The Haunted Hoard: JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island (PC)
It’s not often you find an education game aimed at kids that decides to use a horror aesthetic, but in the JumpStart series of edutainment titles aimed at different grade levels, fourth graders were in for a spookier time than those above and below them in school. JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island doesn’t try to really terrify the likely young player, the ghost Repsac perhaps the most fearsome thing featured thanks to its uncanny face and sudden unexpected appearances. However, theming a learning a game around monsters and eerie locations likely helped it have a unique draw that at least some kids might appreciate.
JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island has you presumably playing as yourself after you miss a day of school. This turns out to be a blessing in disguise though as your fourth grade class’s substitute teacher Ms. Grunkle chose that day to reveal herself as a witch, transforming thirteen of your classmates into monsters and taking them to her haunted island. There is still hope for you to undo Ms. Grunkle’s spell though, the player receiving the aid of the fortune teller Madame Pomreeda and a friendly bat named Flap whose voice sounds like Peter Lorre. If the player can acquire the 25 keys dropped around the island by Ms. Grunkle and collect the items tied to the former lives of your classmates, you can turn everyone back to normal and confront the witch to cast her away for good.
To acquire the necessary items and keys will involve the player completing minigames found around the island. There are nine main ones to tackle, each one themed around a different subject so that this edutainment game can be used for most of the expected topics a fourth grader would be expected to learn at that point in their schooling. There are different difficulty levels for each game with the highest one on offer sometimes legitimately challenging even if you aren’t a fourth grader, and while the game will try to set the difficulty levels itself when you visit a minigame based on your past performance, you are free to raise or lower it without being barred from acquiring the required items for the story.
The minigames on offer aren’t all winners though. The Mutant Swamp tries to pass off trial and error play as a logic puzzle, the player needing to plant seeds in a garden, adjust the light and water, and then see if enough of the plants grow to clear the trial. If they don’t, you tinker with the settings and try again, there being no failure state seemingly but also limited room for actual logical thought. You can see things like some plants withering if they’re perhaps too close to others, but the light and water application will be guesswork for the most part and there are no consistent rules even when you’re planting the same plant species as last time. It’s often not difficult to just bumble into success before you’ve made many deductions either, so while there is some logic involved in knowing how to change the basics, the task isn’t particularly enjoyable because there are rarely tangible clues to pick up on for altering your garden layout. Meanwhile, the Clocktower contains something that is perhaps too ambitious in its scope, the player working together with an unseen hunchback named Semimodo to play songs on a piano. Bats fly in from the right and you need to press the correct key for where that bat appears on the sheet music before you, but the bats don’t fly in to match the rhythm of the songs you’re playing. There are plenty of recognizable public domain tracks that keep it from growing stale, but the bats fly in far too slowly even on the highest difficulty. The higher difficulties perhaps justify that sluggishness a bit better since the game goes from clearly labeling the notes on the piano keys and sheet music to eventually having you have to know their placement by heart to play it, but this is simply too shallow to really teach piano playing and is probably a poor recitation choice considering if a child is learning the piano outside the game, they likely have a better option elsewhere. With the bats appearing so slowly too it can’t even pass for a rhythm game really, but you can at least engage with it better than the Mutant Swamp game.
Over at the Pirate Ship we find a game that doesn’t quite fit the horror aesthetic but might be one of the better games on offer. The Pirate Ship provides a geography test where you sail around the globe and need to find where a buried treasure is based on a clue. On higher difficulty levels you can get clues that ask for things like the world’s largest producer of silver or the country that calls the Nile River the Abay River so this is one of the offerings that can test even a grown adult, and if you need to learn more about a country there is a book you can click on when visiting them to get such details. You need to manage your resources on your global trip too, each movement consuming some food and other pirate ships will get into a simple battle with you where you’ll need to expend cannonballs to avoid being robbed. It’s a resource management and trivia game rolled into one and it works fairly well without losing young players. The Toad Well is a little more unsteady though, it a more active game where a math problem will appear at the bottom of the well and you control a toad who can travel around its edges. Bugs fly up from the well’s interior, some shaped like numbers while others are purple and poisonous. You need to complete the math problems by eating the right number bug to solve them properly, but sometimes you can be left waiting on a number bug who won’t appear until a purple poison bug leaves the well and causes you to lose your life. You get three lives in most games that have failure states so it’s not the end of a run if the poisonous bugs escape, but the only way to keep them from leaving the well is to eat them, this detracting from your score which is important to keep high since it ties to key acquisition. Even on lower difficulties though the Toad Well can still be a bit more of a challenge than other games because it is the most active and fast-paced, the toad needing to eat the right bugs fairly quickly at times so it’s not just about how difficult the math you’re solving is.
