Haunted
is a 3rd person cartoon-style, point-and-click, humorous adventure game
from German developer Deck 13 Interactive. If you enjoyed Deck 13's
previous games (Jack Keane and the Ankh
games) there's a good chance you'll enjoy this one as well.
Haunted uses the same 3D game engine as Ankh and
Jack Keane, and gameplay is very similar, though
Haunted has the addition of the “ghost inventory” and a built-in
hint system.
Story
Your character is a teenaged girl
named Mary, described in the game as a “street urchin”. Believing
herself to be responsible for her sister's death, Mary ran away from
home because she was ashamed to face her parents. In the opening cut
scene, Mary hears what sounds like her sister's voice, calling her for
help. Mary searches for the source of her sister's voice in what appears
to be a deserted university complex. She hears dogs giving chase and
begins to run. Looking behind her instead of where she's going, Mary
trips and knocks herself unconscious. She revives on a dissection table
at the moment the evil “professor” starts cutting into her. After this
long introductory cut scene, you are given control of the game.
Naturally your first order of business is to escape the evil “professor”
and her ax-wielding henchman.
During Mary's escape, she
accidentally releases her first ghost from a diabolical machine – a
small ghost dressed as a pirate who from that point on serves as a hint
feature. Mary learns that she's one of the few people who can actually
see ghosts. Unfortunately, one of the other people is the evil
“professor” who seeks to do away with Mary and use her sister Emily in
her nefarious experiment – an experiment which requires Emily's spirit
to be residing in her body – which it isn't at the moment.
None of this is terribly scary due
to the goofiness of most of the characters. The ghosts are friendly and
for the most part do what Mary asks, provided they are able. The
ax-wielding henchman Ethan is a cowardly whiner. Even the evil Professor
Ashford isn't really scary – she can only hobble around with a cane and
bark orders at Ethan, who is selflessly devoted to her for reasons I
don't fully understand.
Ghost Powers
As you progress through the game,
Mary meets and “collects” more ghost friends/allies. Each of them has a
“power” that can be used to help solve puzzles. Besides serving as a
Hint feature, the pirate ghost can move hot or electrically charged
objects that would fry Mary if she attempted to touch them herself.
Another ghost has enormous physical strength, but can only touch objects
that have been “touched by death”. A different ghost has water-based
powers. Other “powers” include the ability to translate mysterious
writing or speech and the ability to float. To use their abilities, you
click on the appropriate ghost in your “ghost inventory” at the lower
left of your screen, and then either on something in the environment or
on an object in your regular inventory. There is one exception to this:
when you click on the werewolf ghost, you “control” the werewolf – for
all practical purposes, you temporarily turn into the werewolf. The
werewolf ghost can do pretty much anything a dog can do – dig stuff up,
run around, eat stuff up... (No, not that other thing dogs do.) Unlikely
as it seems, using the werewolf ghost is sometimes the only way you can
solve a puzzle. When you decide you're finished being a werewolf, you
can turn back into Mary again by clicking the Mary icon at the lower
right of the screen.
Difficulty Levels and Hint Types
There are three difficulty levels
that can be changed at any point in the game. There is no difference
between the three levels other than the availability of hints and
hotspot help. “Normal” mode allows both hotspot help and puzzle hints.
“Hard” mode only allows hotspot help. “Very Hard” allows neither hotspot
help nor puzzle hints. (Considering how difficult it was to spot small
dark items in this mostly-dimly-lit game, I wouldn't recommend using the
“Very Hard” mode.)
