Ahh…1982. The year I graduated high school with surprisingly good grades despite owning my own Atari 2600 since the Christmas of 1977. Here we were, five years post-launch and Atari was still cranking out the games, and Haunted House was next up, a silly game when you break it down today, but still quite thrilling, even for a jaded high schooler such as myself. The game was simple in premise; you were a pair of glowing eyes moving about a 24-room mansion looking for three pieces of an urn to dispel the evil. Naturally, all sorts of spooky things were out to get you like ghosts, bats, and spiders (oh my!).
Jump forward to 2023 and Atari is bringing this classic back with a fresh new look and roguelite design that will keep you playing another 46 years…or at least through Halloween. In this new Haunted House, you’ll be playing as more than just a pair of eyeballs. Meet Lyn Graves, who one night decides to visit her famous uncle’s mansion with some friends. They immediately find her uncle missing and the house overrun with monsters, and once her friends are also taken Lyn must begin the repetitious task and slow grind of finding those urn pieces and freeing her friends and family.
Haunted House isn’t exactly a new idea. Another great game, Don’t Die Minerva!, still in early access since 2019, is nearly identical in form and function to Atari’s reimagined spook house. While there are dozens of individual room floorplans, their layout is randomized for each trip through the mansion, and the monsters and puzzles are constantly changing to keep things fresh. A simple floorplan shows all discovered rooms with their exits in a grid-like map that will help you efficiently explore the mansion and reach the boss with minimal backtracking.
Being just a little girl armed only with a lantern, Lyn will need to remain stealthy as much as possible using the sneak button to tiptoe behind monsters and ghosts and dispel them with a burst of light from her lamp. This can get tricky as there are a lot of fragile things waiting to get bumped into, all making loud noises to attract or wake up sleeping creatures. Some monsters are stationary while others move about in repeating patterns, and there is even a thieving rat that can swipe your inventory if you get too close.
Haunted House gets considerably easier once you figure out the core mechanic. Each room has a “mission” such as dispel all targeted enemies or more likely, just finding a stone head statue and putting it on special pedestal. Once you complete each room’s objective a wash of white light will dispel any remaining monster turning them into tiny piles of coins and the doors will unlock. Don’t forget to claim your treasure from the final silver chest.
To aid you on your quest are various inventory items you can collect and use to stun, freeze, enrage, or trigger a fear response as well as yummy food items like cookies to restore your health bar. Stunning enemies is super-important since it takes 5-10 seconds of lamplight to kill most enemies, unless you can manage to sneak up for a stealth takedown. You’ll also find other items like food stuff you can take to the cook, but mostly you are here to collect gems and coins you can use to upgrade the mansion and your own RPG-like list of stats. Observant adventurers can also find special Atari 2600 game cartridges you can turn in for special rewards, and there are special keys you can collect to open the challenge rooms down in the cellar.
The addiction level is off the charts, with a “one more try” design that will keep you playing late into the night. The progression is slow but noticeable, with each trip through the house (hopefully) lasting just a bit longer, as I improve my character stats and learn the various tactics for each encounter. Available on pretty much every system, I reviewed Haunted House on the PS5, and it was fantastic. This was one of the first games I played on my new OLED and the contrast and colors were popping off the screen. The game graphics are delightful and family-friendly with fun monster designs and charming art panels for conversations. The UI is intuitive and non-invasive with a row of inventory items along the bottom and personal stats and room goals in the top corners. Haunted House has a great sound mix despite being an overly quiet game. You can hear every footstep (so buy that stealth upgrade sooner than later), every vase shatter, every monster growl, and every ghost moan. Every bit of the presentation screams classic Atari quality and attention to detail with colors and animation to delight all ages.
You don’t have to be an old-timer like me to appreciate this new vision of Haunted House, but if you did play the original then this will prove to be an eye-opening look at 40 years of technical progress. Atari has been doing a lot of remakes lately with their Recharged series, and while this does feel like something from that series, there is enough complexity and content here to set it apart from those other arcade titles. Perfectly timed for a Halloween release, fans of stealth and spooky exploration won’t want to miss this fresh and fun roguelite that the entire family can enjoy.
You can check out the first 90 minutes of the game in our gameplay video.