The Cemetery hosts a rather clever way of getting children interested in grammar, the player presented with a spooky mad lib game where they need to be able to identify specific word types to complete them. It begins with nouns, adjectives, and verbs, but again higher difficulties push into things like adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Words appear from thin air and disappear to be replaced, there being a timer for some pressure so you want to try and spot a word that matches the required word type and click it quickly. There are even a few tricky terms in there that the game accounts for, a word like roast functioning as a noun or verb and the game usually erring towards recognizing both definitions for such terms. The light comedy of the mad libs is sort of carried over to The Spider’s Web where spelling is emphasized, the example sentence for each word given usually tied to some spooky scenario like what Ms. Grunkle does with her magic. However, the Spider’s Web game feels rather slow as you spelling a word requires crawling around a large web at a set speed to grab the required letters around it. The web essentially serves as a bunch of lanes you can travel between but grabbing a wrong letter makes you lose a life and many lanes are blocked by letters you don’t need, so spelling a word can sometimes involve a slow circuitous crawl. Higher difficulties add a malevolent red spider that tries to chase you down and again it adds more time rather than much difficulty, so time spent at the Spider’s Web gradually grows more and more stale as you’re asked to revisit it.
The Vampire Maze is similar to the Toad’s Well except it focuses solely on long division, the player needing to find the right number around the small and easy to navigate maze to finish the currently displayed problem. The maze is visible in full and your vampire moves around it quickly enough, but the ghosts flying around it aren’t much of a challenge and the higher difficulties, while increasing the difficulty of the division to the point it even has remainders after being solved, also hides the numbers around the mazes and slows down the activity without making it more perilous. It’s not a hard game to complete but it offers a fairly simple approach to the math on offer before it makes things a little tedious when you must approach each hidden number to see what it is. The Enchanted Forest can be completed about as quickly as you can figure it out though no matter what setting it is on, the focus for that game being on curing a prince who turned into a frog by making potions. This game is about figuring out fractions and decimals, sometimes even converting between them, as your droppers for potion ingredients must both add and subtract ingredients to get the desired amount. While not as active as something like the Vampire Maze due to a self-guided pace, it does test your knowledge and even your logic since you have limited tools to make the desired amount of potion. Lastly, the Mummy’s Tomb is a test of your historical knowledge by way of Mahjong solitaire. Slabs are piled up detailing famous people, events, and locations from history with an emphasis on American topics, and you must clear them away by matching information that describes or depicts the same subject. You can only grab slabs that are on the outside edge of the pile and are not obscured, and while there’s perhaps an unusual focus on baseball players in this portion, it also feels like a sound way to help children test their knowledge of people like Marie Curie or what they know about the United States Civil War.
While not every minigame on offer here holds up on certain difficulties and a few grow stale fairly quickly, JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island does feel like a fine fit for what is likely its intended form of play. If a teacher in a computer class sets up her students to play it for thirty minutes or so, they can test their knowledge in a few subjects for a bit and the tasks are a bit more interesting than worksheets or exams. However, the game does set up a story, and if a kid were to get this game at home for more consistent play, they might soon realize a bit of a flaw in its design. Acquiring 25 keys to reach Ms. Grunkle and confront her requires scoring points, every 5,000 points granting you another key. A game like Pirate Ship can grant you 1,000 per play, but getting the required 125,000 points will likely take you to other minigames that provide less score in total or you might encounter something like the Toad’s Well poison bugs who can drain points if you let them. You can play any minigame you want by going around the island, the map even letting you teleport to each area that hosts a game quickly if you are playing the game’s updated rerelease, but doing so would be wasting time because getting those keys is only part of completing the plot.
