The Haunted Hoard: Haunt the House: Terrortown (PC)

Back in 2010, the flash game predecessor to Haunt the House: Terrortown went up on Newgrounds, simply titled Haunt the House. I actually managed to play it back then, and while it didn’t really wow me, the short little game seemed to have left some impression on me, one that lead to me being interested when I found out it received a full release as a game on Steam. I was eager to see how the game had evolved to become a more full-fledged title, but oddly enough, the game had very little content on release. Post-release updates did add in more content to give it a bit more substance, making it stand now as a much clearer evolution from its tiny ancestor.

 

Haunt the House: Terrortown has you play as a ghost whose goal it is to frighten all the humans milling about in whatever location you’ve selected to terrorize. Despite the goal being to spook every human into leaving your selected haunt, this game has a charming art style, with the player playing as adorable and simply designed ghosts. The ghosts themselves certainly aren’t going to be scaring anyone, especially since they seem to have no physical presence in the human world unless the posses an object and act through it. Each stage in the game is pretty large with many objects to inhabit in your quest to scare away every human in the level, but things start off relatively calm. Your hold on objects is weak initially, at best able to make them move around a little or perform some mildly unusual option like turning off and on by themselves. As you unsettle more and more people with what amount to ghostly pranks though, the atmosphere in the area begins to become more and more tense, and the tenser the atmosphere, the more options you have when it comes to how you can use certain objects. Soon, you’ll have actual monsters spring out household appliances, sharp implements looking ready to kill anyone near them, and some more absurd animations that are not so much scary as they are clear signs that something strange is going on. Gargoyles spitting and a crane machine’s doll holding a party aren’t the kind of spine-chilling terrors you’d expect to make people run, but the variety in the way objects are activated is perhaps the biggest appeal of the game, as each new level comes with a load of toys for you to uncover the uses for. You aren’t able to make the objects truly interact with most humans though, with most item actions boiling down to flashy animations, but you can chase down people with some of the mobile objects to keep the scare going until you hit a room border.

Because the levels are the source of the items you’ll be playing with, their design is incredibly important, and Haunt the House: Terrortown has a decent batch to explore. The mansion from the flash game makes a return, and the titular Terrortown is actually four interconnected scaring locations that do a good job of having distinct identities that feed into giving you interesting items to haunt. Areas like the museum immediately leap out as an example of how stages are ripe for giving you unique interactive objects, and the two post-game levels do an even better job as they carry their own experiences separate from Terrortown. One is a Christmas-themed department store and the other a carnival taking place on a train, both packed tightly with appropriate objects to frighten visitors, with the train essentially serving as the jumbo-sized version of a regular level as its gimmick. Unique among the four playing options though is Terrortown with its secondary goal of gathering a ghostly family by actually killing a few of your targets. Killing them really just takes haunting the right object when the atmosphere is strong enough, but you can technically kill people in another way by scaring them so much they leap out of windows, although setting this up on purpose can be hard since you can’t much guide the movement of the humans, and if there’s one element that diminishes the promise in this title, it’s the random movements of terrified victims.

 

Building up atmosphere is a somewhat basic process in each level, with the player having to find objects and shaking them over and over with enough people watching to get to the better scares, but once you can terrify your targets, getting them to actually leave the locations is another story. Getting them to leap out of the window is an immediate departure, but it would take far too long to set up only window jumpers, meaning mostly you’ll have to do a big scare and send them off running in a panic. During this panic, they should head towards the area exit and leave, but their preferred routes tend to be just dashing around up and down stairs and back and forth no matter what object you scared them with or where it initially happened. You can’t really herd them to the exit too well either since if they’re already terrified, they won’t respond too much to new haunted objects, but if they spend too much time running back and forth and getting nowhere, they will eventually calm down. So much of the thrill in getting the most powerful and elaborate spooking methods is lost when the humans react the same way to the big scares as they do shaking a lamp at them one too many times without them moving into a safer room, and the running about wildly really begins to get grating when you’re down to your last few victims in a stage.

Waiting out a human that just won’t leave almost wouldn’t be too bad, but the game does grade you on your performance, mostly just as an added bonus after stage completion, but it does feel like a flawed system. Points can be based on how long it took you to clear the level as well as how many people you got to leap out of windows in fright, both things tied to a lot of waiting. You’ll get less score because you are forced to wait as the game randomly sends humans scrambling about with no direction or you’ll have to wait for people to even be near a window when you want to frighten them, something that burns even more time than the easier building clearing method that relies heavily on chance. The carnival train, notably, only rates you on the time it took for you to succeed, and even with the last human on the train running about for almost half of the end total time, I was able to earn an S rank for a run nearly 26 minutes long. The other stages weren’t so lenient with their scores, making it even harder to try and figure out how to engage this rating system that you have so little direct control over.

 

The time you spend in a level is more based on how these random factors play into your completion, not your effectiveness as a ghost. This gives stages a sort of artificial length as things become less about exploring and building up fear and more about waiting about until it finally lets the horrified humans leave. This is where the overall size of the game becomes a bit of a problem, as if the game had more levels that were completed in shorter time, Haunt the House: Terrortown wouldn’t be forcing you to linger in almost completed levels well beyond the point it’s interesting. Any attempt to get better scores is also hampered by that randomness, meaning that replayability mostly comes from achievements that are about finding and activating all the objects in every area. What begins as a cute idea when it’s small and snappy loses its charm as you’re repeatedly left with little to do as you have have to wait for screaming people to settle down before you could possibly get them on track to actually finishing the level.

THE VERDICT: Haunt the House: Terrortown has cute visuals and a fun concept, the player going about haunting objects to make a building feel more and more unsettling until they deliver the terrifying frights that will force the humans out. Unfortunately, the game can’t quite deliver on the payoff for poltergeist activity since the screaming victims run about randomly and make levels drag on far too long for how little you’re actually able to do after the fright that set them off. From that small fact, other issues leak in such as a limited amount of levels and a progression curve that rises too quickly before plateauing into waiting for things to be over with. When the humans play along and make the task satisfying, Haunt the House: Terrortown shows its potential, but there almost always seem to be some stragglers that refuse to let you move onto new and interesting areas, padding an already small experience with unfortunate downtime.

 

And so, I give Haunt the House: Terrortown for PC…

A BAD rating. With a game whose main draw is interesting new content between locations, you don’t want to linger on them well beyond the point the player has already seen all the stage has to offer. Haunt the House: Terrortown’s level completion requirements of scaring every person out of the building can’t be paired with a random system for them finding their way out as it quite clearly leads to cases of them being scared out of their minds but still running about the attic of a building that only has bottom floor exits. There could instead be systems where certain frights cause them to flee in different ways, but instead any object that pushes them over the edge can send them running off with an equal degree of unpredictability. Object use becomes less about strategy and more about location and the severity of the object’s most powerful scare because of this.

 

If Haunt the House: Terrortown kept a quicker pace, some of its underlying issues wouldn’t have time to register with the player. Building atmosphere is sort of repetitive and the objects you select for a scare are almost interchangeable, but the presentation almost made up for it until each level was lengthened by one bad decision to keep you around for too long that aspects of the game have time to sink in. Your contributions aren’t as meaningful as you thought when you realize you are basically helpless to get the last guy out, but toning that down a tad would mean the other aspects of the game wouldn’t bear the burden of having to support the title, allowing you to enjoy its small bit of content for the quick fun it could have offered.