PC User Reviews

Haunted Past: Realm of Ghosts has an interesting gameplay mechanic allowing the player to bury items in the ghost world (or is it the past?) so they can be found and used in the real world. The rules of how this works aren’t, however, made entirely clear. Aside from this, there isn’t much to recommend this game. Gogii Games released better games than this before and after. Unique gameplay mechanic and a cool tagline aside, everything feels lacking in development to the point that the player feels emotional detachment from this tragic love triangle. Anyway, we need more games with taglines.

Really? I have a haunted past and I don't feel the need to put it on a cover. Though mine has less to do with a so-called 'Realm of Ghosts,' and more to do with a realm of incompetency and burn out. But personal anecdotes aside, let me tell you about my experience with this game. Obviously the first note to make is that I'm a tad older than their intended audience. Just a tad. Just a decade or so. So while playing the game on the advanced difficulty, I can't claim to have experienced any challenge here. But if buying this for children aged around 10, I believe this may just keep them distracted for a while. I'd say at least long enough for 4 or 5 trips to the grocery store, or whatever it is that adults do. I have yet to find out. Narratively speaking, this game is actually darker than I'd expect for a young audience. There's plenty of envy, murder, and fear of an innocent man being executed by hanging. Maybe if your kid is the next generation of goth, they'll find a happy home here... ironically. There are several minor jumpscares and potentially freaky imagery that balances the line of 'maybe too much for a 9 year old' and 'mundane as a French riot for a 10 year old.' Nonetheless, is the story satisfying, you ask? Sure, for an hour long game where the entirety of the voiced dialogue is given through a microphone so dull and filtered you can't remember whether this was a game about a realm of ghosts or a realm of robots. I do giggle when one of the 2 tag lines on the box states "There is a realm beyond our own" as if children couldn't work out that murderous robot-ghosts aren't a part of our normal, everyday realm. I know kids be dumb, but not that dumb. They're 'falling for a phone scam' dumb, not 'voting in a tv show host for president' dumb. Visually speaking, the game is adequate. It was made in 2011 yet while it does scale to widescreen, the program looks and behaves as if it wasn't meant to be displayed in widescreen. It is clearly stretched, there are no resolution options and it does that thing old 4:3 games do on modern systems where the screen has to adapt to them and so resizes any other program open in the background. It's not a problem, and it won't hamper your experience at all, but we were well beyond that kind of thing by 2011. Maybe that's why it's called Haunted Past. The ancient, ghostly age of 1280x960 technology. Sends shivers down my spine for sure. The artwork is nice enough. Nothing standout here, but some environments such as the courtyard are beautifully designed. The ghostly, white light sheen of the spirit realm is a pleasing aesthetic and necessary break from the dark blue filter of the normal realm. 1 or 2 scenes genuinely give a lovely, creepy atmosphere (there's the goth in me coming out). Audially speaking, there is a dissonance between hearing the sounds of thunderstorms indoors when none of the outdoors areas display any thunder. Similarly, the many windows have a small effect of rain outside, yet heading to the outside clearly shows that the rain is entirely in your protagonist's head. That's the strangest mental illness I've weather heard of. The ambient sound effects bother me too. Sound artists not talking to the visual artists is bad enough, especially in a game about a haunted house - a genre literally all about atmosphere and ambience. But what's worse is when they don't communicate with the programmers. There are scenes where you hear the skip in the ambient sound clip when it loops. That was incredibly distracting. The sounds themselves aren't anything extraordinary either, ironically. If there was any more work to be done on this game, the sound department is where it was. I've taken more atmospheric dumps than some of these sound effects and ambience tracks. Mechanically speaking, the game has puzzles and hidden object images. The hidden object puzzles are good enough. A bit simple, given that the only difficulty comes from low resolution and monotone use of colour. But otherwise satisfying and a nice break from the adventure game style puzzles of the world. These are also mostly straightforward, only relying on cheap curveballs like pixel hunting and leaps of logic maybe 3 times the entire game. Even then, the design is simple enough to keep you in the right direction anyway. The only other mechanic is the jumping between ghost realm and people realm. I'm not usually a fan of this overdone 'Link to the Past' mechanic of puzzling through 2 connected worlds that are slightly different. But here it works because of its simplicity. You merely find objects in the ghost realm and hide them so they appear in the people realm. Straightforward and a nice little extra step to somewhat prevent too much reliance on 'just click everything.' Haunted Past oversells itself a little. Not the best HOG I've played, not even the best haunted house HOG meant for kids I've played, but still a good experience. I'm an adult, just to be clear. Just so you know... Anyway...