Reviewed: November 19, 2010
Reviewed by: Charles Boucher

Publisher
Atari

Developer
ImaginEngine

Released: October 7, 2010
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1

2
5
4
2
3.0

Supported Features:

In Haunted House, you play as Jacob or Silvia Silverspring, a brother and sister team investigating the Graves Mansion where their grandfather was last seen. In terms of gameplay, this boils down to walking through dark rooms, checking every piece of furniture for keys to open up the way, documents that shed light on the backstory, coins, and light sources while enduring the assaults of ghosts and monsters.

The stakes are low, however, as the fireplaces, one of many additions to the original game, will save your progress, destroy enemies that approach them, and restore your health. While I’m far from the world’s biggest advocate of difficult games, the fireplaces in Haunted House reduce the challenge entirely to how well you can remember the route back to your fireplace when you start getting hit by ghosts. Everything else is simply a matter of time and persistence, with effectively infinite health and no other way to react to the presence of monsters.

As in the original, the goal is to find three pieces of a broken urn. Pretty much the entire game is spent collecting items and wandering aimlessly through a house, sliding along walls to try and find lootable objects that you might have missed. However, the extra objects don’t add depth so much as distraction. The diary pages you find don’t interact with the gameplay in any meaningful way, and the need to find keys is a speed bump that’ll have you rummaging through bookcases and couches to find the key you need to progress. While searching for keys has been a part of gaming since time out of memory, never before has it been so starkly reminiscent of actually trying to find where you put down a set of lost keys, which would be an accomplishment on the part of Haunted House if that was anything to aim for at all.

Haunted House’s graphics are charming, if repetitive, with a cartoonish design that does its job well, though the environmental graphics and monsters are used throughout, and neither are particularly creative. For a topic that’s shown some real creativity in design over the years, Haunted House phones in its ghosts with bog-standard chain-rattling specters. One of the most solid callbacks to the Atari 2600 original, your character appearing as a pair of floating eyes staring at the camera when you don’t have a light source active, is likely to be somewhat jarring to players unaware of the game’s roots. The sound design wears thin even faster than the visuals, with well-recorded sound effects being weighed down by the fact that there aren’t nearly enough of them to go around. When you hear the same scream for the fiftieth time, you’ll start to wonder why they couldn’t have mixed it up a little more.

An offline multiplayer mode might do a little to extend the life of the game, especially for young children with its kid-friendly spooks. Still, a lack of variety in gameplay, banal ghosts, and the sheer grinding repetition don’t do much to serve the memory of the original, smothered under layers of unnecessary new ideas and additions that take away from the purity of its parent game.

For everything new that it tries to do, Haunted House bears the marks of coming from the Atari 2600 poorly, teetering between adding half-hearted new features and trying in vain to do justice to the memory of the original. It’s sort of appropriate that Haunted House is a game stuck between two worlds, but it should have been put to rest instead of sent to haunt the game collections of the unsuspecting and nostalgic.