The Haunted Hoard: Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures (Switch)

During last year’s Haunted Hoard I took a look at Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard and was impressed that it decided to focus on minion management for its gameplay rather than going for the well traveled licensed game route of making an action platformer. When I saw another Hotel Transylvania game was being released it naturally caught my interest, but rather than finding another attempt to break away from the typical design of franchise tie-in games, Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures is very much just another 3D action platformer. However, there is still some creativity behind this new adaptation of the film franchise since it isn’t trying to tie into any specific movie, the premise now where it tries to cook up something different.

 

In Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures, an amicable version of Count Dracula is ready to tuck his half-human grandson Dennis and the boy’s werewolf friend Winnie into bed when they request a bedtime story. Rather than simply whipping out some old standbys though, Dracula decides to get a little more imaginative with how he reads them a familiar set of fairy tales and fables. The game focuses on three stories in particular, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Emperor’s New Clothes all serving as the backbone for a set of levels to jump and fight your way through, but they don’t quite follow the standard design of these familiar stories. While The Emperor’s New Clothes definitely breaks away the most from it by steeping the Danish folktale in a Mesoamerican jungle setting instead, all of them are altered to feature the family-friendly horror monsters that serve as the major players in the Hotel Transylvania films. Dracula swaps himself in as new main character for the forty thieves tale and he has Dennis’s mother Mavis replace Little Red Riding Hood, the two lead characters then joining together and swapping playability in The Emperor’s New Clothes. The changes do go further than simple character swaps though, some to match the personalities of the monsters now playing the roles and others just new twists so that the fairy tales aren’t simple reenactments. With Winnie’s werewolf father playing the Big Bad Wolf he’s certainly viewed more sympathetically while Dennis’s dad is made into a bumbling version of the hunter who typically bails Red out at the end, his presence now more of a hindrance and a representation of Dracula’s continued unease with a human in the family.

 

The little comedic twists will likely amuse young players or fans of the franchise and almost all of the dialogue in the game is voiced albeit not with the original cast, this a fortunate choice since the dialogue boxes feature a fair amount of typos, grammar issues, and incongruities with what is said aloud. One aspect of the story-telling setup is that during the levels the action will be briefly paused as the children interrupt Dracula’s plans by criticizing the plot or injecting their own ideas. Sometimes this can be cute like the penalty free deaths during the gameplay having the kids mildly concerned and insisting that can’t be how the story goes as an excuse for the revival. Other times though they’ll interject to add a group of enemies to an area or lean on expanding the level’s offerings while saying they are adding more “puzzle and traps” despite there being few real puzzles in the adventure that require anything deeper than moving blocks into place or flipping a lever that’s a bit out of reach. Traps are a more present factor but sometimes not really added when the kids insist they are thrown in, and when the game grinds to a halt because the children insist on there being battles and action you’ll engage with a group of enemies that is no different than what’s been faced before in the level on top of the game’s combat being incredibly dull already. It can be amusing at times though like when Dracula has his self-insert hero easily make it to a temple’s entrance only for the kid’s to suggest that was too easy and only then do you see the true shape of the level. While it does serve as an interesting way to introduce some of the special abilities Dracula and Mavis gradually acquire by way of getting them out of narrative dead ends, the story edits are often more of a nuisance than a nice touch because they’re often too basic or excuses to rehash content.

In Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures you’ll spend much of your time jumping around somewhat open spaces. There are deadly drops, hazards like rotating spike bars, and faces in the wall that shoot out persistent lasers you need to wait out, but mostly it will boil down to riding moving platforms or hopping up a sequence of gradually taller pillars. Dracula and Mavis are mostly the same in terms of their basic abilities, both having a gliding option where they turn into a bat to cover greater distances and they both pack a dash that can be used to cover a bit more aerial distance or dodge some danger while on the ground. Their differences become more pronounced in the abilities they acquire over the course of their story sections. Both have a super strength mode which is fortunate since it speeds up the slow and boring battles some where your input otherwise is usually hammering the attack button and avoiding the simple attacks of enemies that are recycled far too often. In fact, despite the game having its story set in a desert, jungle, and a spooky forest, all of the basic enemies are in fact the same creatures but recontexualized for the new theme. The locusts of the desert fire projectiles and disappear like the pumpkins in the forest and the snakes in the jungle, and while there are cool designs like the mushroom spiders, they too are just the latest face for a monster type that got old pretty quickly since they never get new moves and are rarely paired with much beyond more of their own kind in a small batch.

 

The other skills Mavis and Dracula get vary in usefulness and how interesting their design can be. Dracula gets a super jump he can only use on special pads and it’s a little awkward to even get him to land on the ledge he jumps to with it, but Mavis walking on certain prescribed walls is at least a nice bit of visual variety. Dracula’s hypnosis eventually lets him disable foes who have temporary invincibility active, this being the way the game drags out already unexciting fights without adding any true difficulty to them, but Mavis’s equivalent power doesn’t disable that invincibility despite still stunning the foe, making it far less useful. Perhaps the biggest difference between Mavis and her father though is some baffling issues with how Dracula controls despite so many of the fundamentals being functionally identical between the two. Mavis controls rather smoothly but Dracula is a mess, the game seeming to have minor visual issues when he’s in motion. I try not to mention frame rate to avoid alienating people but the speed of the game hitches a bit when Dracula is exploring a level but not to the degree it truly hurts your ability to control him. Instead it adds a visual unease to the action as it can’t maintain true consistency, but that’s hardly Dracula’s only issue. If you try to quickly go from running forward to running in the opposite direction his body can’t handle it, Dracula jerking in place a few times before finally making the turn. To add to this are issues with both vampire characters like not being able to jump if they’re too close to a wall, but sometimes those walls can be passed through since chunks of them lack solidity for some reason. Also of note are moments where a character might get stuck between objects if they fall in the wrong spot and the only option is to exit the level, and sometimes on-screen indicators like the button used to buy collectibles from the shop won’t go away or the compass to guide you to an important area forgets where that thing is and refuses to move.

