Monster House
Think of it as Resident Icky.
Published: July 24, 2006
That doesn't mean there aren't problems. Though the game tries to balance action sequences with boss battles and some light puzzle elements, this is usually just a case of ducking under an attack and then mashing on the X Button to return one of your own. Pushing crates and finding keys in chests occupy most of the other non-shooting bits, and ultimately the game starts to feel incredibly linear. Again, this is a kid's game, so massive backtracking and too many branching hallways might mess with things (especially with the game's wider view), but it still bears mentioning. You'll probably breeze through most of the game without dying, though the nine levels zip by pretty quickly and the difficulty can feel like a bit of a spike as a result.
When the harder parts hit, they hit fast, and they reveal one of the game's most frustrating flaws: the checkpoint system. Bathrooms in the game auto-save your progress just by crossing through them, but they aren't terribly frequent toward the end, and those quick-button sequences where you have to dodge living trees mean instant death if not done properly. If you die, you start the chapter over again, or at least go back past mini-boss battles, leading to a ton of replaying the same bits over and over again, sometimes as much as a good half hour or more, all because you didn't hit a button fast enough during a random attack.
Fortunately, if you get fed up with the main game, there's always a little old-school quasi-8-bit side-scroller called "Thou Art Dead" that lifts elements from Castlevania as much as the main game apes Resident Evil 4. It's a nice diversion, though you'll quickly pick up enough tokens for the game in the main adventure that getting to the end isn't terribly difficult. The synth music, low-fi sound effects and even faux-synthesizer-chip voice are all really nice touches, though things like fading screens and weird ultra-smooth death animations when falling in pits makes the game feel a little like a Flash replica. Still, we giggled a little at the fake checksum boot screens as if it was loading up a ROM.
I've said it before in games like Scooby-Doo Unmasked (hey, stop snickering, it's good): A2M really knows how to animate their characters well. Add to that an engine that offers a little faked bloom lighting, some nice textures, an ultra-wide almost walleye field of view setting and that oh-so-awesome animation and you have a very, very pretty game. Any animators that can make a wooden chair skitter toward me like a spider enough that I got a little creeped out (I've got pretty intense arachnophobia), I have to give them props for their work. The way characters clumsily climb up objects or pump their water guns or even the cutscenes that can make pipes look menacing, it's all very, very well done.
The levels also offer some genuinely cool designs. Whether it's pulling from the CG movie's source material or just something A2M thought up (I haven't yet seen the movie, though I now want to), I was very impressed with some of the later stuff. The whole basement toy room gone evil was especially cool. Often there's plenty of falling dust or dirt, and even the pipes that are used all too often to wall off areas and keep the player on a set path at least look cool. The audio too is really quite nice. Tense music, plenty of skittering effects, good (if terribly repetitive at times) sound bites from the kids.
All in all, Monster House delivers something of a Resident Evil Lite; a little creepy at times, but still set up with kids in mind. It might be a little on the simple side, and it's certainly linear, but that doesn't mean it's not good. It's just not great. Solid, sure, and the kind of game that if you have kids you might want to sit though with them, because if nothing else, it looks great and plays well enough that even adults can enjoy it. Just don't expect any sort of horror masterpiece here; in theme and in approach, this is strictly kids' stuff.
