RetroGaming

Not action oriented, but just wanted to give Maniac Mansion a shout out…

Monster Party

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.

Alien 3 on snes

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!

Splatterhouse:

https://youtu.be/xss7N6ELobU

Decap Attack:

https://youtu.be/Tqb1D9_RCpo

Ghosts N Goblins series;

https://youtu.be/dqMlLueMpew

Ooooo. Zombies ate my neighbours! Absolutely a gem to play with your best friend. Good memories of that.

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.

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.

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.

I really liked Haunting Starring Polterguy.

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.

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.

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...