Haunted House (NSP, XCI) ROM + v1.0.1 Update

Haunted House is a 1982 adventure video game programmed by James Andreasen for the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed Atari 2600) and published by Atari. The player controls an avatar shaped like a pair of eyes who explores a mansion seeking out parts of an urn to return to the entrance. The game world is populated by roaming enemies including vampire bats, tarantulas, and a ghost. Haunted House was among the first games to use player-controlled scrolling between large portions of the visual space.

Haunted House received positive reviews from contemporary video game publications such as The Space Gamer and Electronic Games while others, such as How to Win at Home Video Games, noted the game’s difficulty and lack of intuitiveness. The game has seen several releases across consoles and formats as part of Atari compilation packages as well as follow-up games, such as Haunted House (2010) Haunted House: Cryptic Graves (2014), and Haunted House (2023).

Video game critics such as Christopher Buecheler of GameSpy have called Haunted House one of the earliest examples of the survival horror video game genre due to its elements of creepy themes, limited item management, and a variety of monsters. Other studies of the genre have suggested that the game lacked the specific elements that later games like Alone in the Dark (1992) and Resident Evil (1996) had to establish as a unique game genre.

In Haunted House, a reimagined Atari classic, players assume the role of Lyn Graves, the resourceful niece of renowned treasure hunter Zachary Graves. Lyn, accompanied by her closest companions, visits her uncle’s mansion, only to discover the residence overrun by ghouls and monsters who swiftly seize and whisk away her friends. To rescue her uncle and companions and subdue all the supernatural adversaries, Lyn must locate the shattered fragments of a magical urn and piece them together.

Amid procedurally generated room configurations, ever-shifting walls, unpredictable enemy placements, and unique spectral encounters, Lyn must maneuver stealthily, creeping, sneaking, and dashing past hordes of ghouls and eerie ectoplasms to locate her friends and uncle.

Each urn shard is zealously safeguarded by a bone-chilling boss. With 3D isometric stealth gameplay, Lyn must adapt swiftly to conquer each challenge. When a shadowy specter knocks her out, she reawakens at the entrance of the Haunted House, facing an entirely new floor layout and enemy arrangement, ensuring the uniqueness of each attempt.

GAMEPLAY

Haunted House is a single-player video game in which the player’s goal is to recover three pieces of a magic urn that are randomly placed throughout 24 rooms of a mansion and return them to the entrance. The items and some areas within the game are revealed to the player via matches that the player can ignite and blow out. The magazine How to Win at Video Games described Haunted House as a “storyline” game, comparing its gameplay as being similar to that of Atari’s previous games Superman (1979) and Adventure (1980).

Tim Onosko of The Capital Times also compared Haunted House to the two previous games, describing it as an adventure game that requires players to learn rules and requirements and gather items to reach a goal as they play. The player has nine lives to attempt this task. The player can only collect one object at a time and can swap between two objects by touching another one. The mansion is a set of 24 rooms between four floors.

The player can traverse through different doors that ascend and descend, but none permit the player to go in both directions. Throughout the mansion, the player may encounter such enemies as vampire bats, tarantulas, and a ghost, which cause the player to lose a life upon contact. The game has nine settings of varying difficulty. For example, setting 1 has a room where walls around the room are lit by matches while all others are completely dark.

Further challenges introduce locked doors, which require a master key that is also hidden within the mansion. Other difficulties add extra enemies and enemy abilities such as the bats stealing a carried item and placing it at a random location around the mansion. A scepter can be found inside the mansion as a collectible item, which prevents enemies from chasing the player on most levels of difficulty. The ghost will still give chase on higher difficulty levels regardless of whether the player has the item or not.

FEATURES

• Roguelite Resurgence: Haunted House intensifies stealth and enigmatic challenges while incorporating roguelite elements, guaranteeing distinct runs each time.
• All-Ages Thrills: Haunted House blends whimsical, cartoonish art with underlying chills and thrills. Striking a balance between whimsical and eerie, the game predominantly features stealth-based gameplay and light combat sequences.
• Unlockable Characters: As Lyn explores the Haunted House, she rescues her imprisoned friends, who become playable characters, offering fresh experiences with varying stats.
• Atari Nostalgia: The game brims with collectibles and lore drawn from the original Haunted House and other Atari classics from the golden age.
• Stealthy Chills: With combat de-emphasized, players must concentrate on stealthy movement, solving unseen challenges in the shadows, and utilizing an array of traps and tools to divert the ghoulies pursuing Lyn. Lyn must collect gems to enhance her skills and perks, making her more resilient for the next venture into the mansion’s labyrinth.