The Haunted Hoard: Wailing Heights (PC)

Creating a video game involves a collaboration between many different sorts of talent. Creating an excellent game requires having skilled individuals work on the art, music, writing, and gameplay, and ideally, you’d have people on the development team who excel in these areas working together to make a cohesive experience. Excellence in one department may still help you find success, but failures in another can completely undermine the work done by everyone else on the project. Considering this is the most interactive form of media out there though, the gameplay carries a heavy weight in determining how everything else is perceived, and Wailing Heights unfortunately has its priorities skewed in a way where it’s really hard to determine how the balance of quality checks out.

 

The plot is one area that shows promise until you start to really see the full substance of it. Wailing Heights tells the story of Francis Finklestein, the band manager for an old gimmick act known as The Deadbeats. While their heyday had long passed by the time the story picks up, the game does begin when the final member of the band croaks, Finklestein now a free agent until they find themselves in a strange neighborhood known as Wailing Heights. A host to a few different communities of monsters and the undead, Finklestein finds themselves violating their laws by simply being a living human, and due to archaic laws, they seem like they’ll be trapped in legal limbo for the rest of their natural life. However, a helpful stranger gives them the key to escaping their situation and finding a way to free themselves from Wailing Heights. So long as you learn the name of a character, what they love, and what they hate, you can sing a song with those as the lyrics to take over their body, and while this could have served as an interesting direction for the game’s point and click adventure elements, it doesn’t quite realize its potential.

 

When you first get introduced to this method of possession, the character you’re interacting with is incredibly forthcoming with their name, what they love, and what they hate, almost to a comical degree. However, while these freebies seem like they could be there as an easy example for the tutorial, it feels like most every character you ever need to possess on your journey will lay out the information a bit too plainly. Everyone in the game uses very direct language in referring to what they love and what they hate so there can be no mistake, and while they sometimes have some sort of puzzle related to getting them to spill the beans, there’s never any subtlety in figuring it out since even when it looks like the game will allow a natural conversation to imply what they hate or love, the character then makes sure to use those specific words before the dialogue ends. In the first part of your adventure you’re trying to work out your legal case and in the second you’re trying to reunite the deceased Deadbeats as a favor to a zombie who will help you leave the city, but even late in the game the important characters still don’t mince words about their likes and dislikes.

Possessing characters to do your work about town at least runs into the interesting world-building aspects of Wailing Heights. Your first host is the spirit known as Soul Ghoulman, the game already having him filled with character as you learn through a small comic he was a Scottish rapper turned lawyer turned ghost. Wailing Heights has a few different groups of creatures operating independently, the spirits running the bureaucracy, vampires turning up their noses as they commit to the hipster lifestyle, and zombies running their own gated off nightclub since no one can understand their moans and groans. Every grouping has a very pronounced culture and accent such as the werewolves who are all essentially friendly Irish jocks hanging out in a bar. Beautiful hand drawn art not only helps bring the city alive, but each location has plenty of wonderful art for even the background characters, each creature type oozing character and incorporating their monstrous nature in interesting ways like a zombie woman’s head wound looking like a flower until closer inspection. Finding the next character you’ll posses and learning a bit about their life begins as an interesting pursuit and the full voice acting in the game is remarkably thorough as most any host can interact with any character, but some mechanics beyond just the lazy learning of likes and dislikes get in the way of this system truly being intriguing.

 

One of the biggest problems is your increasing body count. While everyone seems a bit out of it after you’ve possessed them once so you don’t feel guilty for doing it, their bodies do need to be left somewhere as you keep swapping between them, and while Wailing Heights isn’t exactly huge, it is large enough that soon you’ll have stiffs strewn all about who routinely need to be switched between to continue solving the game’s puzzles. You can’t just switch hosts as you please either, as you must be in the same area as an empty body before you can sing the song needed to swap bodies. While these little ditties are amusing the first few times you hear them, they gradually lose their luster in much the same way the body-swapping mechanic does as you repeatedly traipse about town to pick up the monster type you need for an activity.

 

Each monster type has a different unique ability, likes vampires turning into bats so they can fly and werewolves getting down on all fours to sniff scent trails, but even these have their problems. These are all faster than your basic movement, and it seems the game world doesn’t accommodate that speed very well as you can routinely run through solid walls or otherwise ignore the environment and potentially get trapped while in these special forms. This is at least something you can nearly avoid if you only use the powers with proper caution, but the game also has a different technical problem where your character needs to be standing in the exact position to interact with other people, items, or anything of importance. It’s very easy to believe an object isn’t interactive simply because the finicky prompt that lets you interact with them isn’t popping up, and this can be especially troublesome when multiple important things are near each other and you can’t make out if there’s a new item to get or you’ll just talk to the person next to it.

