The Haunted Hoard: Mad Father (PC)
Plenty of horror stories choose to start off with a slow burn, the horror delayed as ominous foreshadowing mysteriously hints at what’s to come even if the audience might already know what’s coming going in. Mad Father, on the other hand, wastes no time in telling you that the titular character is indeed doing macabre experiments in the basement and his undead test subjects have returned to seek revenge.
By being so upfront about some of the horror though, Mad Father actually makes its story more interesting. The story is viewed through the perspective of the mad scientist’s 11 year old daughter Aya, but even she begins the story well aware there is something suspect going on in her house, but neither her nor the player are privy to every detail. Despite knowing about her father’s seemingly sinister work, Aya chooses to believe in the good in him, leading to a few questions hanging over the game as you plunge deeper and deeper into the plot and learn more about what’s going on. Is Aya choosing to forgive her father out of some form of childish naivete, or perhaps she knows something we don’t yet about the purpose behind his gruesome work? With every new room the player comes across, with every new victim encountered, with every flashback viewed of the father’s past, the truth becomes both clearer and yet more complex as the motivations of the characters still remain hard to glean until enough of the details have been uncovered. The question may still be what happened throughout, but why it happened is made all the more intriguing because of the details we begin with, and there are still plenty of strange mysteries along the way like the fate of Aya’s mother, the goals of a strange suited figure named Ogre, and the individual fates of recurring undead test subjects.
Most of your involvement in Mad Father’s story is the gradual exploration of the mansion and the basement below it. Opening up locked doors or finding out ways around horrific creatures requires puzzle solving, much of that involving finding the right items and using them in the right places or ways. While the game isn’t rigidly segmented, an area tends to only require more recent items from nearby places, the game breaking this format only when it’s provided a shortcut to a previous location that it teased the importance of earlier. The many rooms in and below the mansion serve more roles than just item holding areas, each of them decorated with things to inspect that can lead to unexpected scares. Mad Father mostly relies on the style of overworld sprites one would find in an RPG Maker game, the locations having decent detail but character sprites certainly couldn’t carry the horror on their own, even with the text trying to make the simple character designs sound more macabre. Instead, when the game wishes to really crank up the horror, it will present a piece of art that can show the finer details like unsettling expressions, odd anatomy, and bloodied bodies that never seem to be overly grotesque. Portraits of characters will appear during dialogue as well to give us a good look at their expressions, most uses of the art doing their job well and overcoming the limitations of the spritework.
However, the game does try to get a few scares out of its regular graphics as well, and these aren’t quite as effective. Moments like encountering a nun who pukes up blood when you speak to her come off as more goofy than spooky because of the sprite design, but the game makes some excellent use of subtle movements. Many times when you’re investigating an area or even the detailed pieces of art you might back away or start to move forward only to notice something shift out of the corner of your eye, glimpses of strange activities your mind doesn’t have the time to latch onto adding an edge to the mostly still game world. Music can sell the emotions of certain moments pretty well even when the game graphics are being used in a cutscene instead of the art, but the sound design can fail it in other places, such as the game trying to make certain moments scarier with musical stings. While it’s certainly fair to have musical accompaniment to a proper scare, examining objects that only give you a simple text description can sometimes be accompanied by an ineffective scare chord, and these are not only somewhat common, but will repeat if you choose to examine the same objects again.
There are moments of action, such as stealth sections where you need to sneak around living dolls or areas where you are chased by an incredibly fast killer, but neither one really works too well, the fast foes in particular requiring quick problem solving that will likely lead to a few deaths before you can execute the speedy solutions required. Save points are abundant to let the game get away with some of its more death-happy moments, the final action style being a bit more fair in that you need to calmly press button sequences while you are getting your health drained by some dangerous situation. Health is replenished after a trouble has passed too, meaning you only need to worry about your safety in the moment rather than being punished for the game draining some of it to lay on the tension.
Mad Father’s gameplay is definitely at its most effective when its comes to the puzzle solving elements though. While there are a few moments early on where finding out what to do next requires backtracking without much reason to do so, once the amount of available areas opens up, Mad Father starts finding its stride, the player given tools and hints that come together in reasonable ways that still require a careful eye for what can help you make your way forward. There are even optional puzzles along the way to reward players for being thorough or making good use of their usually limited inventory, the player earning gems that go towards unlockable extras. Mad Father’s story has multiple endings as well that all are fairly easy to reach if you split your save across a few files, and the plot certainly feels like it earns putting in the effort to see the different outcomes. Mad Father keeps your mind working throughout, either by taking in new information that makes the plot more engaging or having a few puzzle components up in the air that you need to figure out, and since most of the experience leans on one of these two aspects, it can overcome its little quirks and the action is easy to push through to find the next development in a mystery that knows how to tantalize you into wanting to learn more.
THE VERDICT: Mad Father is quick to give you details other horror stories might hold onto until after some foreshadowing, but by plunging in with plenty of details about the macabre events at Aya’s home from the start, the mystery instead focuses on the motivations of its characters, the player drawn in by trying to understand how the situation came to be rather than just figuring out what’s going to happen. Plot developments are paced well and the puzzles filling the space between them ask for some good observation, thorough exploration, and smart inventory use, but the action segments can be a bit too fast-paced to incorporate their puzzle elements well. The art and music selling the horror story do an excellent job even if the scare chords get a little too excited about the smallest things, so overall, Mad Father sells its familiar horror story well, the pacing excellent at keeping the player hooked until the finale.
And so, I give Mad Father for PC…
A GOOD rating. Mad Father has plenty of strengths it plays into well. Its approach to story-telling lets it come out swinging while still leaving the right details unknown, the quest to uncover the truth strengthened by not pussyfooting around the obvious information horror stories sometimes spend time building up to. There is definitely something to be said for building up the tension through delaying those reveals, but Mad Father can still have those moments since it holds onto its most crucial details, revealing them over the course of your gradual exploration of the family mansion. The action does feel a little at odds with a game that mostly leans on puzzles and its creepy atmosphere to carry the experience, but the speedier moments aren’t a common problem. Most of your adventure is about moving through new areas where strange new situations involving your father’s sinister experiments await, and while the musical stings certainly try to make the game scary, it’s mostly got an interesting yet unsettling atmosphere to it that makes pretty good use of the art and ideas it has. Topped off with a few collectibles for clever players and extra mysteries layered onto the main one, and Mad Father provides a plot and play experience that will keep the player engaged and eager to see what lies ahead.
Mad Father has a few sloppy or unintentionally silly parts, but so much of it is done right that it never loses the player along the way. It’s an intriguing study in just how much information you can give a person before a story kicks off, your motivation only strengthened as you’re given so much to tie together from the start, those threads getting interesting complications as the truth is gradually uncovered along the way. Not every element of the plot comes together well, but the adventure getting there still has the effective atmosphere and interesting puzzles needed to make it a short but engaging horror tale.