The Haunted Hoard: Ghostly Grange (ZX Spectrum)

Ghostly Grange has an excellent cover for an old school horror game. A hooded figure looming over a haunted house, lightning extending from his hand as both he and the titular grange overlook a graveyard. Even if you temper your expectations considering it’s a ZX Spectrum game from 1987, Ghostly Grange looks at least like it’s going to be a serious attempt at horror until you actually read what the game is about. That haunted house isn’t a place of terror, but instead a place so popular for parties that this action game is all about cleaning up after unwanted house guests.

 

Phil the ghost left his residence of Poltergeist Place for a while only to return home and find various other spirits and creatures took their chance to live it up in his absence. The unwanted guests aren’t intent on leaving, obstructing Phil as he floats around the residence and seemingly animating some of his possessions to try and discourage him, but Phil believes the way to get them all to leave is to scoop up the empty beer cans littered around Poltergeist Place. It is debatable how empty these cans are though, as Phil will sometimes behave erratically the deeper into the game you get as if he was getting a little tipsy, although this can feel a bit like an attempt to justify what might be a design problem. Normally, Phil moves about the area when you press up, left, or right, but despite being a floating ghost in what appears to be a top-down adventure, gravity will pull him towards the bottom of the screen if you aren’t moving him. Phil isn’t the fastest phantom either, meaning ducking him around danger can sometimes require some spot-on timing, the player needing to watch for their moment to act. If you decide to sit in place though, that’s when he can suddenly move on his own, running off in unexpected directions or shaking in place. This does mean you usually can’t stay too still, but if you just make him wiggle around a little when you want him to linger in a spot he’ll never leave your control.

A protagonist who you sometimes have to keep calm with a little bit of otherwise pointless movement does sound like quite a drawback, but Ghostly Grange doesn’t try to make that part of its challenge all that much. Poltergeist Place consists of 21 unique screens that consist of the exterior gardens and various indoor rooms, there actually not being a gravestone in sight when it comes to actual gameplay. Most screens will have unique enemies, be they boots walking on their own, flying ice shavers, or indecipherable specters that can almost look like clown faces or melting squids at times. No matter what the dangers look like, they can all kill Phil immediately when they make contact, but they also all behave in the same predictable ways. An object or spirit will only be able to move left to right or up and down in a set area, Phil never having to worry about being chased or shot at. For the most part, this also means once you’re on a screen, you can briefly consider where the enemies perform their patrols and start to figure out how you want to move about and time your flight. There are a few unfortunate screens where entering from the wrong spot will cause you to immediately hit an enemy though, but for all but one of these this will only occur if you choose to keep flying upwards when entering the screen rather than trying to hover at the bottom. It’s not exactly great these can happen at all, but they also will only likely cause an issue once as you’re learning the layout of the grange to better navigate it.

 

For the most part, moving from room to room in Poltergeist Place involves flying up to exits at the top of the room, weaving around obstructions and enemies on the way. However, there are some rooms where you can head to the left or right edge to appear at the opposite side, and more interestingly, some later rooms will have you going back to the previous room to take alternate paths to reach different exits or otherwise inaccessible beer cans. As you fly through the rooms though, you might notice some cans in particularly deadly situations, enemies so close by with such tight windows to slip past you can lose a life or two trying. You can’t earn extra lives, but Ghostly Grange is also not a score challenge despite tracking your high score. To beat Ghostly Grange, you need to get 204 points, and with each can worth 3, that means you only need to grab 68 of them.

Every room but the rooftop has at least four cans in it, some very easy to grab and others requiring more careful avoidance of the enemies, but with well over 80 cans to grab, you can start to pick your battles. Will you press into later rooms and try to collect the easy ones, or will you risk your life a few times to grab earlier ones that are in tight spots? Oftentimes, after taking some time to consider a room’s layout, you can slip through to the exit without getting hit. This is actually where Ghostly Grange finds its footing, as it feels like a game primarily about trying to plunge deep into Poltergeist Place to learn its layout and threats and then decide which beer cans you want to grab along the way. Those initial runs will be failures, maybe even have cheap deaths, but once your mental map improves, you’ll be able to zoom through rooms, having the leeway to pick your battles to increase your chances of surviving to 204 points. At the same time, once you start figuring out the grange’s full scope, you will drastically decrease its difficulty since the cans placed in the hardest spots aren’t required. Some rooms still require some smart movement to slip through unharmed, but Ghostly Grange could have definitely benefited from increasing the required can count just a touch to incentivize some riskier movement.

THE VERDICT: Ghostly Grange has some undeniable issues that could have completely undermined its collection quest. Phil moving on his own occasionally, rooms where you can die the moment you appear on screen, and beer cans in obnoxiously tight situations are still not good ideas, but as you play through a few times and learn Poltergeist Place’s layout, you start to get better and better at scooping up trash around the house and picking where you want to take risks. Your plans pay off once you hit 204 points, the game allowing you to avoid its worst situations and eventually hone your movement abilities for a satisfying conclusion to your efforts to understand this simple ZX Spectrum title.

 

And so, I give Ghostly Grange for ZX Spectrum…

An OKAY rating. It’s not too hard to find a ZX Spectrum game that expects you to play through multiple times to learn the game and gradually succeed by learning the lay of the land, but Ghostly Grange avoids most of the obnoxious pitfalls such games often fell into. Phil controls relatively well, a bit slow to make avoiding enemies occasionally challenging, but thankfully you can account for his occasional attempts to move on his own without much extra work. When you do understand what lies ahead, it’s not going to be ridiculously difficult to press further into Poltergeist Place, precision required for a few beer cans but you can choose which dangerous ones to go for and avoid the ones that are practically tricks due to how perfectly you’d have to move to grab them without dying. It’s an entertaining enough learning process that will be let down some by the areas where the game design does slip up a bit, appearing on a screen and instantly dying still annoying even if you know better for next time. However, it does feel like Ghostly Grange did need to push you a little bit more in fair ways. The abundance of beer cans can lead to you playing it almost too safe, 68 still enough to incentivize some tight squeezes but other times the beer cans would almost be harder to avoid as you pass through a room. Enemies do feel like they could use more advanced movement patterns too. Even just being able to move in more than a line would help. One of the toughest rooms if you don’t consider beer can placement is Turmoil On the Terraces where you slip through small corridors, having to consider multiple enemy patrols at once to get through, and some more areas like that that required deeper consideration of multiple moving enemies or more complex routes could have spiced up some of the rooms to be challenging and exciting even if you’re only passing through.

 

Ghostly Grange may not deliver on the promise of its ominous box art, but Phil’s quest to clean his house might have been a better choice than an authentic effort at horror. It’s a nice little adventure about coming to understand one location well enough to master it, the process not demanding extreme precision but still requiring some skill to figure out that route to 68 beer cans. The layouts could have done with a bit more cleaning up in terms of their design, but Ghostly Grange still works well because all of its major issues can be adjusted for without that harming the more entertaining elements.