The Haunted Hoard: Haunted House (Switch)
When I first tried to play Haunted House on the Switch, I ran into an unfortunate problem. While I had to tried to play it for last year’s Haunted Hoard for some cute symmetry with reviewing the original Haunted House on the Atari 2600, this modern reimagining on the Switch had an issue I literally couldn’t get past at the time. My Switch Joy-Cons had been repaired when their sticks last started drifting a while back and have had no issues since save for with this game, Haunted House so sensitive to stick inputs that the character would move on their own, something that made it hard to tiptoe through the mandatory stealth segments of the tutorial that keep resetting you until you can do them properly. It was a rough start and one that made it seem like I’d need a brand new controller to even play the game properly… and thankfully, the Nintendo Switch 2 came along and with it new Joy-Cons! On a fresher controller, Haunted House had no control issues, and while this issue is worth knowing about for prospective players, it is hopefully a fringe case rather than one most people can expect going into this spooky rogue-like adventure.
In Haunted House you play as Lyn Graves, who along with her friends Fred, Stephanie, Alex, and Eric all go to investigate the estate of Lyn’s uncle Zachary. The famed treasure hunter’s mansion is now under ghost rule though, various malevolent spirits from across the globe escaping from the urn Zachary trapped them in and out to get their revenge. The ghosts quickly capture Lyn’s four friends and lock them in the basement, Lyn needing to search the mansion for the three urn pieces so she can seal all the spirits away and rescue not just her pals, but her missing uncle as well. While you will get to meet a few other characters like a butler not very good at his job or a pair of salesman brothers where one is a ghost himself, the story is there to set up the conflict and doesn’t do much else, a friendly spirit named Spooky sometimes popping up to give you tips but almost everything else focused on the gameplay.
Zachary Grave’s mansion is divided into a few floors, with there being three main areas that each have an urn piece guarded by a boss monster. You’ll need to make your way through somewhat randomized rooms on each floor to make your way to the boss though, and this will be where most of the action takes place. Various spirit types haunt the halls of Haunted House, most of them possible to avoid if you time your movements right and watch how much sound you make. There might be some conical creature slumbering you don’t want to wake up so you tiptoe past, or patrolling phantoms whose vision cone must be avoided or they’ll charge you. Some spots might have spirit traps like fishmen leaping out of water to grab you ghouls from paintings popping out, a lot of Haunted House about trying to safely squeeze your way through limited space to clear whatever the room objective might be. Rooms only have their doors unlock when you’ve completed that space’s goal, which can involve popping open treasure chests to try and find an idol, chasing down a specific foe holding a key, breaking some spectral chains, or taking out specific enemies. Luckily, while you do take some serious damage any time a ghost does injure you, the slower walk where you cover your lantern to sneak around isn’t that slow, meaning sneaking around isn’t going to take ages and it’s usually better to always be sneaking if enemies are about. Running can help you lose any pursuing fiends as well even if it might draw the attention of others though, and different floors will throw new monsters in the mix like a creature that will act like an alarm if it spots you or bats who can see you even in the dark.
Many rooms will also have arrow traps or spikes that pop out of the floor on rotation to keep the focus on trying to carefully maneuver around dangerous spaces, the player never really supposed to feel like they have a strong edge over the monsters of the mansion. However, you can fight back, but at first you will really have to work if you want to take a ghost out. Your lantern’s beam can be focused to deal damage to a spirit, and if you just shine it at them normally, it is more likely to make them mad enough to hurt you than effectively take them out. If you do sneak up behind a spirit though you can do an instant kill attack, but it is not always a valid option, especially since your noisy movement when not sneaking might give you away trying to keep pace with enemies that are often just a little faster than your sneak. However, throughout the haunted house there are going to be treasure chests that can contain helpful traps. The random traps you can collect can help you turn the tables or might be so situational they might as well be duds. The noisemaker rubber ducky for example is meant to distract, but it doesn’t seem all that effective. It’s better to grab items like the Shrink trap that makes foes too tiny to hurt you, the curse trap that makes them run in fear, the stun trap that will leave them unable to fight back against your lantern beam for a bit, or even ones like the freeze trap that doesn’t leave them vulnerable but at least holds them in place. You can’t be hurt by your own traps but you do need enemies to actually go over them to activate them, Haunted House once again about the walking space most of all even when it comes to fighting back.
Once you start getting a sense for how vulnerable you are and what you can get away with near patrolling enemies, Haunted House does well enough with its focus on stealth and traps, even if eventually the action will stagnate some since later enemies are often just light changes to the concepts you’ve already faced before. However, the three major bosses are all fairly effective challenges, albeit mostly because you actually encounter them during regular exploration first where you can’t really fight back yet. The first boss room for a floor will require you to look around for their three items of power, a large space with other enemies already a bit difficult to navigate cautiously before you factor in the boss monster who has better vision and more dangerous attacks. When the witch or vampire boss spots you, their attacks cover a lot more ground and they’re large enough that you can’t really just run around some objects to eventually make them lose sight of you, although they’re not impossible to shake. Traps won’t hinder them either, making for a tense and difficult encounter that is sometimes tougher than the actual fight itself. The true boss fight at the end of the floor can be rather elaborate, the battlefield getting filled with a range of attacks as you need to slip around and do a bit more than shining your lantern on things, the attic’s ghost boss in particular having a lot of tricks like exploding decoys that will make you use your dodge roll to survive even if you hadn’t before.
