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.
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?