haunt the house (flashpoint retrospective #5)

29 Mar, 2024

what's gamin', gamers B] i hope your frames are rated and your pixels are clean. i've got another retrospective in the works, but that game is much bigger and more sprawling and i am yet to get the -- gasp! -- multiple endings that it boasts, so today i'll be talking about a staple of my childhood in its place.

HAUNT THE HOUSE by SFB Games is a charming, straightforward arcade game. you play as an adorable lampshade-esque ghost who has been rudely awoken by a party, and your job is to possess objects around the house to scare your guests away. as a kid i was OBSESSED with this game (which i think i say about pretty much all of these flash games, but hey! it remains true!), and i remember whiling away several wet day timetables terrifying slew after slew of rich white partygoers with my ghostly antics.

there isn't any plot to the game beyond that. which is kinda great in my opinion -- this game wants to show off its cute graphics¹ and object-specific spook animations, and who am i to deny them that? indeed, a lot of the fun of the game is less about scaring people and more about possessing everything you can to see what kinds of animations you can get. as the night goes on and your spookometer ramps up, you unlock yet more animations, which mean yet more experimentation, which in my childhood would prompt me and my friends to discuss our favourites.

interestingly enough, that wasn't. actually the thing i paid most attention to upon replay! i was very charmed by the graphics, which were as endearing as i remembered them, but i actually found myself finagling how best to scare everyone without prompting a reckless self-defenestration. oh yeah, scare people too intensely and they'll lose their head (and their lives) completely, electing to jump out of the nearest window instead of making their way out of the house in (relative...) safety. this was quite finicky, especially because i didn't realise that open windows were in the middle of the house as well as either side of most floors. plus the npcs were sometimes kinda unresponsive, with their sightlines often feeling arbitrary or poorly defined.

nevertheless, it was an enjoyable visit to my childhood, and it was definitely yet another element in my lifelong passion for 2d illustration and animation. and it comes from yet another dev team that i am so excited is still making games -- SFB Games are the same people who brought you Snipperclips, Help the Hero, Chiptone (not a game but a free sound effects creator), Tangle Tower and Mermaid's Tongue (neither of which i know anything about, but they sure do look cute as hell!). it's heartwarming to see creators continuing to do their thing, and also quite humbling -- the world doesn't stop when i'm not looking at it, and creators have lives and ambitions way beyond my own childhood experiences of their work. it makes me excited to think about all the wonderful art that i haven't discovered yet, and i feel proud that with this series i am keeping that wonder for indie video games alive.

anyway, go play haunt the house!!!!!!! in my replay, i was rank A with a 16:39 time and 26/30 people scared. see if you can beat me >:)

-aries

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