood how to beat it.
Ghost Manor for the 2600 is a fun game with lots of atmosphere. However it’s also pretty simple and will only occupy you for 10-20 minutes. It sure was a blast when I was a little kid, though.
There’s also Monster Bash, the 1982 Sega arcade game.
I’m going to keep adding more items as I think of them in case others might be interested in this type of game.
There’s a free game on steam called Nightmare Kart which started out as a Bloodborne Mario Kart but the developer was getting too much attention so he removed all the explicit Bloodborne references that might get him sued and released the game as a vaguely Bloodborne-ish kart racing game. It features PS1 style graphics.
Also, for anyone into arcade (MAME) games, there’s a horror-themed beat 'em up called Night Slashers which is pretty fun.
Apparently this game is getting a remake on steam, called Night Slashers: Remake. I actually had no idea this game was being made until I googled for the arcade game’s cover art just now.
What’s the middle game?
Just to throw another item into the list, there’s a VirtualBoy game called Jack Bros which should perfectly fit my criteria:
Unfortunately, the game is really boring (in my opinion). You just wander around a maze collecting keys so that you can… move onto the next maze to collect more keys. You have a basic attack but the range is so short that it isn’t exactly fun. I had really high hopes when I learned of its existence too…
