Haunted Demo

Horror games need to do much more than startle you from time to time in order to be memorable and leave some sort of impression on the player. Franchises like Silent Hill understand this concept and they use psychological tricks to make you feel uneasy, while games like Amnesia do not even resort to monsters at all, if the atmosphere alone can do the trick.

Haunted is a low-budget first-person shooter with horror elements in which you have to survive a dark dungeon and kill everything that tries to stop you from getting to the end. The term ‘dark’ needs to be emphasized, because you really cannot see much of anything most of the time, which is actually annoying, as opposed to frightening or scary.

There are no options to increase the brightness, although you do have a flashlight you can use to make it easier to navigate the levels. Unfortunately, the lighting effects are terrible as well, so the flashlight doesn’t actually do anything and neither do the countless torches that decorate the dungeon halls. This makes it impossible to see the monsters approaching, or even the way forward for that matter.

Because the dark prevents you from actually seeing where to go, you can use the minimap to stay on course. You are equipped with a pistol to handle the weird monsters that come at you, which needs to be reloaded after five shots. It is possible to change modes and take advantage of infinite ammunition, although the bullets do a bit less damage this way and it may be harder to kill the creatures.

Speaking of which, these monsters are actually blobs with teeth, which hover toward you when you happen to go close enough. Just like everything else in the game, sprites are used to display them, which means that they look quite awful and not a lot of detail went into their design. In fact, the entire game looks incredibly old and basic, even if the technology at the time allowed for far more than this.

All things considered, there is nothing attractive about Haunted and nothing to convince you to give it a try. The graphics are bad, the constant darkness is annoying, the gameplay is awful, and you have to use the directional keys to aim, which is about as basic as it can get in the genre. Hence, unless you are curious to see how a bad game looks like, you’d better keep your distance.