Death is the one constant we all have in common. A billion stores with different beginnings, and middles but always the same outcome. This is probably why, we as a species have decided to obsess over it well into our earliest days of cave paintings. For me, I have always fallen back on the words of our greatest profits, Streetlight Manifesto who once said “I prefer the mystery remains, Unexplained.” Hauntii, a game by Moonloop Games LLC, takes a more beautiful approach to death through its art and simplistic narrative.
In Hauntii, you take the role of a ghost amidst a beautifully hand-drawn world that you will explore. As the name suggests, the player’s goal is to guide this character through the world by haunting objects around him to open pathways and progress. This differs from other puzzle solvers in that at its core it is a twin-stick shooter, meaning that one thumbstick controls movement while the other controls ectoplasm-like bullets.
Twin-stick shooters are usually fun, not that I play a lot of them, but they usually have enemies in which you fight. Here, the bullets are used on objects in the environment that you want to possess and shoot them until your meter fills up and you enter them. These objects can range from trees that can be shaken with leaves falling all over, lights that you move up the body of them to the lamp to light, or even pillars to topple them over. There seems to be a large variety of objects to haunt, all drawn frame by frame for stunning visuals.
The ultimate goal of our cute little ghost friends’ journey, is to collect a series of stars. This is not an uncommon goal by any stretch of the imagination in games, but in Hauntii, these stars have a very special meaning. Each star you collect holds the key to helping our deceased recover a memory of their past, who they were before they died. Maybe, in some small part, this will help them move on and get the closer we as humans so often chase but never find.
This will not only be a solitary journey as other ghosts will intersect with the deeper into this landscape you get. These ghosts are in the middle of their quests, making for a momentary reprieve from death’s isolating embrace. Something that even dead feel. One interaction from several trailers of our ghost and another, holding hands as they are flown up while the chains that bind them shatter beneath them, feels like a particularly impactful moment I cannot wait to experience for myself. These moments remind me of another game, Journey, that so you briefly share your experience with other players, though you never actually interact.
All of this is framed with hauntingly beautiful melodies by the composer Michael Ward. He too must have seen the similarities I have with Journey because he stated that the game’s composer, Austin Wintory, served as an inspiration for his scores. I’m sure once I play the game I will NEVER want to listen to his music again for fear it will shatter my heart, but the music speaks to the experience in such a deep-rooted way it could not be complete without it.
In Hauntii, death isn’t the end, it’s merely the beginning. An adventure to remember the person you left behind, and maybe discover a part of yourself you never found before you crossed over. When you get to the end, will you find the things you were looking for? Will they haunt you? Or, maybe, what you gained along the way will be the most valuable piece of yourself there is.
Hauntii will be released on May 23rd, 2024 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and PC via steam. It will also be a day 1 release on Xbox Game Pass.
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