The Haunted Mansion

If you've been known to scream and squeal during the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, you may contract a mild (but curable) case of the heebie jeebies from the game as you explore dusty rooms and cobwebbed secret passages with your trusty ghost-zapping lantern. Nine hundred and ninety-nine spooks await, as do a few borrowed elements from the movie and ride. In place of film lead Eddie Murphy, you play as an unemployed yokel named Zeke who ventures into yonder mansion, unaware of the apparitional habitants that plague its decrepit halls. We're afraid, but more for concerns of quality.

With Disney's The Haunted Mansion coming to theaters soon, it's not surprising to see a video game released at the same time. What is surprising however is to discover the video game has little to do with the movie beyond both having a haunted mansion. Based on Disney's theme park attraction, The Haunted Mansion is an adventure game where you're lured into a haunted mansion to be the savior of good ghosts being corrupted by an evil presence. Although the gameplay is simplistic, The Haunted Mansion brings enough diversity to create a challenge but isn't going to set any new standards.

The Haunted Mansion gameplay consists to two main objectives repeated throughout the game, consisting of turning on a light switch and then capturing corrupted ghosts in your magical lantern. This process is repeated until all 999 ghosts have been captured. Although this sounds tedious, the puzzles and other gameplay elements help to keep the game diverse enough. Elements like being able to upgrade your lantern and action oriented features such as shooting ghosts with the lantern help to reduce the redundancy of capturing all 999 ghosts.

The graphics and audio have an issue similar to the gameplay in the fact that the environment is similar throughout the game and is limited in variation. Basically, it is one dark room after another with creepy sounds that don't change much. The whole game is set in one house so high expectations of various environments are probably unrealistic.

Although not related to the soon to be released movie of the same name, The Haunted Mansion manages to accomplish more then you would expect with such a simple gameplay structure and limited environment. It doesn't break any new ground but fans of adventure games will find enough motivation to capture all 999 ghosts.