The Haunted Hoard: Casper (Game Boy)

With the cartoon and comics character Casper the Friendly Ghost getting his first live action film in 1995, along with it came video games for many different systems to capitalize. Many leaned on some form of action game where you controlled Casper or his human friend Kat and they at least seemed to try and make some sort of adventure out of it, but Casper on the Game Boy decided to approach it’s tie-in with a much looser structure. Mostly consisting of a series of four short repeated minigames, this Casper experience was already going to feel rather lean, but some baffling design decisions make what could have at least been an easy game to pop on and play into a surprisingly grueling experience.

As you start the game, you’ll watch an unusually slow scene of Casper and Kat entering the large mansion that Casper’s three mischievous uncles are haunting. Even after ambling their way in slowly though, you’ll still need to watch another scene of Casper drifting through the foyer at an obnoxiously slow pace, and this is hardly the only point in the game where things are going to be artificially lengthened for no apparent benefit. If you end up losing a minigame for example, Casper’s uncle Stretch will kick him out of the mansion, and while the scene can thankfully be skipped, the process of Casper being escorted out and then slowly kicked up into the air certainly takes its time for something with only a single simple action to focus on. Things will get much worse though as this slowness proves to be infectious, certain minigames even taking their time and drawing out a moment or structuring things to ensure periods where all you can do is wait for things to resolve or move into place so you can actually play a video game again.

For most of Casper on Game Boy you’ll be playing one of four minigames. Each of them come in three variations, but you need to beat the first set of four to unlock the second variation of each one and then beat those to unlock the third. This does at first seem to be a sound way of potentially preventing play from growing too repetitive, but a lives system ends up potentially forcing a restart if you do lose them all. Working your way back up through them isn’t exactly appealing, especially since one minigame is actually just about figuring out where items are meant to go and repeating it won’t even be a challenge.

That minigame asks the player to essentially construct a Rube Goldberg machine, the player given a set of items that wouldn’t normally be components in a machine and asked to place them in the right spots to trigger a chain reaction and complete a simple task. Whether it’s waking Casper up or cooking Kat breakfast though, the way this task manifests is strange. First, in order to know what you’re even meant to do or what items you have you open a menu by pressing B, the item set consistent across every variation but odd tool choices like an egg cracker aren’t easy to visually understand and it’s hard to know what might even trigger an object. The Chicken with Egg actually needs something to trigger it laying that egg and the toy rocket won’t fly unless something lights it, but the Electric Light is automatically on. There are a set of prescribed spots that you can swap between to potentially place an object, the game telling you on the menu screen if you have any correct ones placed but not specifying which. Gradually puzzling out how to place things could have been fine, but pieces are locked in once placed and unless you want to reset the entire thing, the only way to see how items actually work is to complete the puzzle successfully, the guesswork associated with the sometimes odd item placement leading to wasted time. The more annoying part of this minigame is if you do actually make the machine, the scene after of it activating is obnoxiously ponderous, every little step of the process taking far too long in a device that already is deliberately overcomplicated. Even if you somehow pick up on the weird wavelength of logic for a machine that is already arbitrarily complex, the unveiling of its function is ruined by the time it takes to see the action unfold.

There are some minigame concepts that aren’t so irritating though. One is actually surprisingly speedy, there being three containers at the bottom of the screen that ghosts fly in from above to attack. You move a set of crosshairs around the screen and fire at the incoming attackers, and while they are somewhat fast, your crosshairs are fast enough to intercept them and since they’re meant to be Casper’s uncles, only three can appear at once and thus they are fairly manageable. Even if you miss though, sometimes they inexplicably miss their target, making the stakes even lower. Besides the machine making game, the four core games all have an Ooz threshold you need to hit that it won’t tell you but it will deem a performance a failure if you don’t meet it. In this mode all you need to do is ensure the containers aren’t attacked too much and that’s hardly an issue even with some of your shots failing to register for unclear reasons. That simplicity also means it isn’t particularly interesting to play sadly, but it is at least not going to drag things down like the machine building’s odd demands.

The minigame in the library is likely the one to strain your Ooz collecting abilities. In this minigame, one of Casper’s uncles drops books down from above, Casper needing to shapeshift into a trampoline so he can bounce it off to safety. Sometimes the bounces are simple and straightforward but other times the bounces might send them bouncing away from the safe zone, but the only thing you need to do is be there in your bouncier form to make sure they don’t hit the ground and they’ll eventually make their way out. If three books are missed entirely you’ll lose, but you might also lose if you don’t devote enough time to Ooz collection. Ooz bottles appear in the area Casper flies through while catching books and he cannot collect them while in trampoline mode, and with the Ooz always appearing right as a book is dropped, sometimes you are asked to pick between grabbing the soon-to-disappear Ooz or save the book. If you try to just grab what you can while keeping all books in play, the harder variations of the game will show that not enough Ooz can be collected in time. You need to plan which books to drop to rush over to the Ooz and you are not told how much is needed for a victory, but you will die if you don’t hit that quota. The mere bouncing of the minigame was already slow and didn’t demand anything much of the player though so some complication at least keeps it from being absolutely easy, but the decision making basically boils down to possibly letting two books through in order to try and find the time to grab some Ooz to hit the unknown required amount and thus it just makes a chore a bit more likely to be repeated rather than something exciting to replay.

