Game review: Haunting Starring Polterguy (Sega Genesis)

Haunted house stories normally involve a family who moves into a house that's the home to an evil or dangerous spirit. They start in disbelief as weird things start happening in their home. One of them is usually stubbornly skeptical. However, as the hauntings escalate they finally come to terms with the ghost haunting their home. The remainder of the story is about the family figuring out how to remove the ghost from their home.

What about the ghost's story though? Maybe they're not the bad one and its the family who is the one who needs to be exorcised from the home. That's the premise of Haunting Starring Polterguy.

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This game has been in my collection for some time now and with today being Halloween, what better time to give it a try?

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In Haunting Starring Polterguy (I'm just going to call it Haunting from here on for the sake of brevity), you play as the spirit of a spunky teenager in a leather jacket who died in a skateboarding accident. The cause of your accident was a faulty skateboard that was knowingly manufactured by the company owned by Vito Sardini. Your goal is to haunt the family of the man whose greed and irresponsibility caused your death.

The gameplay of Haunting is very basic, but the draw of the game isn't the gameplay but the experience. You play as the kid known as Polterguy and your goal is to scare the Sardini family out of their home. The way you scare the family is by possessing objects around their home, which essentially sets scare traps for the family. Once activated, some objects will go off immediately, some will only trigger when a family member is nearby and others let you take control of the object to really terrify these people.

You can't simply set traps wherever you want. Only items that flash are able to be possessed and the flash only lasts for a short time, so the goal is to identify a flashing item as soon as you can so you can set a trap in it while you have a chance. This leads to the best part of this game.

The developers created a massive number of scares you can pull on this family. Every room has at least 5 items you can trap and the variety and creativity in these scares is fantastic. From monsters that pop out of paintings to possessed knife drawers, there are a lot of fun traps to set and watch go off. The scares are really nicely animated, driving home the passion that went into this game by the artists and developers.

As you terrorize each of the four family members, their scare level increases. Once they've been scared enough, they'll run screaming from the room. When they flee, green ectoplasm will drip from the ceiling for you to collect. This serves as both your health bar and your energy, as this goo is required to set scare traps. Follow them through the house and keep scaring them, otherwise their terror level will start to decrease and you'll have to start over. Thankfully, a helpful map shows you the location of each family member in the home.

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Once a family member has been scared out of a room several times, they'll run screaming from the house. After all four people have been scared from the house, they'll move to a new home. You're not done with them yet though, so you'll follow this family to a total of four homes to torture them.

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So while you can't die (being already dead), you have to keep your eco level up. When it runs out, you're thrown into a underworld stage where you have to collect every drop of ecto before you can leave. In this area you do have a health bar, and you must dodge monster arms and other hazards. If your life depletes here, its game over. There's no way to restore your health down here, so you have to be very careful down there to avoid taking hits.

The controls in Haunting are very slippery, which makes controlling Polterguy a chore. Trying to maneuver through a doorway or make jumps in the underworld is often troublesome. However, the game isn't about precision, its about strategy and using the traps in each room efficiently. And there's a TON of traps.

With four unique homes to scare the Sardini's out of, there are a lot of fun scare traps to set for them. However, this does lend to the game's biggest shortcoming. Once you've seen the animations a half dozen times, the shallowness of the game becomes more apparent. This isn't a game you'll play to completion regularly, but its great as something fun to break out once in a while.

Like for Halloween!

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The visuals in Haunting are wonderful. With colorful graphics and fantastic animation, the homes and haunts of this game are brought to life with a ton of personality. The types of scares you'll see in this game are more Beetlejuice than Poltergeist, so the game probably won't give younger kids nightmares.

The Sardini family are a bunch that you don't feel bad about haunting, since they're all portrayed as fairly despicable people. Their homes are rendered with a lot of detail and very few reused assets, which you typically didn't see very often in the 16-bit era. These look like lived in homes from a time in gaming where indoor areas were usually empty and non-sensical corridors and bland rooms.

Audio is great as well. While the quality of the sounds is a bit muddy and muffled, the sound effects of the traps and the screams of the Sardinis are varied and appropriate. Music is subdued, but has a fun, whimsical spooky vibe.

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There simply are not many games of the 8 and 16-bit era that are as unique as Haunting Starring Polterguy. Its a clever premise and executed pretty well. While the actual gameplay could use some tweaking and the afterlife segments were a chore, they don't detract from the originality this game expresses at every turn.

This is a great title for anyone to have in their Sega Genesis library. Its fairly unknown and a great crowd-pleaser when introduced to people who've never heard of it. Its far from perfect, but the positives of the experience outweigh the shortcomings of the gameplay.

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!

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