The three floors of Haunted House with their urn pieces don’t need to be finished back to back, the player able to start at the one they still need to clear to help speed up completing the adventure. In fact, while it is a rogue-like in that the floor layouts change, it feels like it’s done more as a way to lightly vary things up rather than you facing the same dangers if you should die before beating a boss. There are temporary items as well, all traps and healing food dropped on death and the gold you gather is only usable at special shops during the run and will also vanish upon defeat. However, between runs you will get a chance to spend any gems you find. Gems can buy you permanent upgrades to things like the lantern power, your health, and how many inventory spaces you have for food and traps. Upgrades are priced so you won’t get too many too quickly but you will start to be able to better survive if you do set off a ghost or fight back with your stronger lantern beam, but Haunted House doesn’t handle its optional collectibles too well. While exploring the mansion you might find lost cats, kitchen utensils, or even old Atari cartridges to turn in to specific characters, often for a few gems as your reward. However, they rarely appear and there are 60 in total. It seems like only 1 can appear per floor and Haunted House isn’t such a hard game you’ll be retrying constantly either, meaning if you do want to collect them all it will involve a lot of runs well after you’ve finished the story. The mansion’s butler even provides a gem sink where you can repair the place as well as another extra goal that the game simply isn’t big enough to make a feasible task without a lot of forced repetition in a game that doesn’t vary up its randomized rooms up that well at the best of times, this secondary layer sadly best forgotten about even if you think the Atari games might have sounded like a cute bonus to pursue.
There is one more activity of note in Haunted House though, that being the basement floors. At various points in the plot you’ll get a key for one of the four doors below the mansion, these being the places where your captured friends were taken. The basement floors are more set in stone than the rest of the mansion, still randomized but featuring a lot more of the same rooms each attempt and culminating in the same fairly easy boss with just a slightly tougher arena each time you face it. The basement can be a bit tough so it might be a place you see more often because you’re also dying on top of needing to clear it four times to save your friends and make it possible to face the final boss. Stephanie, Eric, Alex, and Fred do all play a bit differently from Lyn, mostly in changing how specific stats are allocated. Eric has a lot of health but also makes a lot of noise while Stephanie is the complete opposite for example, but they won’t often make runs feel drastically different so the extra characters aren’t game-changing unlocks that rejuvenate the experience sadly.
THE VERDICT: Haunted House’s rogue-like elements are mostly there for adding little shake-ups to retrying its floors or giving you boosts as the adventure progresses. Making story progress is still handled somewhat linearly making it easier to treat as an adventure you play through once, which makes it a shame so many of its collectables are basically impossible to grab without just replaying barely changed areas an obnoxious amount if you do care for 100%. A run through the main adventure though will still make some decent use of its action format as you try to make your way around cramped, dark, but nicely detailed spooky spaces to avoid strong spirits and place traps well to survive.
And so, I give Haunted House for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. Beyond a crash that happened when I reached the final boss and didn’t have all the characters anyway to unlock it, Haunted House seemed to work just fine once my controller was up to snuff. Its tribute to the Atari original are mostly in simple things like collecting the urn to win while the broader story tries to invent new monsters to beat and new characters to play as, although the Atari 2600 original wasn’t exactly brimming with material they could pull from. Haunted House mostly passes for a modern “adventure rogue-like”, where you are making consistent forward progress on a plot and not asked to replay too much of the game, but you do lose a good deal of temporary items on death and certain rooms and other small features are mixed around to make your next attempt a bit more unique than simply trying again. Haunted House doesn’t quite have the room variety to make the jumbling feel like it’s truly providing new challenges or making you play in unique ways, there only being a handful of traps and enemy types anyway. Bosses are a good injection of difficulty and diversity though, and while the basement really suffers from being even less varied than the main floors, it is at least something that pulls you away from the main adventure for a bit for something worthwhile. Your upgrades will start to make regular ghost encounters a bit easy to handle near the end though, Haunted House feeling like it needed to spend more time on weaving its rogue-like elements more cleanly through the adventure to better achieve the balance, progression, and most of all variety that would make those mechanics worthwhile to add rather than it just making a stealthy action game a bit less straightforward.
Haunted House is a cute spooky reboot but not really one for rogue-like fans since it’s treated more as a way of adding flavor to the experience rather than truly guiding its design. With how the collectibles were handled, it does feel like the developers thought the gameplay had more value for repeat runs than it ends up having, the action losing too much steam and not having enough major rewards to really make you want to return to the Graves estate after you’ve completed the story. At least during that story run though you’ll see it pull off a stealthy action style with some tension that also doesn’t feel too slow or leave you too vulnerable so players of all ages can find a bit to like.