The Haunted Hoard: Goosebumps: The Game (PS4)

Goosebumps is perhaps the biggest name in kid-friendly horror entertainment. The books by R.L. Stine and their various media adaptations are able to appeal to childrens’ interest in the taboo and terrifying while balancing their scares and monster concepts well so that they don’t traumatize children. In 2015, a film that aimed to adapt the Goosebumps series at large instead of one or two of its stories was to be released, so a tie-in set before the movie’s events was produced. While not the first Goosebumps video game, its name would be Goosebumps: The Game, and in many ways it does seem to try and be the ultimate encapsulation of as much of the beloved book series as it can be. The problem is it doesn’t seem to be trying to be much else than that.

 

Goosebumps: The Game is a point-and-click adventure where you play as a child who returns home one day and comes across a strange truck that had crashed on the side of the road. Filled with unusual artifacts, it’s easy to dismiss this chance event until you come home and find your entire house has somehow been converted into an enormous haunted mansion. With no other real course of action, you enter the altered building in search of your family but instead find three ghostly children locking off parts of the house and an old woman who claims to be your aunt very eager to get you to a drink something purple and suspicious. Considering you had to defeat a plant mutant on the way home and already had an encounter with a talking rabbit though, you might just be able to survive your home’s strange new shape and get to the bottom of why your humble town has suddenly become full of supernatural creatures.

One of the most impressive parts of Goosebumps: The Game is how it is absolutely lousy with references to the book series. While having a run-in with Goosebumps’s most famous character, Slappy the ventriloquist dummy, is practically expected, almost every screen of the game is filled with some sort of reference, be it a direct inclusion of some horror like the vampiric poodle from Please Don’t Feed the Vampire! or the green ooze known as Monster Blood, an inventory item like the mask from The Haunted Mask, or a simple painting or other cheeky reference you could miss while exploring the different screens. Even the trophy names for performing certain actions are often directly lifted from the titles of books, and if you have an intricate knowledge of the Goosebumps series, this game will constantly delight as it hurls reference after reference at you to recognize.

 

The problem is, even if these allusions and inclusions are a nifty tour of Goosebumps’s history, their inclusion often feels hollow and superficial. The Beast from the East isn’t defending a buried item because it’s relevant to the creature nor does it feature any ties to its source book in how you defeat it, and when you start running away from lawn gnomes in the dark in the back halls of a security office it really does feel like the game isn’t considering the context for how it presents its literary references. The shallow interchangeability makes it less a reverent look back through the series history and more a procession of nostalgia pandering, but I actually will not fault the game for this intense devotion to roping in as much Goosebumps content as it can because there are far worse problems in the game design and at least seeing a familiar face reminds you of something better.

 

Goosebumps: The Game is mostly interacted with by way of inventory puzzles, and one of the first problems with this is how many inventory items there are in the game total. So many screens of the title are packed with useless items you can pick up and cram in your expansive inventory, and since you can’t exactly determine what has a purpose or not and some items end up having surprising relevance, you will eventually be lugging around so many objects that it’s hard to glean a purpose for most of them. Some puzzles do expect you to do a few small leaps in logic in how you combine and use items, and with so many potential variables for these portions, making progress is slowed down as you try to figure out which of your many items is even relevant. Some of the clutter exists solely for earning PSN trophies for doing something like the laundry with a surprising amount of picked up items only relevant for this, but then one of the laundry items is actually meant to be used for fighting off an enemy so it’s not like you can sort out the rubbish from the vital tools.

Enemy encounters can lead to immediate deaths if you don’t pick the right item and use them in a set amount of turns, and while a death doesn’t set you far back, trying to puzzle out which specific tool will win the day can be aggravating unless you pick up that your camera can at least give a hint on how to beat the monster. That camera needs film you find laying about though and game screens can already be hard to search for important items, and when you can pointlessly pick up the candlestick off the dining table, checking an area in the hopes something is important becomes a chore. Interaction points can be a bother too since some can suddenly trigger those deadly situations that you might not even have the item needed to resolve at the time. There is a very weak justification for a lot of the inventory clutter, in that a leprechaun who is inexplicably hanging out in the mall near the end of the game will only let you through if you answer a randomized riddle. The item he requests is one of the plentiful pieces of otherwise useless objects you come across, so to make this small portion more challenging a lot of the game has been tainted and many puzzles that could have been interesting to solve instead become about guesswork since too many of your items feel like they might have a chance of helping out.

