The Haunted Hoard: Haunting Starring Polterguy (Genesis/Mega Drive)
Haunting Starring Polterguy is a scaring game. It’s certainly not a scary game, it has you playing as a teenage skater spending his afterlife pulling spooky pranks, the entire game built around trying to terrify a family with whatever tricks you can pull off inside their house. With literally hundreds of options for how you’ll be scaring them, it certainly sounds like a poltergeist’s playground. Creativity is definitely on show in some parts, but Haunting Starring Polterguy can feel like it only likes to put its imagination in certain places.
Polterguy is the particular specter you’ll be playing as, this perhaps not too surprising but his origin story is a little unexpected. Polterguy met his end when a cheaply produced skateboard broke beneath him, and while he seems to be a generally jovial guy even after death, this slang-slinging spirit still wants to get his revenge on the man responsible for his untimely demise. Vito Sardini’s company took the cheap route in making their products in every way possible and he generally seems a grumpy and selfish fellow, but while Polterguy wants to scare the businessman out of his many homes, he’s willing to spread some of the scares to the family too. Vito’s wife Flo, daughter Mimi, and son Tony are all in the house as well and must be scared out to complete one of the game’s four households, and while the guilt by association may seem a little cruel, they do seem at least as sour as Vito based on what little you learn about them. Polterguy at least doesn’t want to harm any of them, instead aiming to just scare them out of the lap of luxury for some justice from beyond the grave.
To complete a level in Haunting Starring Polterguy involves successfully riling up the four family members until they’re so panicked they start running through the house and eventually out the door. To do so, you guide Polterguy through the many rooms of their single story homes, Polterguy completely invisible to the Sardinis so he can set up traps without them being any the wiser. Around the house objects or parts of the house will glimmer with a sparkle when you’re close enough, this sparkle indicating you can leap into the object and start to use it to set up a scare. These “Spook ‘Ems” come in a variety of colors, blue being the easiest to set up since you can just pop into them and pop back out to prepare it to go off whenever a Sardini comes over to investigate. Orange ones you’ll need to inhabit for a bit and then spring them when you’re ready to scare a family member, but while this does sound like an ambush you’d lie in wait to trigger, usually a Sardini will look directly at it the moment you activate it so long as they’re on screen when you do so. Green Spook ‘Ems are meant to be more involved, the player given some moving object they can harass someone with. You can find yourself guiding a small tank around the room firing its cannon, a snow monster that hurls snowballs, or a bloody arm that you can make do backflips, but much like the orange Spook ‘Ems, you’ll almost always immediately earn a person’s attention with the action and the only real difference beyond activation is you’ll want to not do it so quickly that the scares overlap each other and you miss out on some credit.
Spook ‘Ems are unfortunately incredibly simple in concept and execution. Enter a room with a target, hop into most anything you can enter, set up the scares, and watch as one of the Sardinis graciously falls for each and every one of them unless they’re so scared they run off before they can trigger them all. There really isn’t much need for thought on which Spook ‘Ems you’ll need to set up and even trying to herd someone towards an exit with them isn’t guaranteed to work as they often dart off wherever they please when terrified. The good news is they don’t often get very lost and usually work their way to the house’s exits naturally, and while you can get them worked up in one room, your work isn’t immediately done since they’ll calm down as they head elsewhere. Haunting Starring Polterguy really isn’t complex at all in terms of your goal, but at the same time, it feels like the game isn’t as concerned about the methods as it is the results.
When a Sardini triggers a Spook ‘Em, an animation will start with whatever household item you haunted suddenly acting unusual or taking on some twisted form. This is the main attraction of Haunting Starring Polterguy, the wealth of objects you can set up for a scare backed up by a plethora of unique and imaginative animations. Many are meant to be a bit gruesome, the game not shying away from having blood and guts be part of a surprise, but where it really shines is how unexpected many of its choices are. A ninja poster in Tony’s room won’t have the ninja leap out and attack like you might expect, instead some unseen monster reaches into frame and yanks the warrior away. The mirror doesn’t show some distorted face of whoever looks into it, instead it fractures to reveal the twinkling depths of space before an alien starts to try and come through. Every Spook ‘Em reverts after it has revealed whatever unusual or fantastic situation it depicts and it really is appealing to enter a new room to see how all the objects will manifest as horrors. These literal haunted houses have plenty of unique room types, bedrooms, bathrooms, and dining rooms different across the houses as one might incorporate a sauna into the restroom or the dining room could range from high end decor to humble suburban accoutrements. Add in areas like garages and game rooms as well and there’s definitely plenty of items that are placed for you to play with even if that play is as shallow as setting it up with little input and watching it unfold with ease. You will see some animations crop up again as some furniture like beds and chairs keep reappearing, but the repeated ideas will usually be in a room with plenty of other objects that provide new unique scares.
