The Haunted Hoard: Haunt (Xbox 360)

Haunt made me feel like a kid again. With its Kinect based play requiring full body movement, avoiding ghosts in a spooky but not scary haunted mansion often felt like the kind of games of imagination you might play with a young child. You could tell them to duck down to avoid trouble or move their arms in big exaggerated ways to fight some fictional monster, and while this does sound a bit like the kind of play you’d expect a group of kindergartners to engage with when lead by the teacher, the physicality integrated into Haunt doesn’t feel condescending since you are actually engaging with something on screen and the tone of the game is jovial rather than too kiddy.

 

Haunt has you as the player find themselves trapped in the mansion of Benjamin Muldoon, but he’s in a pickle worse than yours. This selfish but amusing oblivious businessman was trapped in the portraits of his mansion with a group of ghosts left to guard the Phantaflasks that can be used to return him to his human self, and since neither of you can escape the mansion at the moment, he enlists you in the quest of restoring him to normal with the promise you can escape together. Muldoon provides helpful pointers and tutorials as you explore the mansion, sometime giving hints that are a bit too helpful, but Haunt’s puzzles are often not that involved and the areas you find yourself in are limited in scope so you don’t often find yourself wandering aimlessly or unable to find what needs to be done to progress. While the ghosts you encounter are certainly cartoonish, the mansion itself has an eerie atmosphere and since there is a focus on the player holding their arm up to wield a flashlight, there are spaces that are particularly dark that help the mansion feel like it has some appropriately spooky ambience.  Benjamin Muldoon is almost always a bit nutty though, and while his clear moral failings might make it hard for kids to warm up to him, his presence helps to keep the tone in check since the encounters with comedic ghosts can sometimes be spaced out quite a bit.

To control Haunt, you’ll be using your whole body, the Kinect camera needing a good view of even your legs as you will be traversing this digital mansion by walking in place in real life. For the most part, Haunt is nice and accommodating in terms of movement timing so there aren’t many detection woes, but walking does seem to be one space it occasionally struggles. You might need to take large obvious steps to keep moving at a good pace, but a bit more of a hitch comes in the fact you might be unable to tell if you’re caught on a corner or environmental object. You are given a little too much freedom when walking since you can end up bumping into things the game can’t display too well due to its attempt to appear like a first-person view of the mansion exploration, and while an adjustment can usually be figured out fairly quickly, it does happen often enough to register as a frequent impediment and the kind of thing that might frustrate particularly young players.

 

Haunt involves exploring three annexes for the Phantaflasks and dividing them into multiple floors helps keeps the general size of an area down so you can usually get around fairly quickly and press past the movement woes, and each annex has some distinct ideas. One contains something close to a haunted coaster and to get it active you must complete some small puzzles first while the music wing will have you scouring the area for records to find which one contains the clue you need for a bell puzzle. Not many details are up in the air at one time so you often know either exactly what to do or are walking towards it since it’s the only way forward, but having to involve yourself physically to do things like rotate valves adds a kinetic quality to the work that makes parts of it seem less mundane. Not every interaction is clean, but messing up never really has strong consequences so you can just try the motion again. Each annex does have a new power you gain, these mostly just impacting ghost encounters or chapter specific barriers, but some like the music annex lean into the Kinect’s microphone as there are times you need to sneak through an area without making noise or conversely you can use sound in battle to harm certain spirits more easily.

 

The spirits are a big part of where the game succeeds and where a few struggles emerge. The part that perhaps feels the most like playing pretend as a kid are when you’ll be walking the halls of Muldoon’s manor only for some danger to suddenly appear. It could be a charging ghost you need to duck down under or skulls on the wall emitting toxic gas that you’ll need to cover your mouth and nose to avoid inhaling, but these are usually spaced well so they’re a sudden injection of quick action, and since exaggerated actions are read better by the Kinect sensor, it has that quick shift of pace you might expect from a game like Musical Chairs or Red Light Green Light. The actions you need to take in Haunt are rarely precise so very rarely does it feel like the game makes a mistake on picking up if you covered the right part of your body or moved in time, and while having to jump in certain situations does feel like a risky control method, the game also is much more accommodating on the timing for it so you don’t need to hop a bunch of times in place or spring without proper preparation and potentially fall. Haunt seems to understand the Kinect’s limits surprisingly well much of the time and for the most part the game doesn’t repeat the same danger for quite some time, but that is not as true for the ghost encounters.

