The Haunted Hoard: Scary Monsters (Commodore 64)
Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster. The Wolfman. The Mummy. A witch. And a zombie. Besides perhaps a ghost and a skeleton, the six monsters who you must take down in the Commodore 64 game Scary Monsters seem like the perfect group of Halloweeny badies to face, and the ghost even gets to join in as a standard enemy instead. With its straightforward name and a lineup like this, Scary Monsters sounds like it would be the perfect game to play every Halloween for some seasonal fun, but pretty much the only thing it got right was selecting those six monsters for this awful, sloppy, and agonizing little platforming adventure.
Scary Monsters has you playing as Harry Johns as he arrives on the island of Dr. Graves where the mad doctor has turned men into monsters and aims to do so to the innocent young woman Conny next. Luckily, Harry’s a former football star, and putting his strength and throwing arm to good use, he explores the island, trying to locate the doctor’s six most fearsome creatures and take them out. Luckily for him, the monsters do not put up a fight at all, usually standing completely still at the far end of a building interior, but in order to kill them, you’ll need to find the proper item elsewhere on the island and then carry it to them to instantly take them out. You’ll never end up confronting Dr. Graves or getting closure on the setup, the moment you finish off the last monster and leave the building, you’ll get a Game Over screen just as if you had failed, but it does at least make sure to include a message to congratulate in case you were worried you had failed in your objective.
The premise of Scary Monsters isn’t too bad, the player appearing on the island and needing to head off and investigate each building on it to see if a relevant monster is within or if they can scrounge up one of the tools necessary for defeating the creatures. For the most part the items are straightforward, a hammer and stake are obviously for the vampire, and while a cross feels like it could have been used on him too, it’s easy enough to glean that items like the potion or axe probably are meant for a target with less commonly known weakness while fire and silver bullets line up with little room for questioning your gut instinct. Not every run of Scary Monsters will have the monsters and items in the same places and there are more buildings than there are monsters, meaning sometimes you can enter and find only an item or only a monster. Your only goal is to survive long enough to take all six monsters out by delivering the useful items one at a time around the map. However, the description of the act cannot match how unnecessarily rough and annoying this all ends up in practice, since even though the game is in full command of what it includes to execute its concept, it somehow seems to make constant mistakes in designing its game world.
The first issue you’re likely to encounter is that navigating the map is full of odd technical problems. On the island map, you play as a simplified stick figure representation of Harry, and despite looking fairly small, he will constantly get stuck on corners and edges. Even getting to the first closest mansion will have you realizing he likes to get trapped bumping into the shoreline or rubbing against a nearby rock ineffectively, finagling him through even the simplest looking gaps sometimes held back by the fact important spaces are only just wide enough for him. This gets especially annoying in a maze you’ll be traversing quite a bit near the middle of the island, but thankfully you are in no danger on the world map and thus are free to get irritated in peace as you try to wiggle your character through gaps that could have been made a touch wider without ruining any element of the experience. It’s not difficult in a challenging way, it’s difficult because the game poorly depicts the area you can move in, making it seem like sometimes Harry should be good to move forward despite some invisible piece of him hitching on a nearby wall. Entering buildings, funnily enough, is overly generous. Being in the general area of the entrance will pull you in with little fuss, but this causes an issue when you come back out and prepare to set off to the rest of the island. Sometimes you’ll be deposited so that if you press left or right afterwards, you’ll be immediately pulled back into the house. If you go up, you go back in, so going down seems like the safe bet. The problem is, the entrances are often in bad spots where going down makes you hit a rock wall, again even the first mansion having an issue where it’s likely you’ll keep popping back into the building by mistake as you try to find out how to even get away from the place. You need to line up in the exact spot to safely walk away, all of these annoying and inexplicable issues slowing down a portion of the game that really is just about getting to your next destination normally.
When you enter a building though, you’ll not find much in the way of redeeming qualities. Interiors can at least be uniquely spooky, one place is a chapel, another has huge monsters on slabs as if they were more of the doctor’s experiments waiting to be awakened. Within these buildings though, there is usually one lower layer and one high one, things like staircases, tables, and box of crates technically giving you spots to stand elsewhere, but a high and low ground are fairly common and see different sets of enemies passing through trying to harm you. In the air, witches and ghosts fly by, these able to come at different elevations to account for the occasional appearance of middle ground, but these mostly just make the higher areas dangerous and encourage you to take things slowly. On the ground though, what appear to be more vampires and Frankenstein monsters are marching forward. Luckily, Harry’s time as an athlete means he’s prepared for battle, able to hurl balls at incredible speeds and with frequent regularity. In fact, most of the time when you enter a building, it is wise to start firing balls and never stop, most monsters having no recourse for it. Some of those on the ground though, when killed, will shift into crawling hands on the ground, and while you can aim your balls diagonally high or low, unless you get the timing just so, it’s likely the hand will crawl up and hit you. Surprisingly, a hand touching you is an instant kill despite it being the hardest thing to avoid when it appears, especially because your jumping is rather terrible and almost guaranteed to put you into new trouble in exchange for that trouble you dodged.
