Indie Gaming Theater - Halloween Mysteries

Welcome to Indie Gaming Theater, where I buy a discounted, barely-reviewed indie game from Steam's stacks and take a close, honest look at it. For more details on what this feature aims to do, go here to check out my lengthy preamble. Otherwise, enjoy!

Halloween Mysteries

Look, I'm not a fan of difficult games. I find zero pleasure in memorizing the Lord of Apple Cider's three-frame weak spots while slowly increasing my attunement by whacking skeletons with my slow-rolling paladin. Whatever Souls-alike is popular at the moment gets no love whatsoever from me for the same reason I don't like my dates dripping battery acid on me during our sexy happy fun times... because I'm not a lunatic.

I'm that rare breed that likes my sanity. I don't want my games to feel like I'm hammering rocks into chunks a few miles out of some gulag hellhole for a few scraps of bread and the vague hope that someday I might drop dead from exhaustion or exposure. I like games to be, you know, fun, or entertaining, or hopefully a combination of the two. I like to think I can make forward progress in games so that I can see more, play more, have more of the same hopefully great experiences.

Hard video games tend to be like the equivalent of a Saw movie. Sure, they're kind of fascinating to watch at first, but after a while, you realize they're just a series of torturous scenes, all too often at the cost of actual forward movement of plot (or gameplay, as it were). After the initial shock value wears off, there's nothing there for me. I want my games to move somewhere, and when I'm gated by gameplay that simply will not allow it, I tend to give zero shits very quickly.

Cue Halloween Mysteries, developed by Vyacheslav Ozolnieks (that's a team name, apparently).

Let's get this whole "video games are hard to make" thing out there. It's a hugely popular phrase around Giant Bomb, and I get it! Games ARE hard to make. As are books, movies, TV shows, and anything really creatively focused. And I applaud people for trying to make something, well and truly. That said, criticism exists for a reason - to make better things and to push those arts and industries forward. Criticism solely for the sake of being negative does no one any favors, but neither does being upbeat and coy about a product's problems.

With that said, Halloween Mysteries has problems. Severe problems. And it's made all the more unfortunate because it feels like very competent people made individual aspects of this game work very well. The controls are fine. The basics of the graphics are fine. The essential building blocks of what should make for a fundamentally sound game are all present, but they're almost immediately dragged down by an army of small problems that add up very, very quickly, all led by a vanguard of almost hilariously brutal difficulty problems.

Halloween Mysteries is a stripped-down isometric RPG in the vein of Diablo. It lacks the depth and loot of that game, but you can see some similarities right from the start. Leveling up nets you points to spend in health, magic, or dexterity, all of which do exactly what you'd think in a Diablo clone. You have a ranged and melee attack, and a few special skills to call upon as you gain levels. That's all basically sound stuff and all of it works well enough for a game of this type.

But those basics are immediately undermined by the sense that nothing else in the game was given as much thought or polish. The story, something about a wizard type who has his family's magic crystal stolen by a goblin, is laughably thin and would've been served better by not existing at all. The goblin's voice actor sounds both bored and baffled by the idea of even a bad faked accent, somehow managing to make the already-awful dialogue even worse. The one NPC you'll bump into sets up the weak-ass premise for the game with some of the most bizarre Engrish I've heard in a long time. It makes Persona 5 look Shakespearean in comparison, but even a better translation couldn't stop this from being an exposition slog. At one point, the character unnecessarily defines Halloween night by telling the character that it's between the evening of October 31st and November 1st. This game needed a high school English teacher's once over, or maybe a quick read-through by the kid at the dentist's office flipping through a Highlights. Anything to save it from itself.

Unfortunately, that's not even the worst of the problems. There's a bizarre amount of stuttering with the game's movement, as though it's missing frames with every step. This seems to resolve itself a few minutes in, so I assume it's a loading thing, but who knows? I've also managed to cheese several chests that were supposed to be a challenge to reach by simply pushing at random points in a nearby wall or fence and rolling until I glitched through to the chest.

But Halloween Mysteries' biggest problem is its absolutely ludicrous (as in insane, not the rapper-gone-Fast and Furious sidekick) difficulty. I'm an hour in and still barely past the introductory first couple of save points - and this does not appear to be a long game. I couldn't even get snapshots of the combat properly because every time I glanced down at my keyboard to find the F12 button, I was killed in one or two hits by amorphous enemies that could either be rats, goblins, or some kind of demon child sent to haunt me for tearing down kids in my last couple of blogs.

I wouldn't have minded a difficulty spike a little later in the game when I'm more used to its fundamentals, or if it was a bit more forgiving in the way it handled mana and health regeneration. But the game steadfastly refuses to be nice to the player, a position that I'm sure will make some of you run for it like it's the next Demon's Souls. Don't. Trust me, this isn't the fun kind of difficult. Mana regeneration pools are far and few between, and if you regenerate mana, it doesn't happen nearly fast enough to make any difference whatsoever. Melee attacks wipe out enemies really fast, but it's hard to judge an enemy's position and your swings seem somewhat narrowly focused despite the wide animation arcs. Birdmen swooped down on me and picked me off fast while I thought I was whacking them with my wizardly stick thing.

Also, why do wizards fight with sticks? What the fuck is that about? They're wizards. They should be grabbing up dragon skulls and transforming them into gatling guns that shoot out orc butts or something. "Oh hey, we're ultra-powerful badasses who can only whack you with an unsanded piece of wood. Because that makes sense."

I wish I could like Halloween Mysteries. I wish it had some redemptive thing about it, like Krampus's essentially interesting central premise or MOAI's easy-to-like basic gameplay. But there's just nothing here that makes me want to revisit it in any capacity. As a proof of concept, its programmers should have some success. They've essentially done a very good job at making the basics of a very particular genre of games. But as for absolutely everything else? Halloween Mysteries makes me kinda wish for the sexy fun time battery acid instead.

Halloween Mysteries is available on Steam for $9.99 normally, but no amount of jaw-dropping Engrish is worth the price of admission for this one.