The Haunted Hoard: Monster House (GBA)

Monster House is a 2006 CGI movie that sets up a pretty common premise about people being suspicious of a strange neighbor and weaving some scary yarns about what they must be like, but while this can be used as a set-up for not judging a book by its cover or keeping an open mind, Monster House just follows through on the rumors set up about the house and has it actually be the monster it seems to be. It’s a surprisingly enjoyable children’s movie with quite a bit of style and some effort put into its narrative, and while the Game Boy Advance adaptation isn’t quite on the same level of the movie, it is still a surprisingly decent game that oddly enough is a dungeon crawler in the vein of the early Legend of Zelda titles.

 

The Monster House game begins right at the moment the three central children investigating it, DJ, Chowder, and Jenny, have mustered the courage to enter the building and have a plan for taking the devilish domicile down. This does lead to a bit of narrative oddness as this is trying to take place in the same storyline as the movie but doesn’t go through the effort of establishing certain characters or events before throwing you into the building, so things like the character Skull who is helping you by walkie-talkie just happen and we get some events recapped to us rather than shown at odd points in the plot. The entirety of the game takes place inside the titular house, with the kids immediately identifying the goal of needing to destroy the house’s furnace to kill it but having to do a lot before they can even reach what is essentially the residence’s heart. The Monster House is absolutely huge, meaning that there will be a lot of ground to cover as the three kids must find the way to open access to parts of the building necessary for completing their goal. The action is viewed from a top-down perspective, the Zelda design inspiration too obvious if you know to look for it because the house is basically one enormous dungeon, with progress blocked by the need to clear enemies from a room, find keys or secret passageways, and unlock items that will allow you to reach new areas.

You get to play as each of the three kids in the game, alternating between them with just a press of a button, and there actually is some meaningful differences between the three that makes for perhaps the most common considerations you’ll make during the game. Each of them pack a water gun as their weapon, but depending on who you’re playing as, it has different attributes. DJ, the main character, has the most reliable weapon, his super soaker spraying a strong stream but running out of water if you use it for too long. Jenny’s weapon is essentially a water machine gun, firing rapid shots that make her easiest for rushing down enemies with but having the caveat that it runs through water incredibly quickly, not to mention she has the lowest health of the three kids. Chowder is a bit of an oddball in that his weapon is definitely the strongest, shooting globs of water at a slow pace but having a charge shot that fires out multiple blasts if you can pull it off. He has the most health so he’s good for tougher situations, but his water gun seems prone to a few issues, particularly in a boss fight where you need to put out candles with your water shot and Chowder’s slow firing doesn’t seem to work well even when it clearly nails the candle. Over the course of the game you start finding new items that each kid will insist they are the only ones capable of using, like Jenny with her slingshot or Chowder with water balloons, and while these can make combat a bit more interesting if used, their limited ammo tends to encourage hanging onto them in case you encounter the environmental challenge that requires these special items.

 

Each kid also has a special ability that is only useful for those environmental challenges, like DJ’s climbing or Chowder’s strength, that mostly serve as a way to break them away from the others for a solo section. While clearly meant to be a greater challenge for taking away your two companions on the journey, Monster House wasn’t really a game lacking in difficulty during regular play. The water reserves for your weapons can be drained quite easily if you stand and fight foes, and while you can do weak squirts if you run out of water, it’s not quite up to the task of fighting back many of the enemies in the game. The malevolent house may be unable to attack you more directly while you’re inside it, but it still has plenty of living furniture and insects within that will attack the player. No room in the house is truly safe (save for the bathroom where you can save your progress) because of a living floorboard enemy that will just rip itself out of the ground and give chase, but quite a few evil household items like bookcases do stick out from their less malevolent equivalent when they’re trying to hide in the environment. That doesn’t really make them any easier to kill though, because aiming the water guns can be a bit odd. You can hold R to keep your character facing a direction as they move, but the water gun combat never feels like its a perfect fit for the game world. It does its job, but most battles are standing in place and spraying something to try and hold it in place, and if it is strong enough to push through the stream of water, you run off and try to set it up again. Its the high health of even the basic enemies that drags it down, but it’s also what lends to the game’s decent difficulty because you have to manage your trio carefully to avoid running on empty when it comes to water and health. You may be able to find weapon upgrades, healing items, and some infrequent health and water drops from defeated enemies or broken pots, but foes remain dangerous throughout because of how aggressive they are and how they’ll strike in packs, making it hard to hold your ground and spray any single one for long. The bosses tap into this as well despite being your singular focus during the fights, primarily because they have conditional periods of vulnerability between attack phases. Unfortunately, the game does reuse one boss constantly and it just so happens to be the one Chowder has problems with as mentioned earlier, so a bit more boss variety would have definitely been appreciated to better explore the potential of the combat style.

