The Haunted Hoard: Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery (Switch)

Video games have often struggled with turning carnival games into entertaining experiences. At a carnival or festival, shooting prizes off a shelf with a cork gun is made interesting because it’s a tiny part of a larger outing and you walk away with a material prize if you do well. Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery tries to make its prizes have value within its game systems, but the bigger push to add some excitement to replace the lack of real prizes is right in the name. Adding some ghostly intrusions from various Japanese spirits does sound like something that could add some excitement to a video game adaptation of the simple amusement, although the way the light gun shooter Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery handles it feels a little reserved at times.

 

In Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery’s main Carnival mode, up to three players can use their Switch Joy-Cons like popguns, the players pointing at the screen to aim for the targets they’ll be shooting off the shelves. Since light gun games on the Switch often rely on the relative movement of your controller rather than detecting where they are pointed you will sometimes have to press a button to recenter your aim, although that usually only feels necessary when you’re shifting to something new rather than working on a single screen. The Carnival mode is where Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery gets closest to the real carnival games it is based on, the player having a set amount of time to shoot as many objects off the shelves in front of them. The objects on show do include a decent range of items, things like snacks and toys usually possible to knock off with a single shot unless they’re arranged in a structure that makes them tougher to topple but also satisfying if you can cause it all to crumble with a well placed shot. Other items are much sturdier like models of Mt. Fuji, daruma dolls, trophies, and beckoning cat statues. The game will cycle through a few different ways of displaying items every time the timer runs out and it serves as a way to refresh what you’ll be shooting at, and at first, there are some systems that make this feel like there could be some legs to this game style.

Every shot you take in Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery costs tokens. You have three ammo types, a cork costing 2 tokens to fire but it’s fairly weak, 5 token metal balls are much better at knocking things over but rapid fire or well placed shots feel required for the heavier objects, and the rocket shot at its 10 token price is usually much better at knocking objects over but its shots fly with a little delay so you can’t as easily barrage something that needs more effort to send falling. The items you knock off the shelf all provide some amount of tokens when they topple, so there is a little bit of cost analysis when you’re starting off. The early period of playing is definitely Carnival Mode at its most interesting as you’re learning how certain items can be approached. A crystal skull provides a good pay out but learning where to shoot it and how many shots to spend on it is a decently interesting learning process, but the range of items that really require you to learn the best method of knocking them over is limited and the timer is perhaps too generous. Once you start to understand how to knock off the sturdier prizes, a not exactly lengthy process, it’s pretty easy to knock most everything off, and while some screens will have moving shelves to make it a tiny bit more complicated, it still doesn’t rescue Carnival mode from becoming dull and samey. There’s fewer shelf arrangements than you might expect as well, and while you can maybe spend a little more time trying to ensure shooting down heavier prizes is more profitable, this is where the game would have exhausted itself had it only tried to imitate a real carnival game.

 

However, as you shoot objects, sometimes they contain spooky surprises. Prizes will sometimes move on their own, and shooting them can reveal a mouse, earn you some free shots, or most important of all, they could release a spirit. The spirits during the prize sections of Carnival mode are often the simplest and easy to clear with a few quick shots, but taking out these basic ghosts will start to earn you credit for heading towards the Haunted House. After you’ve built up enough spiritual energy through shelf-shooting, you’ll be whisked away to the Haunted House where you’ll now go through a series of rooms filled with cute but dangerous Japanese spirits. The yokai you can see here come in a wide variety, from faceless delinquents to hopping umbrellas, from zombies and vampires to floating fireballs and animated snack foods. Some like the long-necked woman have a spot you need to shoot them to clear them, but mostly they are pretty similar in behavior until you start reaching the boss rooms. Sometimes the boss monsters are just puffed up versions of regular spirits, but more unique monsters like living walls and a nine-tailed fox appear here and are much more aggressive. Taking damage usually just leaves you unable to shoot for a bit and the Haunted House’s rooms are timed, and with clearing the Haunted House giving you a huge token pay out that basically invalidates any need to be careful with shots in normal play, finishing the excursion does seem like it could be a rewarding challenge. However, it’s hard to tell why sometimes a boss monster at the end of the Haunted House is surviving your shots. You can unload into them as long as possible and sometimes that still isn’t enough, and there’s not really room to improve your shooting. The Haunted House is more involved with its moving targets and variety in enemy types, but capping it off with these sloppy boss showdowns feels like a bit of a dampener on the fun they could have provided.

