Jack Haunt: Old Haunting Grounds makes a bad first impression. The game starts off with an bare title screen with no options. You can only start a new game or, if there’s one already in progress, continue. The lack of any aesthetic appeal made matters worse. Maybe some people will like the whole “crude art” approach, but I thought it looked amateurish.
Once the game itself started, though, I found myself looking past these flaws. Old Haunting Grounds is a standard point-and-click adventure in which you play the titular Jack, a ghost who has lost his “Haunt Deed” in a card game. Now he has thirty days to pack up his things and move out of the house he’s haunted since his death. Fortunately, because he’s a ghost, his only belonging is his corpse. Unfortunately, he has no idea where it is, and finding it becomes the plot’s crux.
There’s no denying the game has ample charm. The writing won’t win any awards, but it is simple and often humorous. The art, though crude, is very readable, so I had no problems identifying hotspots right away and didn’t have to pixel hunt. The other characters who inhabit the house seem interesting, but are sadly undeveloped.
As a matter of fact, “undeveloped” is probably the word best used to describe Jack Haunt in general. The game is a case study in missed opportunities. For example, you learn at the start that Jack, being a ghost, cannot physically interact with anything. This led me to assume there would be some clever puzzle design in which Jack must figure out how to manipulate objects in the house. Instead, the handicap is rendered moot almost immediately, when you conveniently acquire an item that lets Jack interact with the physical world just like any other non-ghost entity. There isn’t even any puzzle-solving required to get this item, it literally shows up at his front door on its own. Why bother having such a limitation to begin with if it’s not going to be exploited in a meaningful way?
Missed opportunities extend to the story as well. There are several tantalizing hints about the house’s nature, including the suggestion of a deeper connection between Jack and the entity that won his Haunt Deed. These intriguing story bits are never explored, and simply forgotten about when the game abruptly ends way sooner than expected, which is my biggest gripe against Old Haunting Grounds.
Normally I don’t mind a short game, but the purchase page for Jack Haunt claims there is 4+ hours of gameplay, while the press release says it’s 10+, including side quests and exploration. So imagine my surprise when, less than an hour later, I was watching the end credits. That was my first time through, as well, during which I looked at everything—including bonus “Director’s Cut” style commentary—and did all the optional side quests. A second run-through took five minutes to complete, and revealed a major bug: starting a new game immediately after reaching the ending fails to reset Jack’s inventory or the puzzles, rendering the game unplayable until you exit the application and start over.
Conclusion—Is It Worth The Money
When I got to the end of Jack Haunt, I couldn’t help but feel it was half-baked. It’s as if the developers realized their ambitions outstripped their skill, so they cut the scope down dramatically and released what little of the game they had complete. Such willingness to ratchet back on scope is admirable, but there are right and wrong ways to go about doing it. Jack Haunt went about it the wrong way, and the end result is a game that had potential to be great, but failed to deliver. You can get adventure games of equal or better quality for free, so there’s no point in spending $5 on this one.
