[Halloween Games is a retrospective highlighting horror-themed video games. This entry sees Chris Gampat reflecting on DreamWorks Interactive's Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland.]
If you’re a late ’80s/early ’90s kid, you’re probably familiar with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps novels. They were scary, entertaining, and featured some pretty damned good writing. Now, how many of you remember the PC game, Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland? Not many perhaps. If you played it, you understand why that game scared the crap out of an entire generation: The game was basically a greenscreen with actors in monster suits popping out at you. Needless to say, it inspired a string of nightmares when I was eleven.
The plot: You and your companion Lucy attempt to rescue your friends Luke and Clay from Horrorland, an amusement park that has legitimate monsters lurking on its grounds. The dark graphics, haunting architecture, eerie howls in the night, and menacing creatures bring the audio-visual creeps, but the frights go even deeper. Much deeper.
The game manages to nail several different fears, both of the gaming and horror variety. For example, there are sections of the game where you have to quickly solve puzzles in order to stay alive. You know, the typical “complete-this-task-in-X-mount-of-time” mechanic that builds tension, but every gamer hates.There’s also a segment where you have to race through a labyrinth to escape a mummy that wants to kill you. Like, really kill you. There are many recurring themes and monsters from R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps series such as horned monsters, vampires, and plants that try to eat you. Dracula makes an appearance, but isn’t scary; his crazed bride running around chasing Lucy, on the other hand, is quite the opposite.
In truth, I almost stopped playing the game because the sounds were so scary. There’s a part in Werewolf Village where you enter a butcher shop after losing Lucy for a while. After you enter, there’s a pounding on a door, but you don’t know who’s a-knocking. For all you know, it could be the werewolf himself trying to get in. When you open the door, however, you free Lucy – -but you then have to outrun the werewolf through a cramped and dimly lit forest. That may not sound like much now, but when you’re a pre-teen, these elements get under the skin.
In the end though, it’s all a real joke. You encounter Madison Storm, the amusement park creator, who has your friends and their parents tied up and you need to save them. So what if it’s a joke in the end: there are a couple of different conclusions to the game, and some may creep you out more than others. But either way, you realize that you’ve just been frightened and have been experiencing nightmares for the past couple of nights only to realize that you’ve basically been punked in a very Scooby Doo-like manner.
Overall, Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland gets my vote for scariest game played when I was a young one. Play it in the dark after watching something like Paranormal Activity 3 to see if i can give you the willies as an adult.
