The Haunted Hoard: The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem (PS4)
The Addams Family lives in a house of horrors and they like it that way. It also means that beyond being a great place to surprise the neighbors with, their embrace of creepiness and dangerous creatures makes the household a pretty natural host for some 3D platforming action. Whether it was the cartoons, films, or shows, the residence already had plenty of death traps just there for a quick laugh, so a game that takes things the extra mile and makes the whole mansion into the host for the action is a surprisingly natural direction to take.
The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem involves the friendly yet horror-loving family needing to defend that mansion. A sleazy businessman named Kyle has come to buy up the family estate, and while the Addams Family isn’t selling, their macabre reputation has caught up with them and the city wants them evicted as well. Before Kyle can set up a combination escape room and buffet in their family home, the Addamses begin to explore the estate in the hopes of finding something significant so it can be declared a historic site and thus exempt from any unwanted remodeling or private purchases. Most of the familiar characters appear in the game with designs taken from the 2019 animated film and even unplayable characters like Uncle Fester and Grandmama get in plenty of dialogue between levels to either discuss the current crisis or cement their spookiness with comments about their creepy but harmless lifestyles. The four playable characters, Gomez, Morticia, Pugsley, and Wednesday, all feel pretty solidly in-character as well, Gomez and Morticia flirting frequently and reminiscing about some of the more morbid things that get them excited, but the usually dreary young girl Wednesday even has an angle where she worries her usual tricks are played out and wants to find a novel way of being macabre. While the story is mostly just a framework to explain why you’re in a part of the mansion and how such activities in that area contribute to the main goal of saving the household, it definitely has both the spookiness and kookiness that makes the family an endearing set of characters.
The stages in The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem can be played with up to four players, each one taking on the role of a family member but the characters all functionally the same. One reason for this is you start levels able to do fairly little, jumping and a close range attack all that’s available until you step over a large square of ground that will grant you some tool for the action ahead. While the load screens like to emphasize these special abilities have character associations, everyone will be able to use Gomez’s saber, Morticia’s spider web sling, and everyone even gets copies of Wednesday’s pet octopus Aristotle with the game making sure to explain they aren’t the real deal. In addition to a bomb you can stand on top of and roll around, these are the four main level navigation mechanics and on the surface these abilities would actually be a really good fit for a platformer. While the saber gives you better combat options, it also give you an extra aerial jump, the octopus works as an ink jetpack for a bit, and you can use the bomb as a surface to leap off of to get to higher areas. While the game does lay out a lot of little challenges tied to these tools, you can use them to also climb your way to spaces that don’t necessarily ask for it, a player who can utilize them well able to gain extra edges in jumping challenges by thinking of the extra potential these options pack.
You can only carry one of these items at a time, and usually that isn’t too much of a problem. The bomb, saber, and Aristotle’s clones all can deal damage fairly well, but your little default shove isn’t the best for a fight and the spider web isn’t the best in combat. It can grab enemies you can then move around, but unless you hurl them off a cliff or smack them into other foes they won’t be harmed by being pulled along. The spider web strand is mostly for latching onto objects to swing across gaps and is probably the least enjoyable of the items to be stuck with, but we face some odd issues when we consider combat in general. Enemies don’t often feel like much of a concern, bumbling around with it often easier to just walk past them rather than stop to fight. There are some fun designs for these foes, but fighting living tomatoes and instruments is often an uncomplicated affair and when an enemy does stick around longer it’s something like the knights who send out soul orbs you need to hit but otherwise you’re just there waiting for those orbs to appear. The saber and bomb makes quick work of most foes and sometimes even when the game forces you into a fight it might then just have the enemy AI forget you’re nearby and stand in place to make the battle even more trivial. Combat isn’t a complete write-off even with a forgiving health system where a death just has you come back to life immediately but it also doesn’t feel like it ever finds its footing, but the platforming is definitely the bigger focus than the action.
