What do you get when you combine Super Mario Odyssey, Geometry Wars, Disney Pixar and Genesis Noir? You get Hauntii, a twin shooter, puzzle platformer and adventure game from the small development studio Moonloop Games. An unexpected mix, sure — but that’s what indie games are all about, and we’re always up for a new genre mix.
The story is the part that reminds us of Pixar — and, given their mastery of storytelling, that’s no bad thing. You wake up as a small black speck from a strand with no memory, in a monochromatic world you don’t recognize. A being with long, flowing hair in a white dress—an angel, perhaps—appears to guide you through the world, out of this wilderness and into the light, but you’re dragged back to the ground, chained, unable to break free. Now you will have to venture through the land of the dead, slowly piecing together your life and afterlife and breaking those chains through self-discovery.
However, the influence of Super Mario Odyssey is the most obvious. Odyssey’s hat-owning mechanic has been admitted by the developers themselves one of the things that inspired the game. You, the little lost ghost, can possess items and creatures to solve puzzles and, most importantly, find stars, which you use to unlock memory fragments and upgrade your health, race and shooting ability. It works quite similar to Odyssey, as each object and being has unique powers that can help you do things your spirit can’t – shoot up, ride a rollercoaster, or swim across a desert, for example.
But Hauntii is also a twin-stick shooter, and it’s the shooting that makes up the bulk of the game. Watermelon seed bullets are bathed in glowing green spit across the screen, and you can use them to destroy or take control of various things, indicated by a yellow vortex that slowly fills up as you shoot. Still, an isometric twin-stick shooter is hard to get right, and we can’t say Hauntii pulls it off, partly because of how small it is on the Switch and partly because of the art — it’s hard to see what’s going on when most things are monochrome and the items in your first the plan obscures the view of the action, or when the game decides to zoom out so much that you can’t tell which tiny black shape is your character. We died, a manyand we really don’t think most of those deaths were our fault.
It’s a shame the art gets in the way (literally), because it’s one of the best things about the game. Hauntii is done in this beautiful ink style, with luminous swirls and swaths breaking through black pools of shadow, punctuated by pointillist stabs of lantern light. Move away from the track and the screen goes dark as the music twists into something horrific, purple eyes staring at you from the depths. The edges of the paths are soft, organic things, pale in patterns of wooden blocks and scribbles, but the enemies are prominent in jagged bureau-red towers, abnormal and quivering in a world of welcoming curves. Michael Kirby Ward’s spectacular, spectral soundtrack also complements the visuals perfectly, with just the right amount of melancholy, and the sound design throughout is quite nicely done, with plenty of goofy details that help bring the world to life.
Later in the game, the art gets even better, as 3D shapes are added to the mix. Long, geometric bridges stretch into the distance as inscrutable polyhedra spin ominously in the foreground, implying some kind of older technology, and there are these breathtakingly fantastic scenes where the camera pulls out to reveal a beautifully crafted view as you race around the roller coaster. If this game has one strength, it’s the art – the reason we were drawn to it in the first place.
The thing is – and this is the part of the review we really hate to write – the game is broken. Even when it’s not broken, there are too many problems for us to have a good time.
We had about ten crashes, probably more, that either froze the game or kicked us out completely. One area was so thick it turned the sound into a stuttering mess. Our bullets were invisible for most of the game, making it almost impossible to aim. Some of these bugs may have been fixed by the launch day patch — we had no more crashes after the update — but many of them still appeared.
And then there are the game’s design flaws. For starters, despite its Mario Odyssey inspiration, Hauntii often reminded us more of Sunshine’s throw-a-lot-at-the-wall approach, with irritating timed challenges, a surprising amount of scavenging, and frustrating platforming. Hauntii really struggles with anything that requires depth perception, and while those moments are thankfully few and far between, they’re still necessary if you want to collect all the stars and sometimes advance the story. One boss battle took us almost an hour due to depth perception issues. It’s not fun.
In fact, we conducted a many wasted time and waste. The map isn’t useful – it’s a map of the wider world, but it doesn’t give the details of individual areas, which it would really nice to have in certain larger or more intricate places where progress is not obvious. We spent a long time trying to figure out where to go in this game, and when we did find a way forward, it was usually by accident.
This was not helped by the harshness of the save points. We often respawned with only one or two hearts, meaning any gauntlet full of enemies was next to impossible, especially since most of them don’t regenerate your hearts. Even Dark Souls isn’t that cruel!
Unfortunately, due to bugs, frustrations, and a confusing world that’s hard to navigate, we just can’t recommend Hauntia. It’s a shame, because we can tell it was made with love and a huge amount of artistic attention, but in the end it’s not just style over substance – it’s style that it darkens matter.
