Poltergeist: A Pixelated Horror

Game Info

Poltergeist: A Pixelated Horror is just that but not how you would expect.  It reminds me a lot of Super Nintendo, with its characters, the music, sounds and the graphics.  It is a puzzle game, in which you are the ghost trying to haunt the people in the game.  Sounds easy but isn’t always the case, being that their are different ways to scare the players as well as some of them having abilities to counter your tactics.  It is basically a point and click kind of game with an over the top view of floor plans, where you will see all the characters that you are trying to scare out of your mansion.

The game begins with the story of a man, Henry B. Knight, who bought a huge mansion for him and his wife.  His wife fell very sick and passed away.  After her passing, Henry swore that he would never lose his house like he lost his wife.  The first couple of levels are pretty basic but there are some that will have you putting on your thinking cap.  The levels are broken down into fifteen levels in four different era’s.  The classic era, which is probably the easiest levels of the four era’s.  Then there are the eighties era, modern era and the office era.  Each era has 12 levels and 3 boss levels.

The boss battle of the eighties era is pretty cool.  It is a woman named Nicole K. but she shows up in the “Ecto-1,” which is the Ghostbusters ride.  She also uses the ghost trap used by the Ghostbusters to try and stop you.  I got a kick out of it being I am an 80’s kid.  Also, one of the regular characters walking around in the levels looks like an original Ghostbuster with the proton pack and all.  The third boss of the game was pretty funny to me as well.  I am not sure if it was what Glitchy Pixel was going for but the he was a priest dressed up in the purple get up.  I laugh because if you have ever seen the movie Haunted House with Marlon Wayans, than this character will remind you a lot of the character that Cedric the Entertainer played.  I just got a kick out of it and it totally adds points for awesomeness in my opinion.

This game consists of you being skilled at scaring the people out of your mansion.  Some of these skills can be countered by certain people.  Before I go into all that, it will make sense to point out the scare tactics first and then the rest of the explanations might make a little more sense.  First off, you have your basic scare skill where you will just flip furniture around.  Another is to call people into other rooms, fling furniture from one room to another, possess people, make furniture spin in the air, call upon a ghost demon, a demon dog to chase people into whatever room you want and a vortex or a black hole that will suck all the people in the room into it.

The levels are filled with regular people, dogs and some people with abilities that you are trying to scare out of your mansion.  All of these soon to be victims also have a life meter above their heads.  Each one will vary from one to three dots.  They need to be frightened for each dot of life they have.  Once it is empty they will run out of the mansion screaming in fear.  The characters with some abilities are not so easy to scare.  Sometimes they can counter some of your scare tactics.  There are also quite a bit of levels with more than one of these types of characters per level.  Sometimes, they can dodge multiple scares and some can dodge a scare that maybe the other can’t.  So if you bring up the ghost demon maybe they can zap it or use a spell to make it disappear and then you will have wasted a scare tactic.

The game graphics look like an 8-bit Nintendo game but works great for what the game is.  The controls are simple but once in awhile seem to lock up.  I’ll try and press over and it won’t select the scare tactic I want to use.  The music and sounds are great with the game.  The music tries to be spooky which is what you would want in a game that you are trying to scare people out.  The sounds go very well with the scare tactics and the people.  Their screams are great as they are waving their arms in the air in fear.  The growls of the demon dog and the sound of furniture crashing are all on par.

Poltergeist is a point and click type of game.  Your goal is to make all the people run out of the mansion in fear with the few scare tactics you are given at the beginning of each level.  Sometimes, you will have to move certain characters from one room to another so you can frighten more than one person at a time with one ability.  You will probably fail a few times on a lot of the levels because you will find out the certain characters that can retaliate your attacks in which you will run out of scaring abilities and be unable to finish.  Some levels are pretty simple but majority of them will take a few minutes to think it through before you make your moves.

The Recommendation

I love the little tidbits in the game, mostly the Ghostbusters references.  I enjoyed the challenge of the game but like most point and click puzzles, they tend to get boring and tedious after a little bit.  I managed to finish the entire game in like 4 hours but that is also including eating and other little things in between.  If I was to play this for fun on my terms, I could probably do about 30 minute sessions to kill time or give my brain a quick thinking workout.  If you are into the point and click puzzles with a good challenge then this is definitely a title to download.  I enjoyed it but only for a short period of time and then felt it got repetitive and boring.