Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Hauntii

• Game: Moonloop Games's Hauntii
• Release Month: May
• Started: 15/01
• Completed: 20/01

The last two games on my GOTY docket for this (OK, last) year are both downers but then that feels thematically apropos given, well, *gestures vaguely around*. Hauntii at least provides a very memorable treatise about what it means to be deceased and how that we might, were our existence to persist somehow after our bodies become worm food, be able to let go to the lives we once led and move on to whatever comes next. Hauntii follows a fallen spirit who mills around a monochrome afterlife for a while before meeting Crisp, an angelic "Eternian" whose job it is to shepherd souls into the (next) great beyond. However, your protag spirit is still being tied down (metaphorically and literally; symbolism, my droogs!) and cannot proceed until they've pieced together their forgotten memories of their time on earth and then... well, forget them again. But more formally and permanently this time, with a big ceremony of dropping crystallized memories into a big fountain or some such.

Hauntii thrives on its narrative and stylistic abstractness to some extent because at its core it's just a top-down collectathon with a few novel ideas for puzzles and action sequences to net you stars that go into constellations that, once formed, allows your ghostly protag to recall a precious memory (they'll also boost its stats, if a cute little cutscene of being given a pet bunny or going to school for the first time wasn't enough). This collectathon aspect is built a little like Super Mario Odyssey's: each region has a set number of stars to find, and a bunch of different tasks for you to complete in order to make them appear, from something as simple as shaking a sparkling tree until its prize falls out to fighting a mini-boss arena battle or completing a checkpoint race. As a ghost, your two main skills are firing out bullets made out of ectoplasm (I try not to think too much about it) and possessing inanimate objects and occasionally other ghosts and using their distinct traits for your own gain. There's a few secondary collectibles out there to find too but all they do is let you buy hats at vendors so they're somewhat less essential. Well, contingent on your interest in millinery, I guess.

Your travels typically have you moving from node to node, each containing a selection of these stars (with hints, to at least give you some idea of where to start looking) and one or more exits to other nodes in the vicinity. There's usually some story critical goal you're pursuing and a specific route to get there, which is often gated off until you've acquired a certain amount of stars and constellations, and the rest of the areas are merely optional treasure hunts to make up any deficit in the necessary stars. It's a straightforward enough format that's very friendly towards OCD weirdos like myself if perhaps resembling more like busywork to anyone else. Still, exploring each of the little nodes and finding all those stars is a pretty strong hook for some varied gameplay targets and tangents that will often keep throwing surprises at you.

The presentation of this game is fantastic. I couldn't even begin to describe what's going on with the soundtrack (composed by freelancer Michael Kirby Ward) except it's very well-made and extremely eclectic, going from orchestral to jazz to some ethereal ambient god-even-knows what genre. It almost feels like a Fantasia soundtrack at times, and the gravitas it lends the game and its little scavenger hunts regularly threatens to feel almost too grand for it. For the game's handful of emotional moments, though, the soundtrack is at its peak efficiency. I'd definitely recommend seeking it out and giving it a listen even if you don't intend to play the game itself: it's a little distracting at how, well, "mature" seems a bit reductive when compared to the average video game soundtrack but its soulfulness is certainly something I didn't anticipate (here's the menu music if you want a taste). Visually, to my untrained eye, the game's use of monochrome is reminiscent of something like Return of the Obra Dinn in that despite the lack of color variety there's no sacrifice to depth, if that makes sense. Maybe some fancy dithering technique is involved but the way the game emphasizes light and shadow—spend too long in the latter and the ghoulies will get you, but sometimes it's worth going out there for collectibles or for shortcuts—makes the whole effect striking. For all the game's faults, the presentation certainly isn't one of them.

So, yeah, faults. I certainly like seizing on those. The game's a bit on the buggy side (something I've gotten used to with PC Game Pass by now, admittedly) in that the rules can often change or there's rules that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Like how you get a little cutscene whenever a star spawns or you finish a puzzle that required you to find five moon phases (a little nod to the developer's name and logo) and the camera just swings over to where something happened so you know where to go, except the game hasn't deigned to pause the action during all this so you could off be getting hurt by enemies or walking off a ledge you can't see because the camera's taken a brief vacay. There are also times where I've fallen off one of those ledges and been carefully placed back on the platform no worse for the wear, since there's parts of the game where falling is pretty easy, but then there are times where I've fallen off in similar situations but was instantly killed by it (and dying removes 10% of your stock of basic currency collectibles, which can still be a lot if you've been stockpiling them for the next vendor). The game used "enslaught" enough times to gaslight me into thinking it was an accepted alternative spelling (it isn't); typos sometimes get a pass if they're a one and done occasion or the developer is from a country where English isn't an official language, though neither's the case here. The game overall can feel sluggish to get around in at times, it can be real hard to aim since there's a limited number of sprites for each direction (so pointing at a 30 degree angle looks the same as a 40), and with no effective fast travel between nodes until right near the end of the game it's a more than a little bit of an ordeal if you wanted to go hunt for the remaining stars or collectibles in any given zone. Despite all this, Hauntii offers an affecting tale of a lost soul seeking redemption buoyed by some excellent presentational chops and a gameplay model that keeps you guessing and gives you plenty to be getting on with, optional or otherwise, and I'm glad I found it buried deep in the annals of Game Pass as it was. Not a serious GOTY contender by most considerations but I could also see this being someone's favorite game from last year: it definitely has a style and voice of its own. (Rating: 4 out of 5.)

Current GOTY

1. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
2. Nine Sols
3. Dungeons of Hinterberg
4. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
5. Another Crab's Treasure
6. Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
7. Pepper Grinder
8. Little Kitty, Big City
9. Still Wakes the Deep
10. Botany Manor
11. Hauntii
12. Magical Delicacy
13. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
14. Doronko Wanko

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2024