Haunt the House - Meant to be Played With

For the record, I'm not sure as to why they chose to name this game Haunt the House: Terrortown. One, the title just doesn't sound right. For a game that is both cartoony and colourful, the title isn't complementary to those characteristics at all. Secondly, you won't actually be haunting houses, you're just stopping by to create havoc, and once the entire house is vacated, you move to another and do what you did there (in the previous house), here in the new house. OK, I'll stop complaining.

Eventhough the name bothers me a little, Haunt the House Terrortown is by all means, a short, simple and fun game. But if you have to ask what title I think would be more appropriate for this game, then it'd be "Scare the Shit Out of the Bunch of Funny Little Twins". You see, the objective is simple and straight forward: yup, scare the shit out of everybody until they all leave.

The game encourages you to try different ways to scare people. You see, you won't be scaring them directly or face-to-face. Your main and only method of scaring them is by possessing inanimate objects scattered all around the house. Everything,  can be possessed.

I found myself quite surprised and impressed when it became apparent to me that everything - any inanimate object that isn't a part of the background, even the least significant things that you'd think the developers paid little attention to, such as lamps, books and mugs - can be possessed. Every object has different levels of animations. Initially, the higher-level and more terrifying animations are locked. You start small with the basic options such as moving the objects around.

The more people you scare, the more tense the atmosphere of the location will get. This unlocks new options which give you more ways to haunt the place. Initially, you can only move the objects around. Then, you can rattle them and ultimately pop monsters out of them. But to be honest, I don't understand why they put the method of "moving things around" as the basic method. In common sense, levitating tables and chairs like crazy all over the place is more bizarre of a method than just rattling them in a fixed position. But that's just my opinion.

In terms of graphics, the game is obviously colourful. Every animation is nicely done. The developers paid very close attention to even the tiniest of details. I find myself constantly amused by the characters' horrid expression as they scream uncontrollably and flee in terror. The sound effect are well done as well, but you shouldn't expect anything to be sounding realistic out of the cartoonish Haunt the House.

Now, the game may look cute and all, but people actually get killed here. No, I'm serious. Don't laugh. Sometimes the victims get so scared shit they jump out of the window and fall to their death. Since their actions are unpredictable, you can't prevent this from happening.

But that's not all. Some of your actions are meant to get people killed. There are special characters in each house. They have specific actions that are reserved to kill them. There is no other way to scare or eliminate them. They won't react to the chaos that ensues around them, so you have no choice other than to trigger the action that is specific to them.

The action which will cause them to die a violent death.

Once they're killed, their soul depart from their lifeless body and hover away to the clock tower which you can visit from time to time to choose which ghosts you want to play as. Aside from appearance, the ghosts are exactly identical. For instance, playing as the clown ghost does not make you any scarier than the generic ghost you start with.

The game keeps track of everything. Apparently scaring people isn't one of my best talents..

Haunt the House isn't actually a game. On my second playthrough, I came to realize that this is not a game that's meant be played, it's more like a game that's meant to be played with. In this game, you can't fail. No matter you do, you are guaranteed success in the end. But that depends on your pacing, what you do and how you do it.

So I came to conclude that this game is actually a toy, you see. It's about exploring different options and possessing different objects to see how the characters react to them and how strong. You don't have to rush things. You can play at your pace. If you're rushing, you won't get to explore all available options.

Let's say you find the characters responding very strongly to a particular object. Since you're rushing to finish the game, you scare everyone away with it. When you finally vacate the house, you no longer have the chance to explore all the available options in other objects and see how the characters react to them. So there's no point in playing the game that way. It's not meant to be played, see. It's meant to be played with.

If you're done with running from monsters and long to be in their shoes instead, you're going to enjoy this game. It's mostly about exploring different options, watching different animations and observing how the characters react in horror. You should play it multiple times if you wish. This isn't a problem since one game would usually last for about an hour. Haunt the House: Terrortown, save for its name, is short and simple, but fun and enjoyable. They should make more games like this.