Seeing the horror-themed animations is definitely the draw of Haunting Starring Polterguy and it can be a game more about messing around than really facing any struggles. You aren’t completely without concerns though, Polterguy having to keep his ectoplasm topped off in order to stay manifested in the mortal realm. When a Sardini flees a room, they’ll leave behind ectoplasm equivalent to how many times they’ve been scared, but with your ectoplasm constantly draining passively, you will eventually run out and be pulled into a Dungeon. Dungeons can harm Polterguy as hands from walls, flocks of bats, steam vents, and other dangers all drain a life separate from your ectoplasm when they come into contact with you. The dungeons are used to collect more ectoplasm but the movement in them is incredibly rough. The drifting movement when the ghostly hero moves around the house is usually not an issue, but he retains that movement style in dungeons and even has an incredibly large awkward jump that doesn’t necessarily work with the isometric presentation of the environment well. If you run out of your dungeon-specific life it’s game over, and the life persists between dungeon visits, but it also feels like the game isn’t too cruel and you can take quite a lot of punishment before you really need to be concerned about your health. This forgiving design and the bad controls for this segment can make you dread a dungeon visit more for the annoyance than any danger, although you can also find helpful powers in this other world that you can then activate over in the houses.
When back in the land of the living, Polterguy has a menu he can pull up to activate a small range of power-ups you collect in the dungeons. The most beneficial is probably the plain ectoplasm refill, but others certainly have their uses, especially since sometimes you might have Vito in a room where he stubbornly refuses to get scared enough to leave. You can activate a power where Polterguy is able to throw fireballs at a person briefly or you can even briefly possess a person to go scare another family member, these again probably meant more as curiosities beyond the uncomplicated usefulness of the ectoplasm refill. There are eventually dangers to be found in the house that reduce your ectoplasm, the family dog’s barks not only harming you but helping calm down any Sardinis nearby. Ecto Beasts are large floating heads that will appear sometimes to fight for the ectoplasm humans leave behind, but you can kick them to dispel them. Your own attacks are just as rough as jumping in the dungeon, and with the game’s final moments an actual boss fight, you’ll soon find yourself using attacks clearly not meant for a battle with any substance and the whole fight ends up frustrating as you try to get Polterguy to land hits on barely moving targets.
Generally though, Haunting Starring Polterguy is pretty easy, and while setting up scares a certain way can earn you higher scores, the only material reward comes from score thresholds that make health spawn in the dungeons. Save for that final fight and rare moments where a member of the household is resisting being scared an unusual amount though, you really can breeze through the adventure and see what you came to Haunting Starring Polterguy for. It may remove some challenge to have Sardinis magnetically drawn to every trap you set up, but it also guarantees you get to see whatever creative corruption of a household object you set up. That mystery of wondering what all the items on hand can do really does prevent the game from growing old despite how minimal your role in the action is, but at the same time, it is distracting you well in that regard. Sure, the gameplay is lacking in strategy and substance, but that just means you can easily breeze forward and keep seeing all those interesting Spook ‘Ems activate.
THE VERDICT: There really isn’t any mechanical depth in Haunting Starring Polterguy, but that uncomplicated design means it can achieve its goal of being a showcase of plenty of spooky and imaginative animations. You enter a room, pop into everything to set it up, and then you watch someone freak out over some scares that subvert your expectations and come in such a wide variety you can’t help but want to see more. Considering Haunting Starring Polterguy gets annoying when you head to dungeons or have to actually control your character for something beyond activating objects, the game is better off just letting you play around, but with how easy it is to keep terrifying the Sardinis, it feels more like you’re browsing for which objects you want to see warped into something scary rather than really being the one controlling the haunting of these houses.
And so, I give Haunting Starring Polterguy for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…
An OKAY rating. Haunting Starring Polterguy walks a delicate tightrope, but it understands that tightrope well enough it can safely backflip on it and do a handstand without much concern. The action only really gets rough in Haunting Starring Polterguy when it actually involves action, the player’s trips through dungeons controlling too loosely to be really engaging while a final boss feels like you can’t even do what you want to when trying to fight back. However, Haunting Starring Polterguy isn’t about those segments, as moving around the Sardini households, looking at some new possession ripe for possession, and setting it up to watch the scare is simple but effective. If Haunting Starring Polterguy always went for the bloody scares it would grow rote, if it was always absurd with them it would perhaps lose its punch, and even a few underwhelming ones helps to prevent you from setting your expectations too high. The Sardinis are incredibly easy to scare and that’s fortunate since it means you keep seeing them trigger the Spook ‘Ems, but it really is a showcase and the moments gameplay becomes something that demands thought or even a smidgen of skill, Haunting Starring Polterguy feels weakly designed. These literal haunted houses are like the carnival attractions called haunted houses, your interactions with them are limited but you do want to pass through and see all the neat decorations. While a little more hands-on because you get some degree of choice in which objects to trigger, Haunting Starring Polterguy is still mostly there just to be looked at when you’re in the mood for something spooky but uncomplicated.
Something closer to how Neighbours from Hell handles trap laying could make Haunting Starring Polterguy feel more substantial, but even if the game wasn’t interested in strategy, there could have at least maybe been more complicated Spook ‘Ems with interesting pay offs if you manage to pull them off. Instead it’s much too easy and the scoring system isn’t a very exciting motivator, Haunting Starring Polterguy still able to skate by thanks to an interesting premise and some craftsmanship and creativity from a talented art team, but it starts to become a shaky ride any time you aren’t being distracted by the scares on screen.