‘Tis the night for ghosties and ghoulies and hiding with the lights off because you suddenly remembered you forgot to buy sweets for trick-or-treaters this Halloween (oops!). And what better way to celebrate the occasion than with a free Game & Watch-style haunted house caper from Papers, Please and Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope?
The wonderfully titled Moida Mansion is available to play right now on itch.io, challenging players to slip into the titular spookhouse and find their fellow Adventure Club members – who’ve all been trapped after following their mascot turtle inside. “Now it’s up to you,” reads the gloriously retro-styled manual. “Sneak in and rescue them before it’s too late!”
In gameplay terms, Moida Mansion is a relatively simple thing, tasking players with moving from room to room and cycling through the objects within to search each one. Searching might locate one of your Adventure Club pals, or it might reveal a secret passageway, or even a handy key. Or all that rummaging might attract the attention of the mansion’s “monsta”, in which case you’ll either need to sneak or – if you cause a ruckus while it’s nearby – run away.
For all its simplicity, though, Moida Mansion is oddly compelling, and I’ve just merrily spend the last 20 minutes dodging monsta and scouring the house to uncover its secrets. It’s also surprisingly atmospheric (and just a little bit tense) for a game with rudimentary LCD-style visuals, virtually zero animation, and minimal sound. What’s more, Pope builds an impressive amount of variety from a relatively limited number of visual elements – and better yet, the mansion changes each game. I would buy this thing immediately if it was real!
This isn’t Pope’s first Game & Watch style effort, of course; the acclaimed designer created a free demake of Papers, Please last year, in celebration of the dystopian document thriller’s 10th anniversary. More recently, he released his Playdate-exclusive puzzler Mars After Midnight – a “lovely, silly game about community”, as Christian Donlan put it back in March.