The thirteen students who were all cursed by Ms. Grunkle each have four items you need to acquire to help turn them back, and each item requires you to successfully complete two minigames to earn them. You don’t get to pick which minigames work towards these goals however, and there appears to be a quirk in how the game decides them. While you have a book that keeps track of your performance in different minigames, it doesn’t seem to do so accurately, leading to the issue where the game can think you’re flagging in certain subjects and thus it will throw you at the same minigames over and over in this item collecting quest. It at least won’t have you play the same minigame twice in a row, but it has no issue having you alternate between the same set of two over and over again. Quitting the game seems to slightly adjust its selection process, but you are still going to need to clear a little over 100 minigames to earn all the items and even the better ones can grow stale with so much exposure. It is a shame this element of the game is so tedious because the game does whip up some fun monster designs for your classmates like a kid with a deflated tire head that still looks fearsome and Madame Pomreeda’s counter-spells are a creative mix of rhyming and words associated with both the monster the kid has become and what interest they were known for before the transformation. To top off this unfortunate repetition though, when you do start to head towards Ms. Grunkle she’ll hurl you into the labyrinth a few times, this usually the place you go if you lose too much health from failing minigames. The Labyrinth is just a basic first-person 3D maze you need to walk out of but it does have a healing fountain where answering trivia question can restore your life, but if you don’t need the healing it’s just more time wasted in a game that doesn’t value your time if you actually want to complete the goals it laid out for you.
THE VERDICT: JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island is a game that really only maintains its quality in short sessions. Its story’s lofty goals demand constant repetition through minigames that aren’t always the best conceived, and while a few games like Pirate’s Ship can prove a solid test of geography knowledge even for an adult, others like the Mutant Swamp’s supposed logic test fall flat due to poor construction. It can sometimes serve as a fine way to test a child’s knowledge of grammar or math, but at other parts things can move obnoxiously slow like the spider-themed spelling game. With the story forcing you to retry minigames an unusually high amount of times as well, the game unfortunately erodes the goodwill that makes it fine in a short classroom play session but awful as a game to commit to play long-term at home.
And so, I give JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island for PC…
A BAD rating. For that possible use of a game a kid plays during class to teach them while entertaining them, JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island is actually not a bad choice so long as you’re working on one of the game’s better handled subjects. The logic game doesn’t provide enough clues to avoid it boiling down to mostly guesswork and the piano-playing isn’t framed well thanks to slow notes on top of simple demands, but get a kid who is learning about the world or math and put them in front of this game for a few minutes and they will likely be entertained for a spell. If that kid is eager to play more though, they’ll soon run into the fact the game really runs its ideas into the ground, your quest to help your fellow classmates obnoxious in its tedium as the game can’t even mix up the minigames you need to play to clear it properly. There are nine minigame types and they have different difficulty levels, some as little as three and others going all the way up to six. Since the story was already angling to test knowledge that covered every subject, it doesn’t feel it would have been a bad idea to make it so that you need to clear each game on each difficulty, although at the same time being able to adjust the difficulty when you do get a minigame can help offset some of the worse approaches to increasing the challenge level like Vampire Maze hiding every number you need to grab to make things slower. Even if it didn’t want the slow difficulty climb (especially since the Clocktower’s piano game would have to be played a lot to actually learn the piano keys if you didn’t already know them) the mixture could have still tried to shuffle it properly instead of throwing you at the same game types again and again if you want to confront Ms. Grunkle. There are some minigame concepts like Pirate Ship and the Cemetery that have potential or at least aren’t bothersome to play like the Enchanted Forest’s potion game, but most of these work best in small doses when the game’s designed to run them into the ground instead.
JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island has its moments of creativity, mostly tied to Madame Pomreeda’s poetic spells, and its spooky aesthetic gives the game a unique appeal compared to many learning games. Unfortunately, rather than being a loose collection you can approach as you like or a short story that then sets you free to play what minigames you enjoy, this game strains some of its weaker concepts thanks to its story demanding absurd amounts of repetition. Funnily enough though this game does work well as a learning tool since it’s fine in that restricted classroom setting where a child won’t have time to get sick of it, but as a product to own its failings become apparent. As a learning aide it works often enough, but as a video game its activities can’t quite measure up.