The Haunted Hoard: Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday (SNES)

When selecting a Looney Tunes character to be the star of a video game, Porky Pig doesn’t feel like he’d be high up on the list of options. Many of the big names like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck routinely engage in high-energy slapstick that would transition well to the video game world, but Porky Pig is a far less zany fellow who is often positioned as a straight man to his more absurd cartoon companions. Even when center stage, his humor is mostly drawn from what he says and how he reacts to things, something we don’t see much of in the video game that put him front and center. However, there was one very simple way to adapt him to a video game, one that could have worked for most any Looney Tunes character, and that was placing him in a very typical SNES-era platforming game.

Porky Pig doesn’t have to be an action hero in this game, because platforming heroes only really need to be able to jump, something that requires no stretch of the imagination to justify. The game even sidesteps the need to explain why he’s setting off on an adventure, because even though the game is known as Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday, the entirety of the game’s events take place in his nightmares. While preparing for a vacation, Porky settles in for the night with thoughts of where he could go swirling about in his head. However, his dreams end up concocting destinations that are terrifying, outlandish, and unusual, Porky needing to make his way safely through them so he can wake up and presumably go on a much simpler holiday in reality.

Strangely enough, Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday really doesn’t spend much time exploring the “haunted” angle, with only the first and last level trying to really appear spooky. Between them, level themes like the wild west and the lost city of Atlantis appear, the premise sort of dropped in favor of trying to diversify the level experiences. In that regard, Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday does manage to keep things fresh, with each new stage theme accompanying a small shift to the platforming design. Porky Pig is truly a limited protagonist, forced to deal with much of what he finds by jumping over it or jumping onto it with a jump that looks awkward but functions perfectly fine. Despite this, the stages give him little twists to deal with. The game eases you in with the starting Haunted Woods area, although even there you can find large vertical platforming sections that wrap around the side of a tree and require constant leaps to overcome slopping platforms. More interesting gimmicks come in the later levels though, like Atlantis having a rafting section where you must ride your boat safely as enemies attack from all directions and underwater segments where you ride bubbles and jump about with slightly different physics. The abandoned mine level is almost maze-like as you must find the right way to progress while the final level is a gradual climb through the floors of Count Duckula’s castle. Perhaps the strangest stage is the innocently named Alps, which quickly devolves into an illogical land where ostriches fly, it rains cats and dogs, and there are floating doors you must pass through to find the way out of such a ridiculous world.

Porky’s capabilities do limit how much any idea is explored though, only really having his jump to consistently draw on and his only other skill being his ability to throw fruit. If you find a bowl of fruit, Porky will be able to lob an infinite supply of food at his foes, the attacks doing the same damage as a jump on the head would but coming with the added safety of being able to attack from a distance. Porky is given quite a few lives to start and he can take a few hits before dying, and the game is very conscious of its more difficult areas, putting extra lives and hearts to heal with after them to allow you to continue the level even if you haven’t found the midlevel checkpoint yet. The game scatters cupcakes all about to earn 1-ups with as well, lives earned every time you’ve managed to collect 100 of the reasonably abundant desserts. Unfortunately, the fruit bowls are very rarely given to the player, and while they do have infinite ammo, they only last until you die once. Outside of the early levels, I never saw a fruit bowl again, and other odd power-ups like Porky inflating to fly about are also mostly found in the early stages as well, suggesting that perhaps the developers spent less time thinking on how to integrate mechanics and more time on level design.

Despite the levels having some identifying traits and unique challenges, things aren’t all too exciting, possibly because Porky himself is somewhat bland. This isn’t so much a problem with his character, although he doesn’t do much besides cowering a bit and muttering angrily if left to stand still, but he doesn’t feel very capable, and by extension, neither does the player. Taking a small slice out of a level will often leave you with a few layers of platforms, Porky often limited to only his current level until he reaches a certain point to leap up to the next. The game tends to place at least one enemy per platform or will have one lingering in the space between a jump, the bulk of the challenge being getting past these foes rather than the difficulty of the platforming, although Porky will have to do some jumping tests over pits and damaging hazards. Enemies are quite abundant but not so overwhelming that the player can’t deal with them, but it does feel like Porky should have more than an oddly rare fruit bowl to call on when so many foes have special approaches that seem to ask for more than a jump on the head as a counterattack. The cauldron enemy launches dangerous fire out of its top at a quick pace, meaning Porky endangers himself by trying to jump on it, and if it isn’t dealt with, the fire lands on the ground and lingers for a bit, meaning Porky has lost platforming space. Walking forward will often reveal an enemy before you have much time to consider what you’re seeing, but so long as you don’t rush you can usually at least accommodate the sudden dangerous arrival. Thankfully, very few enemies are more capable than Porky, although a few fast-moving dangers like tumbleweeds can be a rude surprise if you try and take things at too slow a pace.

The presence of a lot of enemies is what makes Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday have its decent yet dangerous platforming, but the bosses aren’t much to worry about. Almost all of them are just about waiting out a pattern and jumping on the appropriate thing, which is usually the boss’s head. There’s some slight deviation from this when fighting the likes of Yosemite Sam or Count Duckula, but both these bosses are still about jumping on the right thing at the right time, the thing is just changed away from the expected target. The bosses are a great way for Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday to pay homage to famous Looney Tunes, with faces both recognizable and obscure filling the roles of the main antagonists but many more treats scattered about the levels for fans of the cartoons. In fact, the stages were almost assuredly selected for their ability to deliver on these references, with The Alps here so Hugo the Abominable Snowman can show up. The odd deviation into insanity during The Alps is likely the developers way of making this unusual deviation for the sake of a reference more interesting than just ice and snow. The animations and visuals definitely have effort put into their design to match the Looney Tunes style, but a lot of visuals are just set dressing to make similar platforming challenges easier to pass off as something new.

THE VERDICT: Despite Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday being a nightmare of the odd places Porky’s vacation might take him, this platformer’s design opts for the safe route. Besides the underutilized throwable fruits, this is very much a game about jumping about environments and jumping on enemies, with even the bosses being a bit plain because of it. The game does carry itself to the end by introducing a new idea or two with each new area you travel to, but you’ll be back to basics often enough that no unique idea truly excels. Things can get a bit crowded with how much this game likes to fill empty space with quick enemies, but Porky has the resilience needed not to die too easily and most levels are designed around manageable jumping tests. It works as a platforming game and changes just often enough to keep things moving along, allowing Porky Pig to be an unexpected video game hero in a game that doesn’t task him or the player with needing to overcome too much.

And so, I give Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday for the Super Nintendo…

An OKAY rating. Porky Pig’s game falls into the overpopulated area of passable SNES platformers, the typical design of the time easy enough to succeed at so long as you don’t fail at anything overtly, and Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday certainly doesn’t aim to make waves. There’s not too much to single out as objectionable, and the minor shifts to the status quo and visual design mean that beating a level comes with the small reward of seeing what the next destination will have in store. You won’t be impressed by what you find, but the curiosity is still there because it lightly nudges the platforming away from its mostly straightforward moments.

Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday is a suitable trip through lightly shifting platforming designs. There are better games to visit, but this title comes and goes without any unfortunate incidents, leaving you with just enough to say it wasn’t a vacation wasted, it just wasn’t the kind of trip that will stick in your memory for very long.