Whenever I read reviews, I always try to get an idea of how long the reviewer has played the game for. Have they really given the game a chance? Did they persevere to see if there was any gold past a bumpy start? So believe me when I say I really wanted to give Humble Haunted House a chance. I played for as long as I reasonably could, but a player can only restart so many times before glitches and mechanics become too much to face.
To start off with the positives, Humble Haunted House is charming as heck. You are tasked with “amusing” (the game’s words, not mine) the visitors to a haunted house, by either building various spooky mechanisms or by rolling your sleeves up and doing it yourself. Characters are represented by gorgeous 2D pixel art, but the actual game world itself is rendered 3D, with a fully controllable camera. Story conversations give us well drawn character portraits, and, visually at least, the entire thing is a joy to behold.
However, outside of this, the game starts to show its flaws. The audio effects are jarring at best, actively infuriating at worst. The backing track loops incredibly quickly and shows little variety. The writing has incredibly poor grammar (no comments from the editors here please) and doesn’t often make a lot of sense. 4D Creativity clearly had a great concept in mind here, but the execution is really where it starts to show its cracks.
Mechanically, the “tower defense” aspect of the game is flawed. The core loop of each level is that you scare visitors who walk along a predetermined path. Do this enough, and they will enter a state in which you can drain them of their resources until a ghost leaves their body and they vanish. Don’t worry, apparently this just means they are “amused”, as the whole point of the story is apparently the main character learning to feed without killing. You then convert these resources into gold at a mirror, and then spend gold to build “towers” that do the scaring for you.
There are several flaws here that become immediately apparent. The first is that there is an unexplained health system. One of the available abilities you have (never mentioned other than a button label on the pause screen) is to hide. This uses up a magic meter, but if somebody spots you in your true form, they take pictures of you and this drains your health. If your health hits 0, the level ends. On the first level I only managed to scare and drain two of the guests from both waves (about 5-10% of enemies that had appeared so far), then I let myself die to see what happened. I finished the level with what I assume to be four out of five stars.
I’m trying not to overuse the words “assume” and “unexplained” here, but this is the core problem I found in Humble Haunted House‘s opening levels. The tutorial teaches you how to move, manually scare someone, and build. It then teaches you to drain them, convert currency, and how they move through the level. After that, if you look closely at the first level’s introduction screen, you are given a rock paper scissors style weakness chart.
When the first level opens, you have just about enough resources to build a single tower. Nowhere does it explain where the costs of the tower are shown, and building is a fiddly enough process (pressing the trigger opens the build command, holding it actually builds, so heaven forbid you do anything other than tap the trigger lightly because you’ll place a tower right away without realising) that I didn’t realise for a bit that I’d simply ran out of gold and I wasn’t just doing it wrong.
The tutorial had encouraged you to amuse and drain every enemy that passed through, so I was filled with despair when between my one measly tower, and this new health mechanic that had me worried about dying, I only managed to scare a couple of people from the first wave. This meant that even after converting my resources, I only had enough gold to build one more tower. The next wave had nearly triple the number of enemies, and a lot just sailed through my measly defenses. At one point my first tower got destroyed, which I didn’t even know was possible. Level two is another tutorial, but the placement and order make no sense.
The game is also rife with glitches. Some are minor, such as audio cutting off or looping when it shouldn’t. However, twice I got locked into currency conversion, unable to move my character at all and forcing me to restart the level to escape. Later levels stutter and judder under the strain of moving through the environment. Whilst the game came out this month and costs little over a tenner, I’d still expect a better level of quality control than this.
Overall, Humble Haunted House has a good concept behind it, but the execution really stops it being as good as it deserves to be.
Humble Haunted House is available on Xbox and PlayStation, and was reviewed on an Xbox Series X.
