Like the mummies and zombies that populate R.L. Stein’s once-massive run of quintessentially 90’s novels, the Goosebumps series has once again risen from the dead, shambling into the public consciousness by rearing its ugly head upon every form of popular media, leaving a trail of schlock and candy corn in its wake. Developer Cosmic Forces, Inc. brings the series to mobile platforms for the first time ever with Goosebumps Night of Scares, a survival adventure game for Android. Taking cues from other big-name successes in the genre, Goosebumps: Night of Scares is an occasionally clever, often frustrating horror title, delivering some genuinely spooky thrills wrapped in an overall disappointing package.
Like the recent film reboot, Goosebumps: Night of Terror stars Jack Black as R.L. Stine, the king of adolescent B-movie literature and proprietor of an old-fashioned haunted house, replete with creaky wooden floors and all kinds of spine-chilling artifacts whose mysteries are practically begging to be explored. Taking control of the unnamed protagonist, the player will test their mettle against vampires, ghosts, and, naturally, talking ventriloquist dummies as they navigate the house and attempt to unravel its arcane secrets.
The game is a fairly transparent attempt at claiming a small piece of the current trend of immersive horror-based puzzle games like P.T., the Amnesia series, and the endless slew of Slenderman-universe games. These games have captured the popular imagination by blurring the line between gaming and film, emphasizing powerful emotional content over traditional game design. In many ways, it is an impressive addition to the subgenre; Goosebumps’ graphics and audio manage to capture the immersive atmosphere that rivals its big-name competitors, packing in plenty of effective jump scares, hypnotizing audio cues, and an engaging game world to explore. But these comparisons also serve to highlight Goosebumps’ technical shortcomings. Compared to a title like Five Nights at Freddy’s, another title whose DNA is evident in Goosebumps’ genetic makeup, the game feels more like a horror-themed point and click game rather than a true blue puzzle horror title.
Usually, great games will use the first hour or so of gameplay to lob activities at the player that help illuminate essential mechanics, ramping up difficulty only after the player has had a chance to master the game’s various tools and skills. Goosebumps, on the other hand, never deviates from its standard puzzle formula, which essentially breaks down to a simple drag and drop schema—flipping through your inventory until you find the relevant item is the name of the game here. There are some fun moments where you’ll be doing this while being chased by some spooky ghoul or another, necessitating a stealth-ish approach to hiding (a trick cribbed from yet another notable recent title, Alien: Isolation.) These help break up the monotony of the puzzles, but don’t truly elevate the core mechanics of the game.
Another huge issue with a game whose main goal should be immersiveness is the lack of interactivity the player has with the game world and the main character. On-rails point and clicks can be great—Myst is legendary for perfectly valid reasons. But the horror, the exploration, the stealthy bits, and the puzzle solving all suffer from a lack of responsiveness to player input.
Perhaps it could be argued that this is a symptom of the touchscreen based controls mobile gaming is still struggling to perfect: it’s hard to imagine Goosebumps with full-on 3D platforming controls. The game has modest aspirations, and adroitly hits many of those notes. While you’ll be doing more watching than playing during the course of the game, you’ll at least be treated to decent graphics, excellent sound design, and some legitimate scares. There’s plenty here for younger gamers new to the Goosebumps franchise, and surely for older gamers Goosebumps Night of Scares is a well crafted nostalgia trip. There’s also a Virtual Reality-enabled mode for those with the hardware and the guts; while we weren’t able to try this feature out, there’s undeniably a lot of potential there to increase replayability value. But for anyone who has ever spent their time with point-and-click puzzle games mindlessly tapping on anything and everything on screen, or for anyone looking for tight and flexible controls in their spooky games, there’s not enough here to get really excited about.
Is it Hardcore?
Kinda.
Goosebumps Night of Scares impresses with excellent graphics and sound design. Its lack of meaty gameplay, however, will send shivers down the spine of many hardcore gamers.