The Haunted Hoard: The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror (Game Boy Color)

Despite being a cartoon, The Simpsons tries to keep itself somewhat grounded, using its animation for exaggeration and a skewed perspective on reality that allows us to empathize with the characters and relate to their satirical take on suburban life. Some episodes push further into the cartoonish territory than others, but there is one episode every year where the sitcom goes all-in on using the medium to its advantage, these being their annual Halloween celebrations known as The Treehouse of Horror. Continuity is ignored in favor of creating vignettes where The Simpsons cast interact with spooky set-ups, inconsequential stakes, and visuals unshackled from a need to try and root themselves in something believable. No matter what your opinion is on which seasons of the show are good, usually these episodes are creative and strange enough that even lapsed fans of the show can find something to enjoy. These absurd and imaginative scenarios made for fertile ground for a video game adaptation, and in 2001, a Game Boy Color game with the cumbersome title of The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror tried to do just that, plucking segments from then-released Halloween episodes to adapt into video game challenges.

 

Just like some of the episodes it’s based on, this game doesn’t have much of a reason for the events of the game to take place and doesn’t really try to connect them in any meaningful manner, although the end cutscene threatens to do so before it just ends with no actual conclusion. Instead, you progress in an arbitrary order from scenario to scenario, each member of the Simpson family having one level where they are the main focus, save for Homer who manages to snag three turns as the playable character. Each level plays somewhat differently, some not even being in the same genre as each other, but Bart Simpson gets the first level and introduces the player to the most common design between them, that being a pretty standard platforming stage. Bart is tasked with dealing with a poltergeist that has taken over the family home, and the way this is expressed is Bart needing to find keys and fuses around the house to get to the attic and save his dog. All the juvenile delinquent can do is jump and use a slingshot with a small arc, making it useful enough so long as you position yourself right. Most of Bart’s level consists of long stretches with a few enemies or things to jump on that don’t push the player too hard, but there is an absurdly large basement to explore that seems to have much more to it than is actually required to explore. Bart’s level is definitely the template some later levels are based on, such as Homer’s where he goes to a castle to find a vampiric Mr. Burns. While Bart’s level doesn’t push the player to do too much unless they get lost below the house, Homer’s castle level is actually a tight platforming challenge that requires some dexterity and quick-thinking. Timed levers require quick movement across dangerous areas, there’s a shaft where Homer must jump up platforms before growing vines catch him, and there are enemies a-plenty in his path throughout the level, his only weapon being a crossbow that shoots what looks like a fried egg but must actually be garlic. Bart’s stage is a tepid beginning to introduce the player to the game, but Homer’s vampire level is the highlight of it where the controls and design put up the most meaningful fight.

There is a bad implementation of this platforming design though, that being Lisa’s level, one based off a Treehouse of Horror segment where the teachers at school want to eat the students. Lisa must sneak around the school and free kids from cages using keys, which takes the form of long walks through hallways to enter doors, inspect the area for keys or kids, and then going back and forth to deliver keys once they are found to the appropriate children. Teachers stand in your way and sometimes so do wasps and rats, but Lisa Simpson can only jump and hide, the teachers being much too tall for the young girl to vault over. You are given a good amount of health in every stage and can eat donuts to replenish it, but Lisa’s level fails to consider the threat of the adults and its distribution of healing very well. You can often just take the hit from the adult and walk past while you’re briefly invincible, picking up a donut later to compensate. This makes for a much quicker experience than slowly pressing yourself against the wall and waiting for the teachers to complete small looping patrols that only have small windows for you to safely slip through if you do try to play things properly. Another Homer level has almost the opposite issue, where Homer has been turned into a robot and must find his human body parts hidden in, oddly enough, fire extinguishers and fuse boxes. Robot Homer also can’t attack and his opposition is only just barely short enough for him to hop over provided there’s no ceiling, and the timing needed to pull it off is awkward enough that it’s not too reliable even in the open. Robot Homer must traverse a large vertical laboratory in his quest, but he can only carry one body part at a time, necessitating him to go back to the level start and drop each one off before taking off to get another, stretching the time it takes to beat the already slow level and putting him in peril more often without many chances to heal himself.

