Haunting Starring Polterguy

released on Dec 31, 1993

Scare the evil, greedy Sardinis out of their houses by turning everyday household objects into something scary, funny or just plain gross. Or use your special spells to really send 'em shrieking. But you gotta hurry, 'cause your ectoplasm may run out! 16 megs of cool graphics, gross special effects and blood-curdling sounds. Unique 3/4 view perspective. Over 400 scary, funny or gross fright items, each causing something different to happen. Five special spells: Zom-B-Ize, Supr-Scare, Boo-Doo, Ecto-Xtra and Dog-Off. "Killer" dungeon with 12 different paths!


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I have a theory that this was originally designed to be a Beetlejuice game, but EA failed to gain the licence so they pasted a green slapheaded punk chungus in and called it macaroni. The initial game is quite a lot of fun, you can jump into a few household objects like the fishtank and rocking chair and make them come to life to scare the homeowner.

There isn't much beyond that though, save an ill-thought out platforming section that cripples the game.

A kinda neat little ruined by a meter system that drags you into a shithole dungeon full of slippery shitty jank platforming that feels like ass, and a completely dogshit dumpster fire final boss, and no god damn saves at all.


The scaring crap is graphically really fecking cool but mechanically completely shallow.

Also i kinda wish i had more control over where the family members would run off too, id try everything to try to steer them in direction i want ( I thought maybe sacring them near a door would make them more inclined to run out it, or maybe scaring them opposite of a door would make them flee through it or SOMETHING) but it just seems like a complete crapshoot.


And in cutscenes Polterguy looks like a total CHUDZILLA

A GOOD EA game????? Jesus

'Good' is maybe giving them too much credit for glorified peek-a-boo Elmo but idk I love the conceit and direction. Scaring the pants off a bunch of rich white pansies in their gaudy gigaplex houses and whatnot - it has that chunky DOS animation style with a million different environmental animations to trigger. It's goofy, ridiculous, sometimes oddly grotesque, y'know how it is

Was tempted to rate even higher but there's these dumb isometric platforming sections you have to do between stages and whenever you lose your ecto timer. Game also ends with an abominably terrible final boss.

Jenny found out this was also on PSP in a collection and that's so weird to think about, this is the least PSP-core game ever made

It's a cool concept that unfortunately the devs never really manage to flesh out into something that can carry a full game. I got bored pretty quickly but I recommend at least checking it out for a while if you're interested, it's fun for a bit.

Game #33

A fun concept that ultimately wears too thin. As soon as you start to get into a groove it interrupts you with these awful dungeon sequences that totally ruin the flow of the game.

Such a weird concept : as a ghost, you haunt a family's house by interacting with various objects. Fun at first, but barely replayable.