The last of the core four games at least has its greatest sin being that it is a basic execution of the gameplay seen in Lode Runner but with little imagination on how to vary up its design. In this minigame style called Ooz Runner that ends up making a return outside of the set of four as well for the final otherwise unique trio of minigames, you’ll see the action from a side view, Casper needing to climb ladders and collect Ooz on a set of four floors. One of his uncles patrols each floor save for one where a ghost will repeatedly fly through, rising up slightly in one spot to mark the area Casper can safely stand. If Casper is touched in this game type he’ll lose some Ooz and at least this game makes its quota a little clearer in that the exit opens once you have it and dipping below it is the way you die rather than hoping you have enough when the minigame ends. The three uncles patrol their floors at a set pace and getting around them almost always requires digging a hole out at one of the few possible locations on that layer, there being a little decision making since some floors give you two possible spots but mostly you just dig a hole in front of you when a ghost is close, drop them in and make them disappear, and then head to the ladder before they reappear. The flying ghost is at least a unique challenge that requires you to be quick and careful but this minigame type isn’t too hard to figure out and rather weak in terms of how dangerous it can get with it mostly being about using your obvious options in their intended ways.

Near the end you get two new minigames, one a dodging game that is again so slow that you’ll likely only get hurt if you wait at the bottom of the allotted area when a new danger appears and the other sadly one of the best executed minigames in the bunch because it’s a sound and repeat game where you need to learn a slowly more complex sequence of button presses to repeat back to the game. These end up probably better than the core games simply because their expectations are clear and things like the sequence game even let you ask it to repeat it if you feel you missed some info, but with no Ooz requirements they also don’t distract themselves from realizing their basic gameplay concepts. However, this does mean what are essentially the game’s highlight moments still ending up being minigames that get by through inoffensive design alone, and while the minigames are never so demanding they get truly aggravating, the little odd choices in their design do make Casper on Game Boy a game with essentially nothing worth seeing or playing.

THE VERDICT: Casper on Game Boy is a rough collection of six minigame types, four of which it repeats with variations that don’t do anything to really improve on their issues. Constructing a machine involves some guesswork but it is preferable to games that require Ooz collection but don’t tell you how much is necessary, but at the same time minigames like the library book bounce would be almost impossible to lose without such a mild complication. The game’s desire to drag things out also stains what should be simple transitions or what little satisfaction could have been extracted from completing the machines, but even when you’re playing a more competent minigame design, it lacks the danger or substance needed to add any excitement to the experience.

And so, I give Casper for Game Boy…

A TERRIBLE rating. Casper has difficulty settings on top of each minigame getting iterated upon as you progress so it didn’t need to rely on absurdly slow scenes or unspoken Ooz quotas, but the changes to the minigames are often so slight they’re barely perceptible in a fairly basic design or don’t amount to much. The machine making game at least presents a unique challenge in its three variations even if it still feels like its missing important details and the required allowances to really encourage the puzzle-focused concept. Protecting the containers could have been more interesting if it was willing to get more dangerous, but other games like Ooz Runner are so basic you aren’t really figuring much out or having your abilities tested since all the key components are immediately visible and the variables so set that you won’t encounter any interesting complications. Difficulty rarely arises from anything beyond missing information and a good deal of your time in certain minigames involves performing straightforward actions that don’t demand you to really think much or react quickly. When Casper isn’t bland it’s obnoxious, there not really being any redeeming ideas because even its most sound minigame concepts are approached with an utter lack of creativity or any consideration of how to properly engage the player.

Oddly enough the game does have two endings because failing the last minigames will alter the outcome slightly, although the changed detail in the finale is ultimately meaningless and just continues on with Casper on Game Boy’s general trend of not seeming to understand what would even make a video game enjoyable. It putters along at times perhaps just to make itself longer and then feeds the player minigames that lack substance and imagination on top of being far too simple when played to really draw much enjoyment out, but it at least doesn’t seem to be a case of such a fundamental misunderstanding of fun that the game could become abhorrent. It was always destined to be a runt of the litter when it came to the many Casper tie-in games, released on the weakest console of the ones chosen, and taking it a different direction with its design was required because of the Game Boy’s lower power, but it certainly wouldn’t justify its existence as it ended up almost entirely boring from start to finish.