Haunted House Review


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Don’t buy this game. It is bad and the creators should feel bad for charging so much for it.

Oh boy did I pick a bad time to return to game reviewing.
I saw Haunted house and thought that looked like fun, but I was disappointed. You might ask why I am throwing out so much hate early on, but I literally have nothing good to say about this game.
I would normally say these are just my opinions and don’t reflect that of everyone else at BSG, but honestly fuck that. This game is bad and I will tell you all exactly why.

Info

Game Play

So how does the game work. Well you move with arrow keys. That is it. Thanks for coming.
Honestly this game is so simple it is frustrating. The description didn’t make me thing this was going to be anything truly amazing, but this was simple on a level I couldn’t believe. For your original 10 dollar investment you get just 3 games; so lets talk about those and the ways you can play them.

Pumpkin Run

This game is pretty simple. you are put in a backyard. around the yard you will hear pumpkins. you move with the arrows and when you walk over a pumpkin you pick it up.
At some point a witch gets annoyed at you taking the pumpkins and she starts chasing you. As you pick up more pumpkins and avoid said witch more witches will join the hunt. Game ends when you get to close to a witch.
S to see how many pumpkins you have. e to see the number of witches on the map and T to see how much time has passed.
That is it. a 2D game in which you walk around picking up items and avoiding witches. Ground breaking stuff.

Apple Bobbing

Remember to take deep breaths, and try not to get bored as I describe the same game again.
You are in a barrel, use the arrow keys to move around and pick up apples.
As you are collecting apples, some skeletal hands get annoyed with you and will chase you. The game ends if you get to close to the skeletal hands.
But wait some truly amazing game play has been introduced. For you also must remember that you are in a barrel of water. so occasionally you must go all the way to the top to take a breath of air. The game can also end if you drown, So yes this is exactly the same as the first game with a pretty crappy breathing mechanic added.

Skeletal Bard

You will hear a sequence of notes. you must count the notes. If you get it right you get another sequence of notes. If you get all 5 right. you get a cookie.
Trickier then it sounds. but that isn’t really setting the bar very high in this game.

Are you sure that is it?

Now you might be wondering about that nice 10 dollar price tag right now and thinking. surely what you just described wasn’t 10 dollars.
Well buckle up because this game has 1 more trick up its sleeve.
(Spoiler alert, it doesn’t justify the price).

Modes of Game Play

This game has 3 modes. I say that only because it is what the instructions say. It actually has 2 modes and that is a stretch.
Single mode: This allows you to pick any of your unlocked games and play through it. I know exciting.
Linear mode: This plays through all of your unlocked games in a row. I know equally exciting.
Survival mode: Basically the same as single mode but with the added bonus of a time limit which you cannot check.

The problem with this title

so we talked about the game in general and I have made my disdain quite plain. But the truth is for everything this game is…what makes me angry is what this game is not.
It isn’t fun for more then a few minutes, if that. it isn’t well done and it lacks some basic features which could improve the title. All this with a final fuck you in the form of a 10 dollar price tag stuck on.
The games are laughably simple, and the fact you only get 3 with the basic release is a god dam joke. Especially as on release 3 other games are already available, but only for an additional payment. They also talk of releasing more DLC in future. As the current DLC says nothing of including future games you will likely have to fork out even more money for what will probably be equally simplistic games.
To add to this the game has no in built settings. you can’t turn off background music, adjust the pitch for objects in front or behind you, Adjust the volume or anything else which could improve the game play experience.
A couple of bugs also do seem to occur. One that happened a few times would throw me to the website when I clicked on a game that I had got in my basic pack. Pretty annoying since I only had the 3 you would think the game would remember this. I also had 1 instance of starting the pumpkin game only for no pumpkins to ever appear. So after 3 minutes of walking around an empty map I closed it and reopened. All are fixable by closing and reopening the game but this still shouldn’t need to happen.
Also a side note something that would have been a bigger issue if this game wasn’t terrible from the word go. The sounds are at best ok and at worst just silly. The drowning sound in apple bobbing was stupid and the air breathing sound worse.

Final Thoughts and Rating

This was an idea that has been done before and better. It lacks substance, content, and is porely executed.
0 out of 10. Don’t buy it. it is a waste of money.
Before I finish up and you all complain to me about a 0 out of 10 rating. let me give you a breakdown of how I reached that point.
Substance. This game has nothing. It is 3 very basic games, and two of which are the same thing. It gets a 0 for creativity right off the bat.
Even if the game was simplistic I might be able to give a point for replay value, but the game is so basic I can’t even say it has replay value. I was bored with in 15 minutes and that is only because I wanted to play all the games in the different modes for this review. otherwise it would have been lucky to get 5 minutes of my time.
Execution would have been another point I would happily give to the worst and most basic of games, but even here this game falls short. With the most basic of functions like volume controls missing it shows how little time was spent on the finished product. Not to mention for such a small game to still be released with bugs it screams sloppy work.
So even when I tried very hard I could not find any areas in which to give this game even a single point.

Conclusion

Disagree with me? Feel free. let me know all the reasons I was wrong in the comments below.


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2 Replies to “Haunted House Review

  1. Few further things.
    1. For those on the fence: Subscribe to the $10 patron and slash $10 off the $20 price for the whole package. You at least get all the games for $10 rather than being stuck with the three most irritatingly simple ones.
    the witches golem (backyard): Answer to Pumpkin Run. You play as the witch going after trick or treaters. The twist is that you’re movement is constant and you can only turn left 90-degrees by hitting space, so if a noise is off to your right and you’re facing due north you would hit space three times to face east and go after it. More of a gimic dificulty though as once you get used to it it really doesn’t get harder beyond that. Game ends if you crash into trees which you can predict by counting steps.
    Darts (living room): This one is simple. Center the spider-filled balloons, down arrow to power up your dart, release to shoot. Jump to avoid getting splashed if the balloon bloody explodes.
    Escape the Cellar: This one actually had potential so the absence of achievements or even more difficulty than is present is underwhelming.
    Try to last all of five minutes escaping the cellar encountering graves and skellitons along the way. Your movement is constant again, and it gets faster the farther you get. Jump graves with space, and when the skelliton comes at you, you can either dodge (left or right arrow) or punch it with the left or right control key. Punching is actually an exercise in timing as you have to wait for the skelliton to actually get close enough, and it is possible to get instakilled if you’re a fraction of a second off. The problem with this game is that the pattern is way too predictable. You will almost never encounter a wave of two kinds of obstacles at a time. It’s always a few graves here, and a few skellitons there. No surprise attack after jumping a grave. Even mine racer – which the cellar seems loosely based on – had the potential to get surprise attacked by stalactites right after jumping pits.
    Overall, this game is at most worth $10 for the whole thing, but charging $20 for this initial release (especially if most are probably gonna sign up for the patron anyway) seems a bit unnecessary. The sound design is meant to be corny and a mix between retro/somewhat modern, that being said the sound design is definitely decent enough, barring some stereo field issues in Pumpkin Run.Some of these games also seem more mobile-appropriate, so given that the game is open source per the developer’s advertisement it might actually be worth looking into.

    1. The Patreon method is something I could have mentioned I will grant you. however my advice still remains that you shouldn’t pay even 10 dollars for all of that.
      This game is simplistic and the truth is the same concept has been done plenty of times before, better and cheaper.
      But I appreciate your comment and your explanation of the other 3 games.

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