During Carnival play both at the shelves or in the Haunted House you can start earning credit towards Missions. Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery has many ways to earn tokens beyond shooting things down, some of these like a free lottery or the occasional bit of spare change just a way to ensure there’s always a free way to jump back in if you are foolish with your tokens but the Missions will quickly make your money woes basically non-existent after even just the first visit to the Carnival. Missions include tasks like shooting down a certain amount of objects, utilizing your different ammo types, taking down spirits, and pretty much all the common actions you’ll be doing anyway. This might motivate you to knock down some of the heavier objects more often to clear their related missions, but they’re all active at once and available for quick hefty cash outs once you’ve done them. While playing with three players consistently can maybe drain your tokens to some extent, the missions are so generous that scarcity isn’t too much of a concern, although there is at least a capsule machine where you can spend tokens to get random collectibles as some way to add some more use to this abundant resource.

 

There is more to do outside the Carnival though, and the minigames on offer actually hold up longer than the game’s main attraction.  There’s quite a range of minigames to be played in Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery and all of them come in four difficulties, some actually quite challenging on the hardest Evil setting. Here you’ll still often be under a timer, but beyond competing with other players to do better at them, you can also play them alone or cooperatively to try and hit specific quotas to clear them. For example, a minigame where you survive waves of aggressive spirits with an actual health meter now makes it a survival challenge where you do need to aim well and fire quickly to hit that completion timer. Some games are quick one-and-dones like firing rockets to knock over bowling pins or picking an item on a shelf to fire at to see how far it will fly, and these do seem to lean more into the spirit of competition than providing some inherent fun. Others though feel very plain or far too easy even on Evil. A memory game moves slowly and fits in the time limit too easily, a game where spirits burst out of jack-in-the-boxes sets the bar for success too low, and ones that you can find yourself losing sometimes achieve that for a weak reason like trying to shoot dice to roll them until you get a desired result. Unfortunately a good amount of the minigames are very basic, and while they can work as part of a sequence of games for a multiplayer session, there are still very few stand-out concepts that will keep you coming back for multiple rounds.

 

Spirit Stairway tries to turn the minigames into a challenge mode though, and it also suffers as bit from the designs on offer. Spirit Stairway strings together a set of minigames at different difficulties you need to clear to climb up the next step, and while you can retry any step as many times as it takes, you do need to clear the game’s conditions one after the other to win. Again, some are so simple and easy they’ll never be a problem, but some of those weaker ones like the dice rolling one become aggravating because you have only the one try for a minigame that feels fiddly. It is an appreciated bit of structure that tries to draw a bit more out of the more basic minigames, but it still feels held back by the generally low quality of the amusements on offer.

THE VERDICT: It is quite easy to quickly solve the prize-shooting play of Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery’s Carnival mode and the abundant opportunities to earn tokens also removes much need to really consider how you spend your resources, but the spirits that almost salvaged the play end up flawed in a few ways. The Haunted House portions aren’t exciting enough and can end roughly while the minigames where the spirits can be more easily engaged with trend towards simple or easy games that feel basic or even bothersome when they appear in situations like the Spirit Stairway or versus competitions. Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery did put some thought into how it could spice up its simple shooting gallery, but even the additions can often feel a touch too lean in an experience that dries up far too quickly.

 

And so, I give Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery’s offerings wither away far too easily. The shelf shooting that comprises the game’s main mode is supported with a surprisingly paltry selection, the displays and items repeating much too quickly when you can figure out the quirks of the objects without too much time spent experimenting. The missions, while good for short term goals, also lavish you with tokens so you don’t really need to worry about how much you’re spending even if you do care about the capsule machine collectibles, and the Haunted House that feels like it’s meant to be the climax of Carnival mode sessions still feels a bit loose as your success hinges mostly on if a boss decides to be stubborn on going down rather than how you handle the more animate spirit targets. The minigames were nearly a saving grace and the different completion requirements is a smart way to not only give you individual goals but also gives Spirit Stairway its structure, but the actual quality of the minigames ranges too much to where you’re often held up by a weak game and the ones with more potential expect too little of you. If a difficulty is going to be called Hard or Evil the design should at least be pumped up to such a degree, but some of the games at least have potential when played against another player while others just became pretty bland in the same way the standard shooting does.

 

Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery mostly exhibits fairly competent design but it has very low estimations of the difficulty players will experience with them, little kids likely to get more out of the game as they won’t as easily notice the ease with which every element of the game could be figured out. They might also be the ones most bothered by the need to frequently recenter their aim though, but Spooky Spirit Shooting Gallery can at least say it likely is a better experience than if bog standard prize shooting was converted into video game form. It still can’t elevate it into something that works in a digital medium where you can’t get the goodies you knock off the shelf, but the injection of yokai and some minigames at least push it closer to being something more.