While Fist Puncher felt like it was never going to end, Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds left me far too soon. When the credits rolled I was genuinely surprised. I’d been expecting to leave the house and head out into a whole new world of point-and-click adventure, but then the game ended. I was pretty upset about this, as the game had a funny art style and an interesting storyline that just felt like it was starting to get going. It’s good that the game left me wanting more, but it did so far short of the four hours of gameplay the game was supposed to have. A concise game is not an issue and I applaud developers who realize that, but Evolving Poet still made a game that’s pretty scant on content. What’s there is a lot of fun, but there really needed to be more of it.
You play as Jack, a dead private eye who’s currently a ghost haunting an old house. You lose your haunting license for the place to some evil-looking guy, and therefore have to find your remains and leave the house. It’s a silly premise, and the rest of the game is just as silly. Jack makes goofy comments about anything you happen to want him to look at, and makes a lot of the searching involved in a point-and-click game go down a little easier. He also has secondary things to say for a handful of items in the game as well, so when you get stuck and are clicking on everything to figure out what to do, odds are good you’ll get a new piece of dialogue that’ll make the search more entertaining.
That’s made necessary by the fact that Jack won’t pick up just anything. Except for keys, Jack needs to be in the middle of a quest requiring the item in order to pick something up. I found this to be a bit of a nuisance at points, especially when I started noticing that there were candles all over the house. I knew for a fact that I’d be collecting them at some point, but it wasn’t until I was told what I needed them that I could actually get them. It makes sense that a ghost wouldn’t pick up just anything, but I still found it just forced me to do some unnecessary running around. Some items will let you pick them up without a quest, but some quests only show up by looking around the environment so you may as well just click on everything. The fun descriptions make this more tolerable than it would have been in some other point-and-click games, but I still would have just liked to be able to pick things up as soon as I saw them.
Interacting with the items when you do have them is pretty simple, though. Instead of having to know which item you need and what to select, the game will just use the proper item if you have it. It was a really nice touch throughout the game, making it easy to tell when you completed a quest. You’d still have to go to the right room or click on the correct object to finish the task, but there was no fiddling around with item combinations or trying out every single item on a character. If you had the right item, the game would just use it for you. It made the game move faster, and also told me when I hadn’t quite solved the puzzle yet.
It’s typically not that hard to tell if you don’t have what you need, though. The game is quite clear on what items you can click on. For starters, the game only has a few details in each room that you can click on and interact with, so you won’t be on a pixel hunt if you need an item and don’t know what you’re looking for. If it isn’t a piece of bare wall, odds are good you can interact with it in some way. Also, the whole game takes place in a small house with only a few things in each room, so clicking on each item doesn’t really take all that long. Just poke around the house, enjoy Jack’s weird descriptions, and odds are good you’ll find what you want in a few minutes. If you’re stuck, you won’t be stuck long. There is still a hint phone in the game you can use if you can’t figure things out, but the game is so simple there’s not much point in using it.
The quests are as silly as the rest of the game. I ran into an undead emo teenager who wanted me to recover pieces of his journal. He specifically asked me not to read them, so the fact that Jack instantly read them as he found them got a laugh out of me. You also spend some time resurrecting a dead dog, because everyone wants a half-decayed friend. There is also a point where you have to cleanse the house of evil spirits that you let out, doing so by using an instant camera. The cleansing added a little something extra to the game in that it plays a bit like a short action sequence. You just click on falling purple orbs before they touch the bottom of the screen for a few seconds to fill up a meter, but it created a nice diversion from the regular game.
The drag is that, beyond these three tasks, there’s really not a whole lot to do in the game beyond the short main quest. I don’t mind playing concise games; I appreciate a game that doesn’t waste my time with padding. Jack Haunt could have done that by making me select the correct items or by making me combine items in obtuse ways, but it simplified things to make sure the game flowed better and had fewer times where I was frustrated and unsure what to do. The consequence is that it made a short game even shorter. There’s not a whole lot to do, and what you have to do doesn’t take very long. The developers have quoted that the game has four hours of gameplay, but I’d barely been playing for over an hour before I’d beaten it.
The visuals give it some presence. It has a kind of South Park look to it, as if someone had cut out everything from construction paper and laid it out. It makes everything stand out really well, with the few characters and locations looking great because of it. It adds to the fun of the game, and somehow works really well when the storyline takes a bit of a dark turn. The characters and items are all large on the screen, again making it easy to know what to interact with while making it simple to enjoy the childish design of it all. The game looks like a child put it together, and the art clicked really well with the game’s sense of humor.
As I said, the story gets a little dark. You are in a house filled with creatures that are haunting the place, and the game does go into why you’re all stuck there. It’s actually pretty morbid stuff considering the art style and general tone, but it somehow works. The bad things that happened are hinted at in silly ways as you move along, and it really left me unprepared for the reveal of what had happened here. It should have been at odds with the game’s overall presentation, but it still had some impact on me, and would have probably made for a very serious horror game in any other game.
The Night of the Rabbit had some dark events happen in its plot a week ago and I felt that went against the game’s tone, so why is Jack Haunt different, though? The game describes everything in a fun way when you click on it, and the dialogue is infused with a sense of humor, but the game still gears itself towards adults. The jokes and references are more something an adult would appreciate. Everything about The Night of the Rabbit (except the difficulty) felt geared toward children, making the dark turn feel more at odds with the rest of the game. It was too sweet ninety percent of the time for it to feel natural turning so sour at the end.
Also, the nonchalant way Jack describes dead bodies and horrifying things is a little disarming, as is the way the game presents itself with its artwork. You see things that should be terrible, like dead bodies, but having them look like they were cut from construction paper and hearing Jack half joke about them put the more macabre meaning of things at a distance. Jack doesn’t seem too upset by what happened any more, and the player ends up feeling the same way. So, once the game takes a really dark turn, one that bothered me more and more hours after I’d shut the game off, you just kind of roll with the reveal. It’s something I’ve been becoming steadily more impressed with since I finished the game, as it’s very rare for a fun game to be able to deal with such serious subject matter without sabotaging itself.
That fact alone made me happy that I picked up Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds, but it still felt very short on content. There just wasn’t a whole lot to do, and with the promise of the game being a few hours long I expected to have something else to do once I finally found the final item I needed to leave the house. It felt like the game was just getting ready to start, as if I’d just played the introductory chapter, but the introduction was all there was. The game manages to tie up the plot it’s telling you by the end of this time, but it really did feel like I’d just gotten through the initial chapter of an episodic series or something of the like. I liked what I’d seen and was impressed at the developer’s storytelling ability, so it was a downer to have the game just come to a halt there. Jack’s story finished there, but it really felt like it can and should have kept going.
That’s the worst part, really. It’s rare that I find a game that has fun visuals, tells an interesting story, has a good sense of humor, and sticks with me after it’s done. To pull this off in such a short time is a nice accomplishment, but I really did feel like I wanted more content from the game. There just wasn’t enough stuff to do in this game, even considering the five dollar price tag. I’ve put in more time in many free indie games before, so Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds felt like it needed far more content than it gave to justify even its cheap price. It’s a good game if you just want to enjoy a unique point-and-click game, but I really hope Evolving Poets explores this setting again with a little more depth. This feels like the start of something great, and it upset me to have it end so quickly.
Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds is available from the developer’s site for $5.
Jack Haunt Trailer – Indie DB