 

If Homer at the castle is the high and Lisa and Robot Homer are the lows, then the rest make a mixed bag of a middle. Maggie Simpson’s level is a different sort of challenge, the baby getting fused with a fly and needing to fly around a dangerous kitchen area to retrieve computer chips and activate switches in order to reverse the process. The flight controls are easy to understand and have a small drift to them so that you don’t have perfect control, making for a small but manageable learning curve to avoid the bugs and carnivorous plants scattered around the area. Every level has a timer for completion that is meant to keep you from dilly-dallying, and it was only here it felt like it had a huge impact due to the many paths and dead ends that might throw you off the trail of the next important switch for level completion. The flying level feels much better than the other major gameplay shift, that being Marge’s odd top-down shooting stage where Springfield has been overrun with zombies. Taking on zombified versions of other characters from the show, Marge wields an unusual gun that starts off a bit too ineffective with its basic shots. She can pick up manure or puddle water to get more effective but limited shots, but outside the bosses, fighting the zombies isn’t really worth the time since the screen size is small and zombies who you can see are better off ignored instead of weakly shooting at them and hoping they will die before they get close. The regular zombies aren’t hard, but it’s much wiser to move around them since the walking area is so vast and the zombies take more time to kill than they are worth. Boss arenas are more limited though, and the screen size becomes a problem again as it is hard to set up to shoot the bosses properly, all while they hurl projectiles back at you.

Marge’s stage is packed with small boss encounters that test a somewhat flawed shooting system that is rigidly aimed by Marge’s movement, her need to dodge attacks often making it hard to get a bead on enemies for more than a second, but the bosses found in other stages are mostly easy to deal with and require just a bit of smart movement. The final level to discuss though has a boss fight that is difficult mostly for the right reasons and requires the player to pick up on enemy patterns and strategize their movement to avoid damage and land attacks. The last of the Homer stages is one where the player is the family patriarch after he’s been transformed into King Kong. Walking through a city, things seem cool enough at first until King Homer reveals he’s perhaps the most vulnerable character of them all, the stage packed with tanks, attacking planes, and dropping bombs he must deal with as he hops over or climbs up buildings. There aren’t a lot of health pick-ups in this stage, so you must be incredibly cautious with how King Homer approaches enemies, and while he does have a few attacks for dealing with them depending on where they are, sometimes just ignoring them and moving forward is the safer option.  Health preservation is pivotal in this stage because it has a boss fight with an actually good design waiting at the end, one you’ll need that life to weather. Marge technically faces harder foes, but her checkpoints will start her closer to them and the path there isn’t as risky, and King Homer’s final foe feels better designed than the hectic firefights Marge engages in.

 

Since The Simpson: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror involves linear progression from one level to the next, each level essentially must be equally weighed when considering the broader quality of the title. Their order is certainly important as well, and funnily enough, the game seems to alternate between the bad stages and the good or mediocre ones pretty consistently. There’s often a rise right after a fall, but the majority of the levels are either poorly designed or merely acceptable, meaning ones like the castle aren’t really worth playing through to see the rest of the experience.

THE VERDICT: Much like the episode type its based on, The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror is a selection of disconnected ideas for unusual situations the classic cartoon family can experience, and just like those episodes, the quality of an individual segment can be hurt a bit by the company it keeps. While you can choose not to watch the worse segments of an episode, you must play through every part of this video game to get to the next one, and the unfortunate truth is that most levels either don’t have much going on in them or are designed poorly. Marge’s shooting section is sloppy and stiff, Lisa’s stealth stage is mostly long and can be cheesed, the Robot Homer level is similarly long but must be taken slowly so it drags even more. While the game has some highlights like the boss fight as King Kong Homer and the platforming challenges in the vampiric castle, you must push through the badly designed ones and some passable ones for the rare but brief highlights.

 

And so, I give The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror for the Game Boy Color…

A BAD rating. The Treehouse of Horror episodes have a lot of potential for video game adaptation, but this is a bit of a poor exploration of it. The game does add some nice touches like its credits mimicking the corrupted Halloween style the show’s go through for the same episode, but where the episodes on T.V. are incredible breaks from the norm, the video game about them settles into a comfortable zone of reusing the same platforming design with weak alterations too many times, making the points where it works feel less exciting because they are sandwiched between humdrum examples of it. When it breaks away into other genres it doesn’t do so gracefully, so while it may be interesting for a Simpsons fan to find out which horror segment was adapted next, the adaptation of it will be often be underwhelming when it’s not just downright bad.

 

There are many ways The Simpsons could take another crack at a Treehouse of Horror based game and do better at it, such as making it a set of minigames or finding a more universal playstyle to pursue and build on between the vignettes, but this Game Boy Color game’s attempt sadly comes up short, taking some of the most imaginative Simpsons episodes and not finding the creativity needed to make them enjoyable video game stages.