The Haunted Hoard: Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town (PC)

If you want to play out an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You! in video game form, Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town feels like the perfect pick for doing so. The crime solving of Mystery Inc. and their talking dog Scooby Doo is reproduced with a surprising degree of faithfulness, this point and click adventure even conceivably fitting into a thirty minute time slot if it hadn’t been for the interactive elements. Characters are practically cut right out of the cartoon (or one of the straight-to-video movies) when it comes to their appearance and still animated enough so it doesn’t feel too stiff, and while the original voice actors weren’t available, the performers used for Scooby Doo media of the time reprise their roles for that extra bit of authenticity. If it were judged purely on mimicking the source material, Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town would stand out as something amazing, and thankfully, the actual gameplay side of the experience doesn’t hold fans of the series back from experiencing the faithful touches.

Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town does perhaps pull off a somewhat weak first impression though. While it accurately mimics the opening title card to a Scooby Doo, Where Are You! episode, it then transitions into some rougher looking animation compared to the rest of the adventure. The gang’s vehicle, the Mystery Machine, bounces along the rode in a silly looking manner while the faces of the characters are frozen in place, the player treated to an odd angle on Fred and Daphne talking about the ghost town they’re pulling into, Los Burritos. Once you do reach the town though, things settle into a cleaner format, especially since the game can now lean on its spooky backdrops depicting the abandoned Wild West town that help set an eerie atmosphere even if Shaggy and Scooby will routinely break it with their comedic buffoonery. As they usually do, the group of mystery solving teenagers has managed to come across a strange situation where someone is dressed up as a supernatural threat, the Faceless Rider terrorizing the few people who still visit the ghost town. You’ll be in command of Mystery Inc. as they investigate the town, gather clues, escape peril, and even get involved in classic diversions. The gang splits up from time to time, Velma drops her glasses, and you even get a twist on the chase scene where instead it occurs with tunnel entrances during a chase aboard a train engine.

 

The mystery of the Faceless Rider is essentially formulaic, but for a formulaic show, adapting that idea into game form and coming up with a new mystery feels entirely appropriate. There is one major alteration to how the mystery can unfold though. Rather than there being one set culprit you need to figure out, each time you play the game, one of the five characters you meet around Los Burritos will be assigned as the true identity of the Faceless Rider. This means the game ends up with five distinct endings, but surprisingly, this won’t actually alter the course of the narrative all that much no matter who is guilty. Instead, at a few key points, a character or situation will provide you with a clue, the exact items that serve as clues changing between playthroughs. A few of these will point towards who is filling the role of the Faceless Rider that run, but others are deliberate red herrings and not always in ways that make sense. While you often get a clue from one of the potential culprits and the decoy clues could be labeled as a clever ruse to throw you off their trail, their behavior is otherwise unaltered meaning they can only seem so suspicious and other elements just end up not lining up in any meaningful way. You are in essence guessing at the end of the game based on prioritizing certain clues over others despite there being no reliable hints in the rigid narrative, but you don’t need to guess right to clear the game so it at least gets away with not punishing you for its own sloppiness in having these alternate endings available.

Most of your work as Mystery Inc. will involve walking around the small ghost town looking for items of interest to use elsewhere. Inventory puzzles are often fairly light and with obvious apparent utility, although a fully voiced Scrappy Doo serves as a hint system to help you if some things need a bit more explanation. Even across the game’s three difficulties, it shouldn’t be difficult to do what’s required and figure out the mostly consistent path to uncovering the truth behind the mystery. There’s no need for clever deductions, although clicking the right places on screen is important since you can sometimes miss a valuable interaction point thanks to the range of interactive objects. Many places in Los Burritos allow you to click an object or element in the environment to trigger a quick animation. Most of these are pretty simple, like a spider skittering out from hiding or a sign coming loose, but others are more fanciful like making the floorboards dance. Considering you’re poking around for clues though it is nice that clicking somewhere unproductive at least provides you a mildly amusing animation, although the game does lean on a few concepts a bit too often which starts to temper your curiosity about what might appear on a new screen when you start clicking around.

