Games of Halloween: Goosebumps Escape From Horrorland

Adventure — By Chris Gampat on October 31, 2009 at 12:04 pm

Games of Halloween is a retrospective highlighting the most frightening video games that we’ve ever played. In this particular look back, Chris Gampat reflects on DreamWorks Interactive’s Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland.

For those of us that are late 80′s and 90′s kids, you may remember that novel series that everyone went crazy for: Goosebumps. It was scary, it was entertaining, the marketing was genius, and the writing was pretty damned good. Now how many of you remember the PC game, Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland? Not many perhaps. If you played it, you’d understand why that game scared the crap out of players back then. The entire game was basically a greenscreen with actors popping out at you. Despite this, the game gave me nightmares when I was eleven.

What’s so scary about Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland is that you and your colleagues are helpless little kids and you know nothing about the changes and differences in Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland from the book. The unknown combined with the dark visuals, haunting architecture, sounds of werewolf howls and menacing creatures abound help to frighten you to the point where you want to frantically escape. But you can’t yet, you’ve got the save your friends (Luke and Clay.) Most of the time you’ve got Lucy to help you out, and she does quite a good job.

Besides all this, there was plenty more that scared me when I was younger. On top of having to solve puzzles quickly in order to stay alive, the game feeds off of so many different fears. For example, there is a segment where you have to race through a labyrinth to escape a mummy that really wants to kill you. On top of that, moving through is a very tight squeeze and there really isn’t much light to help you out (think Silent Hill.)

As I stated before, the sounds are killer. In truth, I almost stopped playing the game because the sounds were so scary. There’s a segment in Werewolf Village where you lose Lucy for a little while and you enter a butcher shop. When 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 there werewolf himself trying to get in. When you open the door, however, you free Lucy – - but you then have to outrun a werewolf through a crowded and dimly lit forest.

Additionally, you see lots of recurring themes and monsters from R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps series like the horned monsters, vampires, and plants that try to eat you. The game keeps dragging you around to all of these random places to fight monsters when you think that it will all be over upon arriving at Dracula’s castle. Dracula himself isn’t scary, his bride running around chasing Lucy, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. Then you realize that no, it’s still not over and you’ve got a lot more hell to face.

In the end though, it’s all a real joke. You encounter Madison Storm (actor Robert Joy) who has your friends and their parents all 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.

Overall though, Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland gets my vote for scariest game played when I was a young one. Give it a download if you can. Play it in the dark after watching something like Paranormal Activity for some real frights.

---

Thank you for supporting 2D-X, the very best in 2D (and 3D!) video games. If you’d like to help us grow, please take a second to download the free Alexa toolbar for IE or Firefox and continue surfing 2D-X (and the Web) as you normally would. Think of it has the Nielsen ratings of websites–by simply reading with the Alexa toolbar installed, you’ll boost our popularity. And please digg, Stumbleupon, and Twitter us via the links at the top of the page (or on your own)!

You can also support the site by copping some cool 2D-X gear or by following us on Facebook or Twitter. We appreciate it.

Tags: escape from horrorland, goosebumps, halloween, horror, scariest, video games