In “Normal” or “Hard” mode, you
activate hotspot help by hovering your cursor over the eye icon in the
lower left of the screen. “Hotspot” help takes the form of a small
bronze/brown magnifying glass over the hotspots. There is a description
of the hotspot item when you hover the cursor over the item itself. When
playing in “Normal” mode, you get puzzle hints by clicking the light
bulb icon in the lower left of the screen. This causes a conversation
interface to pop up and you are able to ask questions of the pirate
ghost – though not always the questions you'd like. For example, more
than once I exhausted all the pirate ghost's hints only to find he was
suggesting things I'd already done. The worst place for this was when I
had to find a way to climb up a building – and all the pirate ghost
could do was tell me to “use your surroundings”. At that point I
resorted to that much beloved/reviled and time-tested solution –
consulting a walkthrough – from which I learned there was a screen exit
I'd missed. Yes, I'd already checked the hotspot hint, but apparently
the hotspots for the screen exit and something I'd already looked at
were very close together.
Graphics and Sound Settings
One of the advantages of 3D games
over 2.5D games is that they usually offer a lot more in the way of
settings options. The Settings Menu for Haunted is
accessible from the Main Menu and has adjustments for resolution,
anti-aliasing, general details, full screen effects, texture details,
and brightness. Sound settings are simpler, with adjustments for master
volume, music, volume, sound volume, and speech volume. There are also
settings to turn subtitles on or off. You can also enable or disable
hotspot display (eye icon) and quest hint (light bulb) functionality
from the Settings Menu.
Left-click and Escape
Nearly everything in the game is
accomplished by left-clicking. Mary will walk toward the place where you
click – or run if you double-click. The inventory displays all objects
starting at the top left of the screen. I never accumulated enough items
to reach all the way across the screen, so there was no scrolling
inconvenience to contend with. The eye (hotspot locator), light bulb
(pirate ghost hints), and gears (exit to save/load screen) are at the
bottom left of the screen. You can also use the Escape key on your
keyboard to access the save/load screen. The ghost inventory runs from
the bottom left of the screen toward the right, with the exception of
the werewolf ghost, who gets his own spot at the lower right side of the
screen. Early in the game, before Mary finds the pirate ghost, there is
no light bulb for his hints. There is a brief tutorial integrated into
the beginning of the game that tells you how to click on things to
interact with them.
From time to time your investigation
is interrupted by a cut scene which is triggered by discovery or use of
an inventory item or a change in location. You are supposed to be able
to skip speech, but it didn't always work (unless the problem was due to
my mouse button being temperamental).
Puzzles and Locations
The puzzles are mostly inventory
(and ghost inventory) puzzles. There are no door puzzles, sliders,
mechanical puzzles, or any of those types of puzzles that are now
referred to in casual game parlance as “mini games”. You explore, talk
to other characters, and look for and use inventory. Occasionally you
must find your way into or out of places, or to get past a character who
is preventing your progress. Among the places you explore are the
“professor's” unusual office/lab at the university, a clocktower, a
Romanian gypsy camp, a dock, a train, an old theatre, an underwater
temple, and a Scottish church. The puzzles make use of the differing
characteristics of these environments and some are quite creative. They
aren't always “logical” in terms of real life logic, but instead fit the
comical theme of the game.
Bonus Game
Like many “Collector's Editions” of
casual games, Haunted has a “Bonus game” you can play
after finishing the main game. There is a sort of “treasure hunt” part
that can be played either earlier in the game or after the credits. But
after finishing the treasure hunt you can proceed with the bonus game.
Besides offering a few sight gags, the bonus game sets the stage for a
continuation of the story in a possible Haunted 2.
Story, Characters, Voice Acting,
Humor, and Music
The story was OK, though it tended
to hop around sometimes. For example, the cut scenes that played between
locations and were supposed to expand on the story sometimes left me
confused and wondering if something had been left out. And then there
were those times when out of the blue a character would lose heart and
want to give up the quest to find Emily. For example, at one point Mary,
after overcoming several obstacles and finding a solid lead toward
locating her sister, suddenly and inexplicably decides it's all too much
and doesn't want to continue. It seemed like a very forced way to create
a situation where the ghosts have to get her going again. The same thing
happens when one of the ghosts decides he's useless after having done
some very useful things for the group that none of the others could have
accomplished.
