Introduction
Haunted House is one of the first survival horror games to ever grace a home console. The concept, like most for games of this period is a bit thin, but it simple enough. You've come to the dark dusty mansion of the deceased Zachary Graves searching the 4 floors for 3 pieces of a precious urn. The catch being of course that the house is dark, scary, filled with bats and spiders and is of course haunted. It's not Silent Hill, but it does a surprisingly good job of keeping you on edge.
Overview
This is a standard joystick game so the controls are simple. You move around the house with the joystick, light matches with the button. When you encounter items you simply touch them to pick them up, you can only hold one item at a time (other than the urn) so you will automatically switch when you run into a new item. You can drop items as well by hitting the button if you've already got a match lit.
Graphically it's just there. Not the best looking game and not the worst looking game, it gets the job done.
Sound wise there's not a lot going on there's no music and what you do get is a few atmospheric sounds. They're primitive, but effective. As you travel around you hear the sound of your own footsteps and the sound of entering a new floor. When an enemy is around, you get the wailing of a ghostly chilling wind. Should you happen to touch that enemy you hear cracks of thunder while your eyes roll around in fright.
There are only three items but in typical Atari fashion you'll have no idea what they are without a little info.
Magic urn: It's broken into to three pieces which on their own don't really look like anything so if you pickup something weird looking it's probably the urn. It's the whole reason you're traipsing around a dark haunted mansion infested with rabid bats and poisonous spiders. What sort of magic does it hold? Who knows, but you can find out once you've got it all together and escape. (My guess is some sort of hallucinogen given the way the whole house color shifts when you win)
Magic scepter: A completely mysterious relic that keeps ghosts, bats and spiders away from you so long as you're holding it. This sounds a lot more useful than it really is, the holding one item at a time thing means you'll almost never be holding this.
Golden Key: First off let's get this out of the way, I know it's green, but the booklet claims it's golden. We'll just assume it's gold plated copper and has gotten a nice patina over the years. Basically a skeleton key, it opens any locked doors you find. This is a must have item in the later levels and not remembering where you left it is likely to get you killed.
Gameplay
You start off at the front door they only part of you character visible is the whites of your eyes and your pupils, A pretty familiar darkness scenario if you believe in the validity of old cartoons. If you're playing on the first difficultly level you can see the basic layout of whatever floor you are current on. You can go either up or downstairs by exiting up, down or to the left or right. To find the urn pieces and other helpful items you'll need to light a match otherwise it's too dark to see. Matches only last for a set amount of time before going out on their own, but you've got an infinite supply of them so you can light all you want. The only caveat is that the number you use affects your score at the end, but unless you're playing it tournament style with a bunch of geek friends there's no reason to be particularly concerned with that.
Occasionally while you're searching you'll encounter an enemy, or several as sometimes more than one appears at once. When this happens there will be a flash of lightening and a howling wind will come up to blow out your match you'll have to run out of the room or you'll lose a life as soon as they touch you. Usually they won't spawn right on top of you so they should be easy to avoid. Unless it the ghost of Mr. Graves, which is significantly faster. If you're near him when he pops up, you can pretty much kiss that life goodbye. If you can avoid the ghost of Mr. Graves, getting the urn and getting out is pretty simple given you've got 9 lives to work with. It's when you up the difficulty that things get interesting.
In the harder difficulty levels things get a lot harder for you. The mansion is now so dark you can't see the walls unless you light a match. You can no longer pass freely between all the rooms, you'll have to find a key. Additionally as you'd expect the enemies spawn faster and more often. This combination of factors can get you running scared when the vengeful spirit of Mr. Graves blows out your match and you find yourself running away blindly into a locked door or unseen wall. Making matters worse is that they can and will switch floors and rooms to come after you. It's never really scary but it can definitely give you a shot of adrenaline.
Conclusion
Haunted House brought a lot of new concepts to home gaming, scrolling corridors, multi-screen playing field and a whole new genre, survival horror. As I said before it's not quite something in line with fatal frame or a resident evil, but it's stood the test of time admirably, it is still a very playable and very enjoyable game. It's really a bit of a hidden gem, it should be regarded as a gaming classic and should be in every Atari fan's collection
~Stephanie
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