Haunted House – Review

Lyn’s uncle – Zachary Graves has gone missing, so grab your flashlight because we’re heading to a Haunted House.

At the start of the game you’re given a short introduction to the dissapearance of Zachary and after this brief cut-scene you’re thrown in to the haunted house with your lamp in hand and a friendly coast called Casper Spooky on hand, ready to help.

The magical urn found by your uncle was shattered into three pieces and with it’s ghost-trapping powers broken, the released spirits have taken over the house, trapping anyone that enters.

Spooky will spend the next 5-10 minutes, talking you through the basics and popping up everytime you try moving more than a few inches, but thankfully this short tutorial section is as straightforward as the controls.

Run and Sneak are on the Right and Left triggers, the bumpers switch between you’re three item slots, with Y using the item, A interacting with objects and B performing a dodge-roll, finally X allows you to utilise your light to damage and evaporate enemies, but you’ll usually have to sneak up on them unaware or find an item to stun them first which puts a much heavier emphasis on stealth and avoidance rather than confrontation. It’s all easy to get to grips with and having the sneak and run on the triggers feels intuitive and keeps movement nice and fluent.

As you move from room to room, you’ll have to pass an assortment of traps and enemies with each room having its own objective, such as finding relics, visiting the ghost world which usually provides more traps to dodge in order to trigger an object, or something a little more straightforward such as surviving for a set amount of time.

Ultimately you will need to keep searching rooms until you find the boss room, to battle the extra strong ghastly leader who’s protecting one of the pieces of the magical urn.

While it’s fairly simple in play, things soon start to get complicated when you’re losing a few hearts of health, aoe.tones taking damage is unavoidable, so sure enough you’ll meet your maker soon enough.

Thankfully Spooky actually proves useful at this point.

Waking up in the lobby, you lose your items, but in true roguelite fashion, you’ll have some gems to spend on upgrades such as health, sramina or flashlight damage, each of which will prove useful for the next run.

Heading back to the main area of the mansion, the power of the urn has “moved walls” changing the layout, rooms and challenges ahead.

It’s around this point when I started to get a very familiar feeling, the impressive Don’t Die Minerva followed a young girl, in a procedurally generated haunted house with nothing more than a flashlight In a roguelite adventure…
So if you’ve played Don’t Die Minerva in the past, and can envision Atari’s 1982 “Haunted House” as the storyline, you won’t need to read any gravestones to know how this goes.

If you didn’t play Don’t Die Minerva, don’t worry, it was a pretty impressive game that was released in early access late in 2019, but sadly after a handful of updates, the developers who also made The Culling (Xavient games) seemed to dissapear and I don’t believe they’ve released anything since..

It’s fair to say Haunted House feels like it picks up where Minerva’s promise left off, using what was a pretty unique approach with their 40 year old IP, there’s a slightly slower, more calculated pace to haunted house, and outside of the occasional ghost world challenge, there’s far less traps to contend with.

It might not sound much, with one piece of urn on each floor of the mansion and only three to collect, but there’s also 4 basement rooms to unlock, and you’ll come across other humans trapped in the house who you can help, such as searching for the maid’s cats.

You’ll also have the option to help renovate the mansion for the Butler as you progress, as well as various collectables such as throwback retro items about some of Atari’s earlier games meaning there’s definitely more game than I was expecting but the longer it goes on, the more you start to see the same rooms and challenges over and over again and the lack of variety means that feeling of deja vu comes around a little too often.

Graphically there’s not quite the quality I was hoping for, I would have loved to see a more Luigi’s mansion style, but there’s not any deep volumetric fog and lumin lighting to really push what we know is currently posisble, but everything is very well drawn, good sharp details and enough clarity on chests, doors and enemies so you don’t get distracted by your surroundings, but the house and characters jist doesn’t ooze personality like I’d hoped.

At times it does look a little too familiar (as is common with many roguelite games), and I would have liked to see a little more diversity in the surrounding visual theme, rather than just the order of the rooms, at least as you progress through different floors there’s a few different enemy types, but I would have liked to see more visual variation of each enemy rather than every similar room feeling the same.

Audio has a few bumps in the night, there’s a eerie background music that’s playing throughout and while it does start to feel as repetitive as some of the visuals, it suits the theme and style of the game. I would have loved a little voice acting to help bring the characters to life and help I next that personality I mentioned above, so while the overall presentation might not be great, it is still very good.

Sneaking onto the store at only £14.99 (£11.99 at launch), Haunted House screams very good value, approaching Halloween it’s going to leave you enough money left for extra snacks and still provide many hours of gameplay.

It’s also suitable for a wide range of ages, and with the procedurally generated levels, while there’s no multiplayer options (which is a shame), it’s entertaining enough to watch someone else play, before taking on a new level yourself.

Haunted House comes with its own frights, with a repetitive but replayable gameplay loop, it’s similarity to Don’t Die Minerva (released 4 years ago) maybe makes it feel a little more dated, but if you can forgive the expected roguelite repetition, there’s a decent game that’s suitable for all the family.

It could have been presented a little better, but at under £15, we can’t complain too much.

Overall, Haunted House is a fun and playable, if repetitive stealth adventure that’s sure to keep you coming back from the dead for more.

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