Realms of the Haunting

My first reaction to Realms of the Haunting was confusion about what kind of game it actually thinks it is, and by the end I had decided that confusion is half the point. Gremlin Interactive built something in 1996 that shifts shape as you play it: it opens as a creepy point-and-click set inside a locked Cornish mansion, gradually mutates into a first-person dungeon crawler, throws in live-action FMV sequences with professional actors, and occasionally pivots into something resembling a boomer-shooter when a room fills up with demonic knights. No single layer is polished enough to stand alone, but together they produce an atmosphere that lingers. The core loop is exploration and inventory-based puzzle solving. You control Adam Randall through first-person corridors using a floating cursor to interact with objects, pick up items, and trigger dialogue. The mansion's early areas are the game's strongest stretch: darkened hallways, sparse working light switches, and ambient sound design that makes the house feel genuinely inhabited by something wrong. A companion named Rebecca joins Adam and provides narrative context as the story escalates from haunted house mystery into full apocalyptic mythology, pulling in Templar knights, spirit crystals, and dimensional portals. The plot starts interesting and gets increasingly overwrought in its back half, piling new lore on top of lore long after the central mystery has been answered. The FMV cutscenes are the production's standout investment. Gremlin hired a dedicated film company, built proper costumes and prosthetics, and the results hold up surprisingly well as artifacts of their era. They are skippable but worth watching. The villain Belial, played with genuine menace by David Learner, is a highlight. The combat, unfortunately, is not. Enemy AI is remarkably limited: monsters cannot open doors, cannot navigate stairs, and can be neutralized by simply closing a door between you and them. Circle-strafing handles everything else. Weapons are functional but unremarkable. The game is clearly aware the shooting is secondary, and playing on easy difficulty to keep frustration low is the sensible approach. The bigger issue is pacing. The later third of the game introduces maze-heavy sections and puzzle sequences that arrive after the narrative momentum has already peaked. A famous brain-maze puzzle involving sixteen collectibles fed into a steampunk machine is clever once; the mazes that follow feel like padding. The map system requires freezing the game and squinting at a tiny inventory window, which does not help. The ending, in both of its available versions, lands with less impact than the long journey to reach it deserves. For retro horror fans or anyone curious about a genuinely odd piece of PC gaming history, this is worth the low asking price and a few patient evenings. Approach it as an atmospheric adventure game that happens to have shooting in it, not the other way around, and the rough edges become part of the texture rather than reasons to quit.

Alex · Scout Team

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