All of the technical problems make actually moving around levels a bit more of a task than they should be, but the levels already feel like they lack any strong ideas for challenging your progress. There are many concepts that would work in small doses like the Mavis wall walks or using telekinesis to move a block around an area to reach new places, but each idea is reused far too often and with long stretches before something truly new is introduced, and even then it’s rarely asking much more out of the player when it appears. A lot of level design is also devoted to the optional collectibles, story-specific floating objects scattered around in abundance. These exist solely to be used to buy the trading cards, these actually being a way to view character and item models. Some can be found in the level as well, often by finding a key for a treasure chest that can ask for a bit more in terms of dangerous platforming to reach, and the final set of levels does at least get a bit rougher with the player to test their skills. However, the weak reward for gathering so much cash ends up making the process feel pointless, and if that incentive doesn’t click with you then a lot of the enemies found in levels are pointless to fight since they are mostly there to hold onto some of those collectibles rather than serving as true obstacles to your platforming. Some battles are required so sadly you can’t rush past all of the boring fights, the game locking you in as it slowly spawns in basic baddies that are easy to kill, but the boss fights at least step things up. The Forty Thieves story actually uses a unique mirror-turning mechanic seen only a bit before the boss battle and other fights can actually require a bit of figuring out and good movement. Unfortunately the final boss can have its own glitch arise where the boss is stuck infinitely spinning in place so you have to go die to reset the fight if that happens, but these big fights at least give you something new and special compared to a game that otherwise so heavily focuses on trotting out the same ideas constantly.

 

One of the weirder choices in terms of level design though is the fact that many levels aren’t technically done after you beat them. Once you finish certain stages you’ll be informed you must now return to the previous level rather than continuing on to something new. Luckily Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures does have the good sense to make the area you explore in the previous level technically new, the player usually using a newly acquired ability to get to a spot they couldn’t before. This could have been an excuse to get more out of a specific type of level, but already it’s not like stages do much to differentiate themselves visually so a canyon, oasis, and open desert all might as well be the same archetype. Like most things it seems a way to drag things out rather than creating truly novel content, and even when you hear there might be a race in a level, you don’t actually compete with the character and instead its the same platforming done at your own pace with check-ins on your competitor to pretend there’s actually a competition happening.

THE VERDICT: Boring battles, technical issues on top of glitches, and levels that have few ideas on how to vary themselves while also leaning on low value collectibles to pad their already padded design make Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures painfully unexciting. A few boss battle ideas and the later levels would have worked well enough if they weren’t placed behind so many stages where the platforming has few ideas on how to impede you and fights are unremarkable but still forced upon you despite their basic design. The sloppiness of the character control is what really pushes this beyond simply being a dull chore though, Dracula in particular a mess and the fact his movement issues don’t really increase the difficulty only go to show how tepid the levels are with what they place before you. Even the game’s cute story time framing ends up suffering from the game’s overall lack of imagination.

 

And so, I give Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures for Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. When you start Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures it lets you pick whether you want to start with Dracula’s or Mavis’s tale first, and while you likely won’t know going in, you’re choosing between the more negligible badness of Mavis’s smooth but empty level exploration or the awful struggle that is moving Dracula around. You can adjust to the inexplicable issues of Dracula over time mostly because the game rarely pushes for any precision or careful action and during moments of battle you’ll usually just be hammering the attack button or waiting for the foe to attack so you can then move in and do your bland combo. New powers rarely inject the kind of needed variety to spice up the gameplay and instead Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures continues to place platforming challenges with no clear identity in your path and then asks you to return to a previous level where even the new content isn’t going to be too creative. It remembers that getting secret keys and fighting bosses should at least be a bit of a challenge, but otherwise this game can struggle to whip up much of interest beyond a level’s start and end, even saying it mostly reshuffles elements around not quite accurate since that would imply it did a better job of mixing things together. Fights are basic and quickly repetitive because the enemies don’t bring in new moves and aren’t paired much with other foes nor do they often interrupt navigation much save when your locked in with them, that navigation often featuring the same hazards constantly without much consideration for how easily many can be quickly pushed past.

 

There must have been some awareness by the development team how much recycling was going on considering how many times Dennis and Winnie say similar lines about adding in more traps and the block-moving and lever-pulling “puzzles”, but they were all included anyway. If the game had run smoothly then perhaps it could be easily pushed through if you decide to ignore the barely useful floating collectibles, but there are a surprising amount of problems in just how the game holds together even in the most basic moments like Dracula simply running forward. The silly plot could have been a nice little adventure with familiar characters with the fun twist of the story-tellers shifting it around as they pleased and it still ends up perhaps the best idea put forth by the game, but considering how often the story Dennis and Winnie are being told must include constant unexciting jumping sections or identical fights with the same foes faced many times before, it’s hard to believe they’d stay awake for a tale with such stale and flimsy action.