Moving around the house can be a touch confusing at times, but the game does make sure you always know where you should be, whether by having it set up in a scene or having your buddy Skull be able to tell you on the walkie-talkie if you’re lost. He doesn’t really give you any hints about how to get there or what to do when you arrive, but usually you’re exploring one floor to unlock the way to exploring another, so you can at least be sure you’re on the right trail. The main thing making finding your way around is perhaps the abundance of cracks in the wall that you must spray to break open. The Monster House is already a run down place with appropriate visuals to match that idea, and on the small Game Boy Advance screen, spotting the subtle cracks that are meant to be broken open is only made that much harder. So many moments of getting stuck in the game are likely solved by finding the right crack it wanted you to spot, but there are some more legitimate puzzles blocking your progress. Some are as simple as pushing blocks into the right spot, others are more about performing a task while monsters harass you, but there is a decent variety to the requirements to move on that advancing never becomes too standardized. There are even secret areas to uncover where you fight a hard golden enemy to collect the toys the evil house has taken from children, although these harder golden enemies are really just more difficult because it takes more water to put them down than their regular counterparts. You do have a map to help you with moving around the house interior, and finding the blueprints for a floor will help you figure out if there might be potential secret passages or unexplored rooms, so there are some things working in your favor for finding your way around in a more general sense. It’s identifying the small things that can trip up the flow of exploration some, especially when the game gets more complex mechanics like raising and lowering water levels in the basement involved and you have a huge area with many different states to potentially find the one actual way onward in.

THE VERDICT: Monster House for Game Boy Advance may be based on a movie, but its gameplay seems based on The Legend of Zelda, and some of its baseline quality come from how it built off that game’s dungeon crawling design. It does come with its own unique angle of managing the three kids, their unique items and abilities, and their individual health bars and water tanks, making for an interesting dynamic during play, but while Monster House does put some decent puzzles and strong enemies in its many rooms, exploration can become confusing due to the interconnected layout, and the battles lack any real energy since the water guns are slow to kill and enemies keep you on the move too much to allow you to keep up the pressure.

 

And so, I give Monster House for the Game Boy Advance…

An OKAY rating. Perhaps the big thing preventing Monster House from being just as surprisingly good as the movie is the way its combat is expressed during play. The water gun system is interesting when it ties to the character swapping, but actually fighting takes too much time for how little variation there is in a typical battle. Facing a foe and waiting for your spray to do its work isn’t really exciting, and the game tries to shield this issue by throwing more enemies into a fight so you have to move around and draw out the battle. The living furniture already feels competent enough that the guns could have been made stronger, and if they had been adjusted in some other manner it could still avoid battles being cakewalks. Chowder’s weapon shows the potential already, dealing decent damage with single fire shots, but some enemies need the constant pressure of the other two and lead to the slower fights. Giving your extra items more room to shine would be a good step in the right direction as well, as things like the slingshot are useful for fighting lamps, but its need for progression puzzles means you can’t be tossing out its ammo too often in these small skirmishes.

 

Monster House still works well enough as a dungeon crawler, the inside of this single house having enough variation and new puzzles to test the player as the game goes on, but with the most prevalent activity being fighting back furniture with your squirt guns, the combat needed more polish to make the game stand out as something special.