Scratches Demo

Haunted mansions are a Hollywood cliche by now, since they have been featured in hundreds of movies throughout the years, few of which managed to bring anything new or truly unsettling to the original idea. The same can be said about video games, although the medium is still rather young here and some progress can still be made, with enough dedication and creativity.

Scratches is a point-and-click adventure game that allows you to explore and deal with a haunted mansion, although the horror is a bit more psychological than graphic, given the technological boundaries of the genre in question. A lot of emphasis is put on atmosphere and level design, since the environments are very detailed and you can really get lost in all the things you can gaze at and examine.

The main character is a horror writer by the name of Michael Arthate, who one day decides to nudge his imagination in the right direction by buying and spending a while inside an old manor, somewhere in a remote part of England. After he gets acquainted with the place, things start to get disturbing pretty quickly, when strange noises start coming out of the basement, which also happens to be locked.

As previously mentioned, the game impresses through detail when it comes to level design, since, although the environments are pre-rendered and quite pixelated, the entire world is in three dimensions and you can move from a fixed place to the other, in order to investigate the surroundings. The walls are decorated with various paintings, the grandfather clock ticks loudly and the scratches from the basement are liable to make the hair on the back of your head rise.

There is some spoken dialogue as well, done by dedicated professionals who make the conversations seem real and convincing. As far as the music is concerned, on the other hand, the gloomy tracks are quite atmospheric and nice, but there are long pauses between them and it gets pretty annoying at some point. Thankfully, the scary parts keep the illusion going and you do not have time to complain about the breaks in the soundtrack very often.

All things considered, Scratches is quite the unique and mighty intriguing video game, although it could have used a bit more interactivity when it comes to puzzles and the horror mechanics. Other than that, it certainly looks pretty and you can really get into it after only a few minutes.