Haunting: Starring Polterguy
“Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! …uhh Genesis!” And upon uttering these fateful words, deep in Electronic Arts’ software development labs, the afterlife belched forth this game. Almost a twisted version of The Sims, and one of the more original games made in the 16-bit era, Haunting casts you as a dead rocker’s ghost. You’re tasked with scaring all four members of an evil family out of four different posh houses. You do this by possessing objects and watching the comically frightening results.
Haunting’s plot is never really explained in the game, except to say that dead, surfer-speaking Polterguy got “dissed” by the wealthy Sardinis. He’s made some deal in the afterlife to be able to return to the Earth and exact his revenge. You glide Polterguy’s specter – invisible to the family, of course – around different isometric houses. In every room there are multiple objects that can be possessed, marked by a color-coded sparkle. If it’s blue, jumping into the object will arm it like a trap. A nearby Sardini will get lured to it and automatically spooked. Yellow means the trap is immediately fired off, relying on you to make sure a Sardini is looking. Green means you get to manually drive the object (like a chainsaw or a severed hand) for a brief amount of time.
Traps are prepped by diving into them with the A button. They only work when a Sardini is the room, and nearly every trap has a creative, custom animation. A china cabinet fills with blood and the outline of a body. A golfer on TV knocks a ball through the screen. A monster tears off a duct grate and swipes at the terrified person below. It’s usually goofy fun, but the animations also aren’t afraid to get bloody. Traps are reset when you leave the room and come back, and while a few are repeated, most of the fun here comes from seeing what bizarre effect you’ll get from each innocuous household item.
Every time you spring a trap, that particular family member’s fear level will rise – reinforced by their actions (jumping out of their pants, cowering in fear, etc) and a text report rating fear at calm to very high. At “very high,” they will leave the room for another to compose themselves. They’ll calm themselves back down if you let them, but chase after them and spring more traps, and they’ll keep running to new rooms. You can use the map to steer them towards a room with an exit door. Scare them enough in here and they’ll flee the house completely – exactly where you want them. Spooking all four family members out of the house moves you on to the next level.
All of your actions are powered by ectoplasm, shown by a green bar at the bottom of the screen. This bar is constantly depleting – spent on traps and slowly draining to keep your form in the world of the living. The only way you can get more ecto is to scare someone out of a room. The bits they drop can keep you going a little further, but you’re always getting diminishing returns.
This means that inevitably, you’re going to run out of ectoplasm. When you do, you’re dumped into a dungeon in the realm of the dead, and must run a short maze collecting more drops of ecto. While you can’t be harmed while haunting, you can and will take damage in the dungeon – which cannot be healed and adds up over the course of the entire game. So while the dungeon allows you to keep going above ground, every time you end up in it, you run the risk of losing all your health and the game.
As you succeed, you’ll get new houses with new layouts and new traps to go with. The Sardinis become slightly more resistant to scares (they’re becoming pros at this sort of thing) but not enough to change the basic game loop. Instead, difficulty comes from adding rival ghosts and a dog. The rival spirits appear when there’s ecto on the ground – you can fend them off with a kick on the B button (its only use). By eating your ecto supplies, they force more dungeon trips upon you. The dog roams the house and random and can always spot you. His barking calms a Sardini in the room, while his presence saps some of your ecto reserves. He cannot be scared or defeated. You can only distract him with some rare spells, or avoid the room he’s in.
These spells are collected in the dungeon levels and deployed with a menu on the C button. Dog-Off leaves a bowl of food that will keep that pesky pooch occupied. Super-Scare lets you shoot a fireball at the Sardinis to scare them, while Boo-Doo drops a manually-placed trap. Extra Ecto gives a one-shot refill of your ecto stores. Finally, Zombi-ize lets you briefly take control of a Sardini. You can use this to manually steer them toward an exit room, or to scare the absolute bejeezus out of another family member (as you would expect).
Visuals are sharp, as are the designs for the characters. You know nothing about the Sardinis, except that you want them gone, so it helps that their portraits capitalize off typical stereotypes. The husband looks like a pompous ass and the kids look like complete brats. I wouldn’t want these people in my house either. The houses look great for the Genesis, making use of an extensive color range and a lot of smart decorating and design. No two rooms look the same, while no furniture is too small or undetailed to figure out.
Haunting can get difficult, however, and this is entirely the fault of the dungeons. You’ll end up there at least once during each level, while you’re forced to go between houses. You almost unavoidably take damage while there, as the controls have you slipping and sliding around like a ghost supposedly would. This means sliding into walls with claws coming out, or into pits opening in the ground. The floaty controls cause trouble in the houses as well, but not as much, since your life doesn’t depend on them there. You also must play all four houses in one sitting, making the damage that accumulates in the dungeons all the more troublesome.
It can also be unnecessarily complicated to herd the Sardinis out the door. Blue objects will lure them closer before springing, which is helpful, and the family will flee from the objects you can actively control and fly around (like the aforementioned chainsaw). Still, it’s possible to get one of them stuck cowering in a corner, exhausting the room’s traps and denying you your ectoplasm (they only drop ecto when they leave a room). Maybe I planned poorly, but I spent most of the game having to chase them back and forth around the house before they finally went to an exit room. They never seemed to go where I wanted them to. As said, you can only scare them out of a room – it doesn’t guarantee that they will head for the exit.
The final boss is also a real ball breaker, asking you to fight crawling brains that duplicate when hit. Hit them enough times and they eventually die, but you’ll have to do it by lobbing a red ball that has a fixed and awkward throw distance. Run out of ecto, and you’re sent to the hardest version of the dungeon while the brains apparently reset. It’s a good time to mention there’s no passwords here (but there’s only four houses, so no surprise).
Haunting is a very clever game, and certainly deserves praise for trying something new. Yet it’s admittedly gimmicky. Once you’re over the chuckles at seeing what furniture can do in your innocent little hands, you’re left with a game that doesn’t have much substance to it. You have unlimited trips to the dungeon for more ectoplasm, so it’s forgiving in that sense, but you’re bound to take damage while getting a little bored with it all. Still, Haunting’s a unique concept that hasn’t really been remade, so worth checking out on that merit alone.
The Good
Great look. Traps are both clever and actually rewarding.
The Bad
Slippery “ghostlike” controls make required dungeons annoying. Not much to the game once you’ve seen what each trap does.