 

A few puzzles do turn out fine, mainly ones like setting up checkmate on a chess board simply because the challenge is figuring something out on a set of rules instead of rummaging through your pack for the item that might work. It does say a lot about the game that the one I found most interesting was a photo development challenge where you need to time things right, this slightly interesting simply because it was a more involved interaction than most rather than the game truly stimulating the mind with what it asks of you. Unfortunately I have since seen the game The Medium do the concept better so Goosebumps: The Game won’t even stick in my mind anymore as the game with a nifty photo development section. “Clever” is not a word that goes with any of its featured puzzles, and even ones that had potential like getting the right price of candies to activate a secret door is guesswork rather than a mild math puzzle. Some characters you defeat like a mechanical security guard could have been intriguing if the clues weren’t handed to you in such an obvious manner, but it feels harsh to criticize the easier spots when the game otherwise leans on your bloated inventory and areas filled with so many interaction points it can be hard to determine if some even have any degree of importance.

 

While some of its creatures hit a decent level of scariness with their design to make this game still feel in line with something kids can be safely terrified by, the inclusion of pop scares at parts feels rather out of place. Some deaths or monster appearances are deliberately designed to startle you even though the situation and character’s appearance could have done the job without the jolt, but outside of the creatures that are glorified timers for figuring out an inventory puzzle, there are also deadly encounters in mazes where the rules change as you explore them. The lawn gnomes mentioned earlier must be escaped from in the dark, but even though you had to take a deliberate path through a maze when the lights were on, escaping the gnomes feels like its turns are arbitrary and are definitely not tied to cues like where the red eyes appear in the dark. One segment has you needing to run backwards through a maze beneath the sink, but since you view each area of the maze with the same perspective as you did going forward through it, it’s easy to accidentally feed yourself to the pursuing ooze due to disorienting camera angles. Having risky moments does at least break away from some of the monotony of rubbing items against things in the hopes something will give, but like the rest of the game, you’re either getting a puzzle so basic it barely required any thought or one so arcane that you’ll grumble after you eventually get through it.

THE VERDICT: Goosebumps: The Game is truly horrific, but not in the way it intends. The glut of pointless inventory items obstructs the player’s ability to try and figure out the less logical puzzle solutions while the ones that do make sense are so plain that you’re left with very few truly interesting interactions with the game world. The waterfall of references to Goosebumps books will make seeing what’s next delightful for a fan of the books, but they’re all essentially cameos or cute allusions. They’re mostly just present rather than building up the game’s substance, the monsters that don’t just serve as part of the scenery instead fought in odd manners with instant deaths as you have to figure them out. If you lack that nostalgic connection to R.L. Stine’s series, all you’re left with is a confused point-and-click that can’t be said to have dropped the ball only because it would rather cram that ball into your bloated backpack full of pointless trinkets.

 

And so, I give Goosebumps: The Game for PlayStation 4…

A TERRIBLE rating. I do like a game that takes a storied source material and throws in so much it’s almost a museum piece for that brand’s history, but Goosebumps: The Game feels like those cameos are a superficial shroud to obscure the fact so much of the interaction is lacking. Running from evil lawn gnomes would be fun and silly if the maze sections weren’t so disorienting, meeting a random leprechaun in the mall to solve his riddle could be delightful if his mere existence didn’t add almost ten new items to an already bloated inventory, and taking down an evil toy robot with a humorous item use could have been amusing if you didn’t have to grab up every item in the hopes one will be relevant in a situation where the solution is otherwise unclear. Having the obvious clues and puzzles does ease the game away from being completely awful throughout and there’s always that mystery of what Goosebumps book the next screen will reference, but the point-and-click inventory puzzles that are meant to carry the experience are all over the place because the game would rather have cheeky references and weird trophy requirements than curate a set of interesting logic challenges.

 

Goosebumps: The Game is truly a game for the fans, in that only they will be able to push through the wall of references and come out with a potentially positive impression on the other side. Looking through the list of references the game makes does make me respect how deeply the game’s creators dove to make this a game rife with allusions to its source material, but if this is THE Goosebumps game, it’s sadly not one that’s enjoyable to play. The nostalgic references seem to exist to cloud your judgment so you don’t realize that what you’re doing is dull, unfocused, and deliberately confusing. While I can’t speak for the quality of other Goosebumps games until I play them, some at least try to adhere to the structure of a kid-friendly horror story while Goosebumps: The Game slaps familiar characters all around to distract from its limited substance and low quality puzzle design.