Voice acting was professional, even
by most of the minor characters. Of course, the most important feature
of a humorous game is the humor. I'm sorry to say it, but this was not
the funniest game I ever played. I remember laughing once, but I did
more groaning and eye-rolling than smiling. Humor is a tricky thing
though, and I can't say that other gamers wouldn't find it funnier than
I did. The voice actors did what they could with their lines, but I
think the script could have used a little work.
Once you find more than one ghost,
they start having conversations in the background while you play. The
conversation loops, just in case you weren't paying attention the first
time. In some areas this gets annoying, though they do seem to go quiet
when you need to hear something as a clue in the game. I still would
have appreciated a “shut up you great bags of wind so I can think”
button.
The music seemed very good at first,
but the quality varied later in the game – especially during the bonus
game where it sounded particularly canned. Background sound was better
in some places than in others, but generally good (when it wasn't
drowned out by the great bags of wind).
Miscellaneous Observations
You can't die in the game.
Haunted
makes several references to adventure games from the past – mostly
LucasArts adventures but also Simon the Sorcerer and
Syberia (no, not just the name – you'll know what I mean when
you get there) and possibly some other adventure games where I didn't
recognize the reference. I hope in their future games that Deck 13
doesn't reuse the same Indiana Jones sight gag that I've seen about six
times before (in casual games, no less!)
Even with hotspot display enabled,
hotspots could be hard to find. It can be difficult to spot a dark
bronze hotspot icon over a dark background with similar bronzy
coloration – still harder to see the item I was clicking on.
Although the game is a 3rd person
point-and-click, the background doesn't stay still. Instead it pans
around as you move your character. It doesn't move fast enough to induce
motion sickness (at least not in my case), but it still causes a certain
problem. Often I'd try to click on an object and would miss it by just
enough that the game interpreted my click as if I meant to move Mary. So
Mary would start walking around and the screen would pan around with her
and I'd be trying to play tag with the hotspot that was now a moving
target and harder to click on than ever. Arrrrh...
I noticed a couple of grammatical
errors. The word “wagon” was spelled with two G's in one of the
descriptions – they spelled it “waggon”, which might have been OK if it
had had a moving tail, but it didn't. A male chicken was described as a
“nymphomaniac cock” – doesn't a nymphomaniac have to be female?
The only technical problems I had
were graphical artifacts and irregularities produced by the 3D game
engine. For example, as Mary was walking across the screen, she would
often abruptly teleport a few feet to the left or right, sometimes even
changing direction at the same time. During one conversation she
suddenly teleported up in the air so she appeared to be standing on the
shoulders of a man several feet behind her. Of course these types of
problems don't prevent you from completing the game – they just look
bad.
I played the Adventure Shop version
of the game on an older computer (about 5 years old) with the following
specs:
Windows XP SP3
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual core @ 2.5GHz
2GB system RAM
Nvidia 8800 GTS with 320MB of video memory
Realtek HD audio
These are the system requirements
from the Viva Media website:
Operating System: Windows 8/7/Vista/XP
Processor: 1.4 GHz or better
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Hard Drive Space: 6 GB free hard drive space
Video Card: 128 MB graphics card, DirectX 9
The system requirements from The
Adventure Shop are a little different, especially for processor and
system memory.
Operating System: Windows 7/Vista/XP
Processor: 2.4 GHz or better
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Hard Drive Space: 5 GB free hard drive space
Video Card: 128 MB graphics card, Shader 2, Nvidia
Geforce 6800/ATI Radeon X1600, DirectX 9.0c
Recommendations
Shortcomings in the story,
characterizations, and humor prevent Haunted from being an
A-list game. But there is a lot of creativity in the design of the
puzzles and environment and for fans of comedy adventure games,
Haunted is certainly worth a look.
Grade: B
The game can be purchased from
The Adventure Shop or
Viva Media.
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
January 2013
design copyright© 2013
GameBoomers
Group