 

At times, rather than merely clicking on the right spot or using an item in the right place, you do have to solve a proper puzzle or play a minigame. Again, these aren’t going to be too complex no matter the difficulty you choose, meaning young players can get through them easily. There isn’t much deduction involved in these puzzles or the grander mystery, but sometimes there are more involved minigames like playing horseshoes with an actual horse or having a showdown at high noon with the Faceless Rider by way of a pie throwing fight. These more involved minigames actually serve a purpose beyond a more interactive diversion, the player needing to earn Scooby Snacks through them since otherwise there will be points where Shaggy and Scooby refuse to continue until they’ve been placated with dog treats. It’s not exactly the best barrier though, either requiring backtracking to repeat a minigame if you are lacking or, as I found, you might earn enough snacks through the first minigame that you technically don’t need to play any others. Ultimately, while it is nice for there to be some interactivity beyond poking around, it’s certainly not a major appeal of the game or one that will do much to raise your estimation of it, the focus clearly more on trying to make a believable story that would have fit in with the show’s usual capers.

THE VERDICT: Save for the rare disruptive element like a 3D model of a train engine, Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town looks the part of the Scooby Doo cartoon impeccably. It follows the same unmasking formula of a regular episode, the common jokes and situations from the show arise, and the voice acting helps it feel faithful, but the actual investigation feels a bit shallow due to the culprit being essentially random each time with minimal changes to the game to accommodate. A few minigames and inventory puzzles here and there don’t make the interactive side of things much more interesting, but if you just want to play out a Scooby Doo mystery in the classic mold, Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town can’t be faulted when it comes to hitting the right beats.

 

And so, I give Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town for PC…

An OKAY rating. While the culprit and clues changing each run sounds like a reason to come back and play again, their miniscule impact on the course of the game means additional playthroughs won’t really feel much different at all. It feels more like a way to guarantee a kid who comes back to the game after a bit won’t be able to just remember who was behind the mystery, not that it feels like a well constructed one since its parts are so easily swapped around and more concrete suspicious elements are left out so the mystery is so basic anyone can be the culprit. The deduction doesn’t feel like the point of the game though, and neither do the serviceable and simple inventory puzzles or occasional minigame. You are probably meant to absorb this the same way you would a normal episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You!, and there’s some silly moments, some spookiness, and faithful elements like the vocal performances so it comfortably fits in save for the need to actually click around rather than passively watch things unfold. At that point though, you are almost left weighing how highly you’d rate a standard episode of Scooby Doo, and Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town doesn’t feel too exceptional in that regard. The ghost appears at random times, is caught with a fairly basic trap you don’t even get to set up, and the possible motivation for the crimes can be figured out almost immediately and from there you’re collecting clues that include a few too many red herrings to make the process feel worthwhile. If this was just an episode of the cartoon, it probably wouldn’t impress or disappoint, just serving as another in the lineup with perhaps the pie-throwing duel standing out for being a memorable bit of silliness. The game offering three difficulties is the strange element, as this could have been where the game put in some real deduction tests or harder to solve inventory puzzles, but the gameplay here is to facilitate seeing more Scooby Doo antics so it never tries to demand too much mindpower to avoid distracting from that purpose.

 

For fans of a franchise, sometimes playing a video game adaptation is more about finding a faithful recreation of the source material rather than finding something enjoyable on its own merits. Scooby Doo! Showdown in Ghost Town feels like it might as well be an episode of the Scooby Doo cartoon, and even I couldn’t help but be charmed at times as it reproduced classic moments despite it not bringing too much to the table when it is viewed as a video game. While it could do with being more involved in actually having you participate in the course of events more, one thing you can’t take from this game is that it could almost pass for a classic Scooby Doo caper.