HomeReviewsHauntii
Hauntii review: an adventure as beautiful as it looksI don’t normally like letting things haunt me, but this is an exception
I don’t normally like letting things haunt me, but this is an exception
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Firestoke
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Firestoke
As you defeat enemies and haunt things, you’ll earn crystals and special world tokens. You can cash these in at merchants, who’ll sell nothing other than fun hats. There are wizard hats, cat ears, beer hats. It’s a laugh and I’m into it. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Firestoke
A lot of Hauntii’s puzzling is about picking up on cues in each of its clever playgrounds, then figuring out what needs resolving or how you might navigate the dark sea and get over to that suspect island of light in the distance. It’s about haunting these skittish witches whose knapsacks spill light, granting you makeshift stepping stones. Or possessing a creature that’s capable of stomping and using them to plunge a sequence of stumps into the earth. Or becoming a fairground bell just as a titanic ghost smacks you upwards with a mallet, rocketing you to a new area.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Firestoke
Eternity isgorgeousand at times, I wonder if it’s one of the loveliest looking games I’ve ever set my eyes on. All hand-drawn art with a two-tone palette that lends itself to the ethereal, where mostly everything bobs or shimmers at a low frame rate making it seem like a grand odyssey contained in a notepad, but if that notepad sprang to life.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Firestoke
Puzzles certainly increase in complexity later on, but they’re never truly difficult. And I think that’s nice, because it keeps you flowing through each stage at a pace befitting of the game’s relaxed atmosphere. Sure, some paths to progress can be a bit unclear at times and some worlds might drag on a tiny bit longer than you’d like, but these gripes pale in comparison to the joy of embodying things big or small to prize each star from its lodgings.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Firestoke
And perhaps one of my favourite touches is the extra,extradimension to completing those constellations. Every time you create a glistening rabbit or a shiny boat in the night sky, you’ll witness a very brief cutscene of a life once lived. It’s presented as a thought bubble, where line-drawings - reminiscent of the Nintendo DS' Flipnote studio - show us nice moments or sad moments. And often the simplest of moments, where Hauntii might come across a whale in an aquarium and through just a few scrawled lines, you can see the happiness radiate off him. I think it’s genius really, that those stars act as a way to strengthen Hauntii’s resolve as he pieces together who he was and why he passed. I was, predictably, in bits after some of these short scenes.
Every time I mention Hauntii, I get an “eh?”, or I hear the clack of a pal giving it a search. They always say, “Woah, that looks gorgeous, I’d never heard of it”. And that’s no slight on the game, but rather its relative out-of-nowhere-ness has felt rather nice, actually. That I’ve got to delight in anadventure gameso beautiful and unpretentious and clever before it’s released to the masses. It’s a selfish sort of feeling which this job grants us on rare occasions, and as I urge you to give this game a go, I get this deep satisfaction from parting the curtains. Don’t sleep on Hauntii, for goodness sake.