There are few boss ghosts found in Haunt that you’ll be facing multiple times, the player fighting them with big movements like how they’d respond to hazards during normal exploration. You might smack an energy blast back, deliver a punch when a ghost’s defense is down, or even reach forward to snap the goggles on a ghost’s face back into their eyes to daze them, and these do work well and set apart the small range of ghosts a bit since each has different motions tied to taking them down. Most do involve using your flashlight as well, it normally a pretty good way of interacting with the world since pointing its beam at objects or doors for a second will cause you to interact with them even if they’re distant so you don’t need to walk closely to every item of interest. The flashlight in a fight feels a touch harder to aim since ghosts move so much, but what weakens these more is their frequency. When you’re first encountering a new ghost type like each annex’s main spirit, they will gradually get more complicated. However, a green ghost makes frequent reappearances all throughout the mansion and their fight becomes all too easy early on, and unlike the quick reactions to a ghost tearing through the hall or a toxic gas trap, the green ghost fight goes on for a while. You can tackle the annexes in any order so their difficulty was probably kept comparable, but reusing one encounter with relative frequency across them saps some of the interest you have in otherwise new areas, and soon the main ghost of that location starts to feel a bit too familiar as well.

 

Even if you do slip up during an ambush or struggle with a specific ghost type, life is hardly hard to find in Haunt. Most bureaus and drawers you can investigate will contain either a healing pink orb or a heart vial that is meant to revive you should you lose all your life, but if you just search every room in these fairly small floors, you’ll have loads of those vials despite likely never needing them. This does feel like a way to prevent young players from losing too easily though and legitimate peril doesn’t feel like the main purpose behind the spectral encounters, it really more about the movement based play.

THE VERDICT: While it’s a short adventure with some repetitive elements and occasional walking issues, Haunt does feel like an effective showcase for how the Kinect can enhance a game. With possible detection issues properly accounted for to avoid frustrations and plenty of situations that require big kinetic reactions that make you feel more involved in the action, the haunted house exploration of Haunt is able to tap into the simple fun of playing pretend and moving your body while rooting it in a silly narrative and suitably varied gameplay context. While waving your arms to keep bats out of your face loses its novelty thanks to some overuse, generally nothing in Haunt ends up worn down to the point of annoyance through their repeat appearances so you can focus more on whatever nifty idea for some motion play crops up next.

 

And so, I give Haunt for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. Had it kept up its creative momentum for longer, Haunt would come as an easy recommendation despite being so easy you’ll likely have a huge hoard of heart vials by the story’s end.  The green ghost is the game at its most egregiously repetitive though and even then it doesn’t appear so often you can’t bear to fight it again, but seeing other parts of the mansion whip out simple changes to things like how traps are designed does make you wish it was something quick and simple like the bat attacks instead of a full fight you encountered one too many times. Mixing up the concepts behind each of the areas you explore does really help put forth more new content and interaction types though, keeping the microphone play to one annex a nice way of making it distinct for example but even the coaster section can still stand out since it is a break from creepy hallways and empty bedrooms. Benjamin Muldoon is embodied well enough through the voice of Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, but his character as an unrepentant profit-driven businessman can cut through the quirkiness at times and make this singular character with any dialogue perhaps rankle the player a bit. More mature players might at least be able to see some of the comedy in his concept and children might not spend time searching out the hidden notes that really lay that aspect of him on thick. The ghosts do have a bit of personality that helps keeps things light-hearted even though the game does whip out a few sights that edge a little closer to horror than one might expect, but overall it still feels like a strong fit for a young player if they found themselves interested in the peculiar Kinect peripheral.

 

Haunt could have definitely been so much more even if it didn’t want to make anything more difficult, it sometimes giving off the vibe of an interactive theme park attraction rather than the usual similarity to group play in the vein of Red Light Green Light. It does show the potential the Kinect could have had though, the design team not asking too much of the sensor and actually leaning into exaggeration so that interacting with things in the game world was more interesting than it would be had you just used buttons to easily reply. Haunt would probably be too bland to be worth playing if you just needed to press a button to shield your ears from a screaming ghost as there is definitely some enjoyment to be found in acting out the actions yourself, Haunt nearly having the creativity needed to pull it off well if only it hadn’t trotted out a few of its ideas a bit too often for it all to stay fresh.