If designers didn’t borrow gameplay elements from existing games, many of the titles we know and love would never have been made. Think about it - Super Mario 64 begat Banjo Kazooie and Jak and Daxter, and then Jak and Daxter begat Ratchet and Clank, which in turn helped begat Jak 2. As you can see, this borrowing of elements can be a good thing that leads to quality games.
But sometimes it isn’t a good thing. Sometimes it leads to horrible games. The following is a cautionary tale about what happens when designers go too far, borrowing elements willy-nilly until the end result is a patchwork game so horrible that…I can’t even begin to describe the ill-effects. Read the following at your own risk.
The Haunted Mansion is a ride in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World (and also at Disneyland). Instead of being a terrifying experience, the folks over at Disney took the road less traveled and showed that death can be fun. The Haunted Mansion is also a soon-to-be-released motion picture starring Eddie Murphy.
Curiously enough, the game has little or nothing to do with the movie or the ride. That’s right, no Eddie Murphy in the game. Instead, our intrepid hero is Zeke Holloway, a schlemiel who responds to a want ad in the paper, only to find himself saving the mansion from the clutches of an evil overlord who sends out all sorts of nasty ghosts and spiders to stop Zeke. Our hero is given a magical sacred lantern which he can use to shoot mean ghosts and then suck up friendly souls.
Does this sound familiar? Does anyone remember a little GameCube launch title called Luigi’s Mansion in which Mario’s oft-ignored brother sucked up ghosts with the Poltergust 4000? I suppose I can forgive the designers; again, borrowing things here and there is what makes games great. Also, how else is Zeke supposed to fight and capture ghosts?
The game quickly established a pattern. Zeke will enter a room in the mansion and the goal is to flip the light switch in the room. However, things are not that simple; you must solve puzzles and fight baddies on your way to the switch. Once you have illuminated the room, phase two begins. You must search the room for loose souls and collect them in the sacred lantern. It is not very difficult to spot said souls; they tend to make the furniture in which they are hiding quiver. Once you have found all the souls in a particular room, you move on to the next room and repeat the process. Over and over and over again. In fact, that’s all you ever do: enter a room, solve the puzzles, fight the baddies, flip on the lights and suck up the souls.
It might seem like I am making light of soul sucking, but it is actually the most important part of the game. All of the doors in the mansion are locked but you can unlock them if you have successfully captured enough souls in your lantern. This can actually be rather annoying at times. It’s not so difficult to suck up souls within an enclosed room but I spent a very long time chasing an errant soul in the “graveyard,” which is, as expected, a large open space.
Overall, the game does not present that much of a challenge and any problems are mostly due to the flawed controls (more on that later). Clearly then, this is yet another kiddie title, right?
Wrong! You might be surprised to learn that Haunted Mansion is rated Teen and they really seem to be going out of their way to earn their rating. This presents a rather interesting conundrum: if they are going to have ghosts that will most definitely frighten children, why do they have puzzles that a monkey with a head cold could solve?
They make further attempts to justify their Teen rating by blatantly stealing from Eternal Darkness, but without that pesky Cthulu. Impossible, you say? Read this excerpt from one of the many “journals” you can find around the mansion:
“Tome of Shadows
Volume I
Page 734
Years have passed since our defeat. But we do not sleep yet, and the plague has proven quite effective at reducing the Brotherhood's numbers. Folly it was to believe we were no longer a threat and to lower their defenses. For, the shadows crawl eastward from the setting sun, so too does the reach of the order-extending to encircle the globe.
A.Thorn
Grand Master
The Order of Shadows
October 31st, 1349 A.D.”
Secret organizations? World domination? It certainly sounds sinister and could add a lot to the general theme, but then you remember that the hero fights ghosts with a magic lantern.
Graphically, this game presents a dazzling array of juxtaposition. On one end of the spectrum you have Zeke, who looks a little like Ichabod Crane from the old Disney version of Sleepy Hollow and scary ghosts like one who likes the girl from the Ring with her long hair covering her face…if she was a cartoon. I’ll admit that some of the things in the game made me jump just the tiniest bit. On the other end, you have serious framerate issues, especially when Zeke is trying to jump onto a ledge.
Control is equally shaky, especially when controlling the lantern. For the GameCube version, you use the “L” shoulder button to lock onto targets and the “R” button to fire the lantern. Despite the grooves in the shoulder buttons intended for comfort, after constantly firing the lantern, my fingers were sore. Furthermore, many of the puzzles are jumping puzzles which wouldn’t be a problem if the jumping system wasn’t horribly flawed. Rather than jumping, Zeke does more of a hop. This makes jumping from platform to platform more difficult than cleaning the Augean Stables. I wouldn’t mind if the game had difficult puzzles, but when easy puzzles are rendered difficult because of a flawed jumping system, then that gets my goat. If you’re not going to have Zeke do much more than hop, don’t include jumping puzzles!
The music is rather innocuous and at times, it can be difficult to notice. It doesn’t really gets in the way of puzzle solving and its absence adds a lot to the ambience. The voice acting is fairly functional and I was neither impressed nor annoyed by what I heard. There are a wide variety of dialects, some of which are better than others. Despite the inherent cheesiness of the game, there is something to be said for walking down a dark hallway with no sound except for Zeke’s footsteps.
Replay is virtually non-existent. Once you have cleared a room, there is nothing left to do. I suppose you could play through the game on a higher level of difficulty, but once is more than enough.
Clearly, this is a game with an identity crisis. Kids can’t play it because of the scary ghosts and more mature gamers will be turned off by the puzzles that would be ridiculously easy if not for the occasionally wonky controls. So who’s left?
