Haunt the House: Terrortown

Luigi's Mansion handed you a vacuum cleaner and told you the ghosts were the problem. Haunt the House: Terrortown flips the polarity, and that one decision is the whole game. Here you are the haunting. The panicking humans are the obstacle. SFB Games released this side-scrolling action puzzle in 2014, and it gives you four buildings to clear after dark: a museum, a hospital, a theatre and a cruise ship. Your job is simple to state and fiddly to execute. Empty them before the night runs out. You do it by pouring your little sheet-ghost into whatever is fixed in the room, a grandfather clock, a lamp, a piano, a hospital bed, then making that object behave badly enough that the nearest living person decides they have somewhere else to be. The mechanical spine is an escalation ladder. Every possessable object has a few tiers of misbehaviour, and you build them up rather than firing them off at random. A lamp flickers before it swings, a clock ticks strangely before it goes fully wrong. Nudge someone gently and they shrug and carry on with their evening. Keep the pressure on and they break, sprint for the stairs and take their fear with them, because panic in this town is contagious. The real puzzle is geography. You learn which fixture covers which corridor, which rooms have dead spots where there is nothing to inhabit, and how to herd a scattered crowd toward a single exit instead of chasing stragglers one at a time for five minutes. It is closer to crowd control than to combat, and when a whole floor empties in one chain reaction it feels genuinely good. What keeps me recommending it a dozen years after release is the craft. The art is hand-drawn with a wobbly, slightly sketchbook line, the kind of look that costs an artist real hours and cannot be faked with a filter. Almost all the comedy lives in the animation rather than in text, which is why the game plays fine with the sound off and much better with it on. The score carries the mood, all creaky music-box menace that stays playful instead of tipping into horror. Each venue has its own personality too. The theatre understands stagecraft, the ship gives you tight decks and long sightlines, and the hospital finds the exact line between spooky and mean without crossing it. This is a game with no interest in frightening you. It wants you to enjoy being the thing that frightens. The disappointments are real and worth stating plainly. It is short, a couple of evenings at most, and while I will always defend a game that knows when to stop, the last two locations are the same verbs on a bigger floor plan rather than genuinely new ideas. Movement floats, which suits a ghost thematically but turns imprecise when you want to hop between objects quickly during a chase. There is very little difficulty and almost no pressure once the loop clicks, so the night-long framing promises a tension the design never really delivers. Replay value is thin outside achievement hunting and the trading cards. The loudest omission is co-op, because this is obviously a two-player couch game in spirit and it never became one. Controller support is solid, at least, and it belongs on a TV more than a monitor. So who is it for. Anyone who wants a Halloween-night game they can finish in one sitting with someone watching over their shoulder, anyone who likes cartoon spookiness with no gore and no jump scares, and anyone whose backlog is stacked with eighty-hour epics they will never open. It is a good game to hand to a kid. It is a better game to play alone at one in the morning in October. Nearly nine in ten of its couple of thousand Steam reviewers landed positive, which tells you the audience is small, self-selecting and quietly delighted. Go in expecting a well-made short story rather than a novel and you will not feel shortchanged.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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