Essentially, the gameplay is full of little annoyances that continue to pile up over the adventure, but shockingly, the personality of this adventure nearly makes up for it. Already mentioned is the spectacular art design, the world often looking on par with a detailed comic cover or hand drawn horror movie poster. An incredible amount of details went into making Wailing Heights look fantastic, and while there are some little issues like the scent trails you follow as a wolf disappearing into the haze quite easily, most of the world is beautiful to behold and finds a good balance between macabre and captivating. The personality of many of the characters is easy to latch onto as well, many of the lead characters having decent or downright good voice actors. Abnorm the werewolf is mildly pathetic but well-liked and won’t let much get him down, the werewolves in general have a wonderful energy to them, Soul Ghoulman can be wonderfully corny, and even the vampire Lola manages to endear herself just by being one of the friendlier sorts in this town where most people are hostile towards each other. Getting to learn the character histories of people you possess is often a fun little treat and there are some cute payoffs to personality traits and running gags, some even factoring into the better puzzles like the process of mixing Shaggy’s beloved cologne.

 

However, the standout feature of the game is definitely its soundtrack. Wailing Heights seems to put almost all its eggs in two baskets, the art and the music meant to really carry this world that sadly isn’t as interesting to interact with as it is to look at and listen to. Already kicking of the adventure with a wonderful parody of early British rock like The Beatles with the Deadbeats’s self-named track, music continues to crop up in plenty of places along your adventure. While your possession songs are often silly little compositions barely as long as a limerick, they come from various different genres and can be a bit catchy before they instead implant themselves in your head through necessary repetition. There are many areas in the game where music is relevant to the setting, such as the vampire coffee shop featuring some lounge music that is performed with a surprising level of passion. Most of the music is of a high quality for its genre and having lyrics relevant to their monster type, the zombies having a catchy jazz number about looking past their decaying bodies for example. Despite all the artistry put into the visual and musical components of the game, they’re still tied to a plot that spends more time on a tour of the city than making interesting story developments, and the mechanics used to engage with all these lovely sights and sounds continue to grate against the player until the goodwill the aesthetic and tunes build up erodes away.

THE VERDICT: Wailing Heights features a wonderfully spooky town of monsters drawn in gorgeous detail with plenty of quality music to be found along the adventure, but that adventure continues to disappoint as it can’t hold a candle to all the set dressing. Plenty of puzzles are either too forthcoming with their vital info or are dependent on the many systems that barely work as intended, monster powers having the potential to go awry and the simple act of interacting with important items and characters often hampered by bad detection in regards to your character’s position. Shuffling bodies around to progress a plot that squanders the world-building makes it hard to enjoy the songs and art design, and since they are pretty steeped in the context of the game, you have to push through a lot of bothersome mechanics and puzzle design to try and appreciate them.

 

And so, I give Wailing Heights for PC…

A BAD rating. While the soundtrack and art book can be purchased and appreciated in lieu of the shoddily programmed video game they’re tied to, that world-building element and character personalities that truly bring together that package ultimately lead to the quality aspects of Wailing Heights being dragged down by a gameplay side that wasn’t given the proper level of attention. So much heart clearly went into the art and the songs were composed well even when they’re so closely tied to portions of the plot, but the plot mostly exists to carry you between puzzles that could stand to be more interesting and cohesive. Navigation and progress are often hampered by touchy mechanics and thoughtless integration of half-baked systems like the monster powers and body-swapping, and it’s easy to see fixes for them if the programming was given more attention. There aren’t any meaningful puzzles tied to where you left a body so swapping them shouldn’t demand proximity, and monster powers should have been properly tested to see how often they can accidentally break immersion by charging right through solid walls. You are fed the better parts of the game’s artistic direction every now and then, but not often enough to offset the impact of the repeated hindrances that make it debatable whether a bunch of well drawn zombies or a catchy beat were worth the trouble.

 

For some though, it will be worth the effort, and Wailing Heights does deserve some appreciation for its successes. However, it does feel a bit more like a game made by artists rather than game developers, and based on the credits, that certainly seems to be the case. Plenty of talent in other departments relied on one writer and one programmer to bring things together with almost every other name on board tied to the visuals or sound, and unfortunately, the burden seemed to be too much. Wailing Heights ends up succeeding in the departments it put the proper amount of work into, but it pays the price for ignoring the interactive element. You can push through it if you really want to see this spooky game’s sights and hear its soundtrack, but it sadly doesn’t support them as well as they deserve.