Haunting Starring Polterguy

The Good
The Haunting is an unusual game, which employs a some what inventive play style, as you take control of Polterguy, an apparition of a teenage boy who seeks revenge on the family that wronged him.

The family in question is the Sardini’s, a snooty high class bunch, the head of the family being Vito, a mobster like character, his high maintenance wife Flo, and their two brattish children, Mimi and Tony. Before each level begins, the Sardini’s arrive in their own personal delivery truck to their new home, which incidentally is always a huge, lavish place more like a mansion, and it’s up to you to scare them out of it. During these sequences, Polterguy communicates with you from beyond the video game, with some surfer type banter. Like, radical dudes!

The game takes place from a pseudo 3d overhead isometric perspective, looking into the house from a three quarter angle, not so dissimilar to games such as Skeleton Krew, D-Generation, or The Sims. The various members of the family will be moving around the house, going about their business, and when you encounter one of them, they won’t be able to see you, thanks to your unique disposition. You have the ability to possess objects at will, and you can use your supernatural forces to create havoc around your victim.

The object of the game is to scare them so much that they flee the house in pure terror. You are able to possess just about any object from a house plant to the family car. How this is accomplished are various things about the house will brandish a sparkle when it can be possessed, and you simply press the A button for Polterguy to transform into an ecto plasmic blob and throw himself into it, and this is a rather nifty little animation by the way, and press the same button again to leap out of it. Now the object is loaded up with ecto plasm and ready to scare the bejesus out of your victim.

One thing worth mentioning is, when you pause the game, as well as giving you a chance to sip your beverage of choice, you are given a plan view of the house, which shows you where you are located, and also where all the family members are, represented by an icon with the first letter of their respective names. This can be effectively utilised for finding the quick route to your next target.

There is a cavalcade of things to possess, such as the dish washer in the kitchen, where you can shoot out plates by rapidly pressing the fire button, take control of the chainsaw in the garage, and thrust it about the place in abandon, make tins of paint explode, have monsters jump out from the family computer monitor in the study, turn a throw rug into a chasm with big sharp teeth, take control of a toy aeroplane and fly it across the room, and basically turn virtually every object conceivable into monstrous creatures, or move them about in some sort of poltergeist fashion.

When Polterguy is in the same room as one of the family members, that individuals’ face will be shown in a picture in a picture box, and this will give a visualisation of their state of mind. To begin with, they will be perfectly calm, but as you put the smack dab on their fear threshold, they will become increasingly distressed, and you will be able to see just how freaked out they are becoming.

While all this is going on, you have an ecto gauge, which is slowly depleting all the time, and this is expressed in the form of a horizontal green bar at the bottom of the display, and you have to try and keep this filled up by scaring someone out of the room. So the goal is essentially to take control of as many objects as possible, so every time you victim turns, they will be shocked or horrified from what they see. If you are successful, they will run out of the room screaming, and some droplets of ooze will be left behind for you to collect, to replenish your ecto supply. The more terrified they were, the more ecto is left behind for you.

One thing you have to be wary of, and can’t be possessed, is the family dog, which can see you, and also attack you, which subsequently rapidly drains your ecto.

Should your ecto plasm supplies completely run dry, you are plucked from the land of the living, and taken to a dark foreboding dungeon outside of earth’s realm. This is a kind of sub-game, where you must collect a quota of ooze droplets, which fall from the ceiling, while contending with obstacles like bouncing eye balls, hordes of bats that fly out of coffins, swiping arms that protrude from the walls, and vortexes that open up in the ground to suck you in.

In this section, the A button has a different function, and here it makes you somersault, so that you may evade the various hazards. Once you have collected all the droplets, a sort of checkpoint will appear on the ground, and touching it will start an animation of a door opening which leads back to the land of the living, and Polterguy will dance a little jig to some rock music, before entering it for another attempt at exacting revenge in the real world.
Every time you have to go back to the dungeon, you are slightly weaker, and this is shown by a face icon of Polterguy, which fades away more each time you go down here, and leaves you weaker, and more easily dispatched by the lurking darkness. When the face completely disappears it is game-over.

If you manage to scare away the entire Sardini clan, they will move to another house, and you keep pursuing them from one home to the next for as long as you can.

The visuals come off quite well, and there are loads of neat animations to grab your attention. This is of course an American game, and sort of has the flavour of some older Atari games like Paper Boy or Toobin’, in terms of the overall presentation, as well as the staging and articulation of the scenes. There are various silly visual gags, like pants falling down, and heads exploding, which expands on the cartoon theme of the proceedings. Some of the animations are quite gory, sort of in the fashion of a game like Battle Chess, where here body parts will fall out of the cupboard in a pool of blood, or a head will be decapitated, but it’s all done in a sort of light comic horror style which isn’t offensive.

The audio side of things compliments the visuals well enough, with some suitably ghoulish synthesised tunes, the one that plays in the dungeon section is more upbeat, and reflects the transition in the pace. Sound is used here to some good effect, especially the heart beat of your victim, which starts out slow, and gradually becomes more frantic as they shift into a terrified state of mind. Other sound samples like the nervous chattering of teeth, yelps and screams, and the roar of the various incarnations of monsters is fairly well realised given the limitations of the Genesis sound hardware.

The Bad
The game-play isn’t varied or deep enough to sustain any kind of real long-term value. The game is as simplistic in execution as it sounds, so the game is essentially an arcade style burst of two highly limited contrasting play styles, both being quite basic, so your interest will probably wane after only a few games. The only motivation for progressing deeper into the game is to see different level layouts, and some new animated content. I suppose it just depends on how much you like the formula.

The Bottom Line
I was honestly rather taken by this offering from EA, because it takes a chance at breaking away from the usual dire platform capers that are so overly abundant, it’s refreshing to play something that is a bit different, and dare I say it, even original. It doesn’t completely pay off, as it is really a bit too simplistic to hold your attention for more than an afternoon, but its fun and moves along well enough, which makes it initially quite captivating. The overall presentation has a kind of a manic charm which creates a unique atmosphere that harks back to a different, albeit simpler time.