Collection essentials #122: Haunting Starring Polterguy (Genesis)

This is a game that I didn’t know about for years and years, and once I discovered I was flabbergasted that I never had. It’s one of the most creative and unique games of its time.

Haunting is about a dead teenager who had gotten into an accident because of a defective skateboard. As a deceased ghost, he decides to get his revenge on the family of the businessman in charge of the skateboard company. So your objective is to go around the house and scare the people who live there. You do this by possessing the objects around the house, making them do supernatural creepy stuff. Some things can be set like traps waiting for a person to pass by, some go off immediately when they’re activated, and some can be possessed and controlled. This game works because the animations are so well-done, and it’s always amusing to see all the different things you can do and how the terrified people react to them. Once you’ve scared everyone to the max, you move on to the next level. But your health slowly depletes over time, so you’d better not be too sluggish in your scaring or else your revenge mission may fail.

I played this game on stream for Halloween 2020 during lockdown, and I made it to the very end of the game…but lost. Boooo. I may go back to it someday. I didn’t right away because one drawback of the game is that it’s not all that replayable. When I played through it, I didn’t feel much of a reason to go through everything again right away, since it would involve just seeing a whole bunch of stuff I had already just seen. So I wouldn’t call it one of the absolute “best” Genesis games, but it’s certainly one of the most creative and one I consider essential.