An English Haunting is still an Edwardian point-and-click Ghostbusters, and also out in May
Spooky retro adventure gets new trailer and release date!
At the end of last year I played the demo for An English Haunting and got very excited. I like horror that has a generally spooky, creeping dread vibe rather than being wall-to-wall cheap jumpscares and gore, and that sort of stuff is thin on the ground. But it'll be less so from May the 15th, cos that's when this ghosty point and click puzzle adventure is out! Hooray! The demo is still on Steam if you want a taste before then. In the meantime, the release date announcement comes with a new trailer to enjoy.
I love it! Seances, possessions, poltergeist activity! You play a professor called Patrick Moore (not that one, but it would be very funny if it was), who has a few days to prove that ghosts are real or he and his colleague will be kicked out of the school where they teach and do research. So this is basically Edwardian Ghostbusters, isn't it? Except this is less action and more methodically solving puzzles by examining your environment and putting clues together.
It's set in 1907, which is a good era. It's pre the mania for ghosts and the occult that really took off after the first World War, when a lot of dead sons made people really want to connect to the other side, so you can see that people would be very sceptical. But at the same time the paranormal being studied at a school isn't a totally silly set up, because it's post 1900, when WB Yeats and Aleister Crowley having a magician bitch fight on the steps of a magical secret society (I will never stop referencing this last point because the descriptions of it are extremely funny; they cast spells at each other like LARPers shouting "LIGHTNING BOLT!" until Crowley got close enough for Yeats to kick him).
When I played the demo I really liked the whole style of the game. It makes me think of the sort of historical ghost stories where it's a disembodied narrator telling you about something terrible that happened to him when I was a young man. You know, the kind that has stuff like "You will recall that my sister married young", as if you know the man and his family well. Great stuff - and importantly for a puzzle game, I enjoyed the puzzles in the demo too. It had several that were lateral without being obtuse, and I'm excited to play the full thing when it comes out in a few weeks on May 15th.