Harry Johns may be a football pro, but when it comes time to jumping, he refuses to budge from his single huge spring forward. Tucking in and leaping a set distance ahead, Harry can’t just climb a staircase normally or clear enemies with ease, you really need to get his positioning right to make sure he doesn’t jump too far or fall short and end up missing his target, losing ground, or worse: he hits a monster. While the instant kill hands are a pain, they’re rarer than the many standard foes, but the normal monsters can actually be more tedious to tangle with because of how Harry reacts to being touched. One bit of contact with a monster and he will go flying back an incredible distance, and what makes this truly terrible is the fact he is not invincible as he’s thrown backwards. If Harry hits another monster while knocked back, he’ll be thrown back in the other direction, and then likely ping-ponged all about the building for a bit as more and more monsters make contact and toss him around. There is no recourse once you’re in this but to wait it out, and the longer you’re in a building, the more monsters will be on screen at one time. Surprisingly, you can get bounced around a truly absurd amount of times and survive while other times you will perish, it hard to glean what determines your fate. On the other hand, sometimes even if you do survive, your ball throwing ability can often be robbed when you’re one hit away from death, meaning you’re functionally useless and pretty much guaranteed to die since your jump is too rigid in its use to do the necessary monster avoidance.
During a run you are given fives”peek-a-boos” where Harry can wave his hands out in front of him and clear every monster on screen and you are given three lives to work with so finding all six main monsters doesn’t feel utterly impossible. Three lives and a few surprises aren’t nearly enough to deal with the waves of enemies in the buildings though, and the fact that monsters and items are in different places between runs means you can’t even figure out the best route to try and avoid trouble. You must investigate every building inevitably and that means glitchy map navigation and annoying pushes through packs of monsters just to see if you even need to be where you are. This is certainly not made better by some true glitches, the game crashing entirely certainly disheartening but even odder are moments like grabbing an item and exiting a building only to find it has somehow disappeared so you need to dive back in and grab it again. While not a glitch, the enemies on the ground also appear from the left and right side of the screen, meaning at times when you need to be in the right area of a building or exit through the far left, you can bump into an enemy that just appeared. Very little of the game’s design seemed to have factored in how you actually explore this world, leading to a lot of aggravating situations as you work find out where everything is and successfully make the repetitive delivery treks without losing all three lives.
THE VERDICT: After struggling with the odd issues involved in navigating the seemingly simple world map of Scary Monsters, players will face annoyance after annoyance trying to explore the building interiors. An enormously unhelpful bound of a jump, the propensity for chain reactions whenever you hit a monster, the instant kill hands, and difficulties even leaving the building make the act of checking what’s inside a building annoying enough on a first go. However, you’ll need to revisit locations to line up the weapons with their intended targets, and when the game isn’t outright crashing, you’re still likely going to lose your small set of lives to something frustrating because the only thing that can break through your wall of attacks are nuisances.
And so, I give Scary Monsters for Commodore 64…
An ATROCIOUS rating. Scary Monsters is a very strange mess and it can’t even hide it from the start. Your character bumping into objects on the world map while you’re just trying to walk from place to place is an immediate poor impression that is a signal of how almost everything you do is going to be imprecise or have an issue. Funnily enough, your ball throw could have been almost too effective and actually robs the game of what could have been some genuine danger. It’s far too easy to just keep launching your attacks, but the moment you truly need it, when those hands are coming towards you, it will almost undoubtedly fail you. The peek-a-boos almost give you an out if you’re quick enough to see the hand, but you’ll likely see more than five hands across your adventure because buildings are packed with ornery undead. You can figure out little ways to make things less inconvenient, but there really isn’t much to the game’s substance even if you strip away all the outright glitches or baffling design flaws. You’re just walking from place to place to see if the buildings have what you need inside, the meaningful differences between interiors mostly just being the backdrop and a few spots where the high ground is a bit different. A pyramid interior offers no unique challenges compared to a castle, and they all are mostly made hard by the threat of a hand, of being bounced back and forth between monsters, or trying to line up your terrible leap. The world map movement shouldn’t have been so rough, the ping-ponging as multiple monsters hit you shouldn’t exist, the hands shouldn’t be instant kills, these all feel like obvious improvements if you play the game for a bit, but it feels like the game’s designer Marc Wilding shoved it out untested to get to work on their next game.
Unless you want a game to truly horrify you with how horrendous it is to play it, Scary Monsters is sadly not the perfect piece of Halloween entertainment its simplicity set it up to be. Rather than a game you can easily return to, it’s one that’s aggravating to be forced to replay as too many things are set up to bring it to a premature end while offering almost nothing of true interest besides gradually figuring out where everything is placed and executing on your notes. Perhaps the straightforward title and simple selection for the six monsters you need to kill were actually a sign of how little thought was put into the experience, elements feeling like they were thought up and implemented without proper consideration or polishing to make them work together.