For Rent: Haunted House Demo

No matter where you are in the world, you are no doubt familiar with the myth of a haunted house, since every culture has its own spin on the subject. Hence, it would appear that spirits like to inhabit their homes even after they no longer have a physical form, and they are not too keen on having new housemates either. They tend to become violent most of the time, even if that basically means they throw pans and pots around the kitchen.

For Rent: Haunted House is a text-based adventure game in which you have to manipulate people into living in a haunted house just because the landlord is going to fire you if the tenants leave. You get a plethora of options when it comes to how you keep people from leaving, so there are always multiple solutions to your problems, which in turn allows you to play the game more than once without getting bored.

To begin with, you are free to decide a few things about your character, so that you can be more skilled when it comes to certain things. This allows you to open up new ways to tackle problems, but most of the time it really depends on the situation and not on your stats, since there are very few skills to begin with. After that, there’s a succession of mini-stories to go through with every potential tenant.

The main problem is that the house is actually haunted, so it’s not a myth in this case. Hence, tenants are actually going to go through nightmare situations once they move in, and your job is to mitigate the damage and make sure you convince them to stay. Sometimes you can provide them with favors for not moving out, but there’s also the option to investigate the haunting and maybe do something about it.

In any case, there are countless possibilities in this regard, so multiple playthroughs are a must if you want to get the most out of the game. Hence, solving one crisis in a different way can potentially change all the other problems, so there is always something new to do or witness when you go through the game one more time. The lack of graphics is barely noticeable as well, especially if you enjoy reading.

Even if you have to imagine the whole thing in your head, For Rent: Haunted House is about as fun as text-based games can get. Thus, it’s worth a shot if you like hilarious horror stories, and you can get a lot of playtime out of the game if you are persistent enough.