A new, reimagined version of the game Haunted House was announced by Atari, set to come out at some point in 2023.
Are you craving a new roguelite game? Well, strangely enough, Atari and Orbit Studio have announced the release of Haunted House, a roguelite horror/stealth game—based on the 1982 classic Atari game of the same name. A full description of the game has already been released from the game companies, along with some screenshots.
Haunted House has players taking on the role of Lyn Graves, niece of a legendary treasure hunter named Zachary Graves. Lyn goes to visit her uncle’s mansion with her friends, but things do not go as planned. The house is filled with ghouls, monsters who snatch her friends away, and her uncle. She must find the broken pieces of a magical urn to put it back together to save her uncle and friends from the supernatural beings that plague the mansion.
The description also included that the room map layouts were specifically generated with “shifting walls, unpredictable enemy placements, and unique ghostly encounters”, thus the horror elements. Then, the stealth factors come into play as Lyn must creep, sneak, and dash through hordes of ghouls and eerie ectoplasms to find her friends and uncle.
The scariest part of the game is facing the bosses that protect the urn pieces that players must collect. When a ghost or monster defeats Lyn, she is sent back to the entrance with a new floor layout and enemy placement. Atari was keen to emphasize that the game would not be grotesquely scary but more suitable for all ages – more campy and silly. Another way they added a layer to the game is that players can choose different unlockable characters when they find Lyn’s friends and free them. Each character will also have different stats.
The original game was a simple survival horror game in which players acted like a pair of eyes scrolling through 24 differently designed rooms in a Pac-Man style. The game’s main objective was similar in that the player had to recover three pieces of a magic urn. The player had nine lives and could encounter enemies such as vampire bats, tarantulas and a ghost that would cause the player to lose a life on contact.
While the roguelite element sort of shakes things up for this classic reimagining, this may be one that I will have to play to see if it really works as a revamp to a notable game. Haunted House will be out for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC, and Atari VCS in 2023.
