I thought about buying the game. Sure, why not? It's $5. I collect horror games. This is at least marginally a horror game in complete condition with case, cover art and manual. You know what's weird now that I think about it? ALL the games at Good Will that are on disc media are in great condition with all their bits and pieces present and accounted for. This is a store that receives nearly all of their inventory via donations. People are just dropping games off in this condition at the curb outside and giving them away to the store for them to sell at a profit. Now go into Gamestop and look at the used games. Probably around 1/4 of the games are missing cover art and/or the manual or have some large mar on something like a torn or broken case. I haven't noticed if they still do this but some are even just a disk in a paper slip. THESE games are getting sold by their owners to the store. Why in the hell? I will never understand this. Why is it socially acceptable to buy a game, throw away the box and manual and keep it in a fucking CD binder? Why would you do that? Why would the store buy it back from them in such shitty condition? Why would another customer buy that same game from the store at a marked up price in such shitty condition? Why does a used game which is essentially just a disk, cost as much as a used game in the original case with art and manual? If you look on Amazon they sure as hell don't. What are these dumb fucks doing to their games that make the plastic on the front look like it was run over with a lawnmower? Why is it so hard for people to just buy a game, put it on the shelf, play it for a while and then sell it when they don't want it anymore? You don't need to throw components of the product away or beat the shit out of it with a tire iron. Just put it on the fucking shelf and leave it! Anyway, the point I was originally trying to make is that maybe there is a correlation between the two, suggesting that generous people take better care of their possessions. Or maybe Good Will just has higher standards. Yeah, that's it. The garbage that Gamestop sells for three times as much isn't good enough for the poor.
So I bought it.
The Haunted Mansion is about a man named Zeke, (pretty much this guy), who comes to the mansion and blah blah blah blah. He has to stop a dark cultist named Thorn who has trapped and corrupted the souls in the house. The guy looks like a cross between Jafar and Maleficent. You make your way through the house room by room. Each door you come across is usually sealed and can only be opened with a certain amount of souls. The house incorporates a lot of elements from the ride which is nice. You've got Madame Leota, (the head in the crystal ball) who sounds nothing like she does on the ride. She's more of a cheery southern belle now. They replaced Helena Bonham Carter with Reeba McEntire. The loading screens have those morphing hologram paintings. There are those pedestal busts that appear to follow you. The evil looking clocks are the save points. The candelabra floating down the hall. Every painting you ever see in the mansion. Various ghost characters. This wallpaper...
The list goes on. There's a simple checklist of things you do to finish each room. Go in. Do a puzzle to turn on the lights. Collect souls. Leave to find the next room you can afford to open. (There are also some enemies.)
These puzzles are actually pretty good which surprised me. They integrate into their respective rooms well and most of them are interesting and original. I was expecting lazy puzzles. You know the ones. Just throwing in a slider puzzle with no context or find X number of keys. They never did that. The only problem is that nearly every single puzzle is completely aggravating and it can all be traced to a single and easily avoidable problem: excess.
I think the first real puzzle you come across is the floating book bridge where you need to do some good platforming on patches of floating books that go around the room. Oh this is intriguing, I thought as I worked my way across. Then it was, Why is it just going around the room? Where the hell is this even going? Damn, I fell off and have to start over. Finally I made it to the balcony. I have to do ANOTHER one now? After that it was, I have to do ANOTHER ONE?! It just starts to get really annoying.
There's a really nasty one that makes you solve five quasi chess boards as a human chess piece. It involves patience and timing and if you screw up, you start over. By the time you get to the third one, you're thinking, I can't believe I'm barely half way done with this shit.
There's a haunted fireplace that shoots fireballs at you in the trophy room. You can only make your way down the hall slowly toward it by jumping behind these three moving shields. I'm not quite sure how long this really takes but it certainly feels like an eternity when you're getting the fuck beaten out of you.
The gallery puzzle was impossible for me to solve because I could never find what the problem was. I never noticed that the pictures change because I've seen those pictures so many times by now I've completely tuned them out. I guess I should have used a hint but I went straight for a walkthrough.
In the ballroom there's a loud pipe organ that pushes you away. The only way to advance is to let giant spiders reel you toward them with their web. You have to go from spider to spider, always killing the last one so that the next one can take you. If you screw up, like by killing the wrong spider, there's no salvaging it. You have to go back to the beginning to make the spiders respawn.
The mirror puzzle is fucking broken. I re-solved it probably half a dozen times but one of the mirrors refused to catch the light. I tried every combination until coming back to the only one that made sense and then it just decided to work. Gee, thanks. I will say this, It's still not as terrible as the mirror light puzzle in the end of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. That was bullshit.
The giant billiard table just takes forever.
Those are just a few but almost every single one goes like this: Yay, this is fun --> This is a little less fun now --> This is starting to get annoying --> Okay, now I'm pissed off.
There are legitimately scary parts in the game. Parts that even scared... or at least startled me. When I was little, the ride The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland scared the shit out of me. I didn't try it again until I was in junior high. Now I think it's awesome. I'd go through it over and over,each time trying to notice something new. I tried to read the tombstones in the graveyard in the dim light. (I think they're complete gibberish.) I'd lean out and look behind the doom buggy and places that your attention was generally steered away from, sort of looking behind the scenes and trying to figure out how stuff worked. Anyway, my point is that my younger self probably could not have handled playing this DISNEY game out of fear. It wasn't until I realized this that I went back and had a look at the ESRB rating. It's actually rated T for Teen. I was not expecting this. I thought it would be a more or less silly game along the lines of Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy. Don't get me wrong, the game is still silly but also remains dark and intense all the while.The part where the reaper thing chases you down the hall is scary. The first time you walk past a boarded up door and a bunch of arms burst out to grab at you and hurt you is at least a jump scare. Yeah, it was surprising and delightful the first time but when it happens to you at six different doors while walking down the same hall, it's fucking annoying. Combined with reapers chasing you down the hall it's super mega shit time fucktastic annoying. Do you see what I mean? EVERYTHING that they do that's entertaining, they run into the ground and kill it.
Combat is stupid simple. You carry a supernatural lantern which shoots energy projectiles. That's all. Just spam the shoot button. The projectiles do different things depending on how long you charge the shot. As you collect souls, you also get fragments of death certificates. When you complete a death certificate, you get an upgrade for your lantern. It's actually a lot like a shoot 'em up.
Once you get all 999 souls in the house, you get to fight the one and only boss who's pretty easy. I'd seriously rather fight him than do the kitchen puzzle.
And at the end, what do you get? Grim Grinning Ghosts in four part harmony. Honestly, I'd be pretty pissed off if it ended any other way.
Surprisingly overall it's a decent game. I went in more or less expecting a kid's game and got a legitimate challenge. The puzzles are interesting and annoying which is better than mediocre and annoying. But it still hurts that they botched the execution so many times. It's dark. It pays close attention to elements of the ride. There's a lot of nice details like random stuff you can interact with in the environment such as dishes you can break and building blocks you can knock over. If you look close at a teddy bear, you'll notice that it's head follows you. It's the least shitty game that I was expecting to be shitty since Dino Crisis 2.