Despite the mansion being the host of the game’s entire platforming action, there was some creativity in the kinds of places you explore. The basement laboratory feels like a solid fit with its many gizmos to interact with like conveyor belts and switch activated platforms and the graveyard in the yard brings some of the expected dreariness while also shifting to a bright green bog for a bit so headstones and dirt doesn’t dominate the entire aesthetic. However, the game starts off with a rather odd but interesting choice for its levels, the first batch of stages involving them seemingly shrinking down to platform across food, plateware, and other kitchen tools. The music room has something similar with its giant instrument to interact with and records to ride as moving platforms, and this aesthetic variety allows the game to explore expected creepy settings and more creative locales. However, these settings do begin to wear out their welcome, mainly in the case of the starting food section since it feels like it wears out its ideas fairly quickly and it starts repeating the same hazards or introduces ideas that don’t change things up much. Perhaps more of a bother is how the game clearly repaints a few ideas, there being a raft section where foes slowly hop aboard in the food stages, a similar raft in the graveyard bog, and a record that floats through the air like those rafts in the music room. The game does try to keep pushing forward with some new gimmicks admittedly and that prevents it from entirely going stale, but some of its best ideas like a level section where suddenly everything is tipped sideways are saved for small moments of optional content.
The main adventure starts to feel pretty repetitive, and despite each stage having three extra missions to tackle during the level, they don’t add quite enough to these often quite long stages. The player needs to collect Family Crests to unlock new levels, and in each level the first crest is available if you collect enough of the floating coins that are a bit too abundant for it to be a challenge. Sometimes the game will try to entice you in dabbling with breaking environmental objects or doing a short interaction with something like an instrument to get some coins, but if you take it up every time you’ll go well beyond the required amount with no extra reward so it feels less like a challenge to grab enough and more a way to prevent you from outright blitzing to the level’s end. The other crests usually come from some diversion into a minor challenge, and the best ideas are usually kept for these as you can sometimes be asked to do a decent puzzle, fight your way free of a bunch of enemies who are at least dangerous when they’re everywhere, or pull off some lightly demanding platforming. It’s a brief moment of more careful planning for level design but more love should have definitely gone into the main stage challenges whose hits are much rarer.
Every now and again rather than a new level though you’ll be asked to play a minigame, these available to play separately in the main menu but also cropping up during the story as a way to earn a crest. These minigames, unfortunately, are often just a bit more platforming but now you need to grab more coins than other players or reach a certain threshold for that crest. While there are some true minigames like curling, more often you’ll still be steeped in the area’s current aesthetic and either running an automatically moving obstacle or collecting objects in a single small space for these minigames, their design less exciting since its more of the same with a goal that doesn’t even encourage much direct competition in play. The game may tout eleven minigames, but very few of them feel truly unique.
THE VERDICT: While The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem does a decent job capturing the personalities of its famously fearsome yet friendly family, platforming through the mansion unfortunately feels far too stretched out despite the occasional moments of creativity. Level-specific abilities have a lot of platforming potential but no room to spread their wings in an interesting way thanks to levels that are too long and recycle too much. Crests often offer the better moments of play with their better tailored challenges but they’re off the main path and the coin collection crest is always too easy to earn. Minigames even find themselves recycling the same platforming ideas more than introducing new ones, so when you add in enemies who don’t really pose a danger as well, The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem ends up a co-op adventure with too little overall energy to keep players interested in exploring a rather tepid mansion.
And so, I give The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. You can see a lot of what would almost work when exploring The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem, the game trying to introduce new level exploration gimmicks or even throwing a nifty idea into the mix for a single crest challenge. The saber jump, ink hover, and bomb roll all have more to give than how the game expects you to use them, and areas like the music room and food stages are very creative when you’re first coming into contact with their new visual directions. However soon you’re doing the same actions and avoiding the same hazards while enemies do a poor job of blocking your progress and even within a singular level it can feel like things drag. The fact the coin collection can be completed well before a level wraps up is probably a good sign things should have been divided up more, the best ideas pursued rather than the game taking its time barely evolving the kind of dangers a new mechanic or hazard is meant to introduce to the action. The game released about a week before the 2021 film so it could have always been a case of having to make the game a meaty experience but not having the time to keep things consistently novel, and maybe in small doses playing this in co-op with younger players might still hold some promise, but it’s a game that definitely suffers the longer you play it and see more of the idea recycling rearing its ugly head.
Some of the level graphics, the accurate characterization and humor style, and the extra use cases for your special abilities does make it a shame this Addams Family game couldn’t match such efforts with excellence in level design. Things that start of creative soon become plain and eventually worn out when you drag them out the way The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem does, but besides a few things like the pathetic enemy opposition you face it does feel like you could snip pieces out and stitch them into a consistently solid platforming adventure. While removing all of that level filler would make it a shorter experience to be sure, it would alleviate a fair bit of the issues that cause such unsatisfying and low energy gameplay.