Haunted Lands
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
Haunted Lands is an action platformer in an EGA graphics style, emulating the look and some of the feel of an old DOS game. You play as a ragtag band of crusaders, sent into hotspots of occult activity to purge the area of all cultists, undead, and demons, halt their sinister rituals, and retrieve any artifacts [and money] within.
The game takes place over five missions, a mix of creepy mansions, dank caves, towering cathedrals, and toxic waste dumps. Each excursion, you pick one of your members, load them up with equipment, and then drive over in your Jeep. The only ways out at that point are to backtrack to your vehicle, make it through the final boss, or give up and lose all your progress and collected loot, but get a chance to choose a different character or change up your gear.
The missions are pretty strictly linear, but very long, very dense, and consistently engaging. Many stages have sections that branch out, forcing you to tackle a few areas in parallel before progressing. Each mission has at least two major bosses, and there’s a ton of secrets and extra loot to find.
One of the coolest features of the game is the diverse player roster. There are three archetypes, who function very differently mechanically, but can all beat every stage just fine, and one alternate member for each archetype that has their own nuances. The gunners are kind of the default, using long-range, hitscan rifles that can only be fired horizontally or at about a 45 degree angle up or down, have a very limited dodge roll for invulnerability, and must reload their guns periodically. The beasts are the berserkers, using only melee swipes, dashes that can also deal damage, and channeled pounces that let them stun and shred a single enemy. Finally, the mages can hover and teleport horizontally, and have multiple levels of charge to their magic bolt shots that each have unique behaviors.
On top of the core differences, each character can gain Wrath from attacking enemies that can either be spent on quick, explosive attacks, or saved up for a spectacular ult. My favorites were the Ranger’s dual revolvers, which can lock on to enemies to deliver a precision magnum round, the Sorceress’s thundercloud, which passively fires bolts of lightning to clear out chaff while you focus on heavier targets, and the Werewolf’s Spirit Pack, which causes any attack he lands to be followed up by pouncing ghost wolves which shred minibosses.
Each character is fun to play with in their own way, and each level has some spots that one will struggle with while another can… struggle slightly less with. There are also a few areas that only one archetype can reach, usually containing a hidden item for that class, and giving you a cool incentive to replay missions with different characters. There’s no backstory or much in the way of framing besides the intro and outro text for each mission, but the different hunters all have a little bit of personality just in their design, animations, introductions, and most of all, in what they do at your safehouse when you aren’t using them.
But the real defining quality of Haunted Lands is its difficulty, which is brutal, unrelenting, and absolutely masterful. It is a genuine challenge just to make it through the first mission in the game, and while you do get more equipment as you play, the game ramps up just enough to keep a consistent level of resistance the whole way through. Nothing requires extreme precision or repetition, enemies and bosses have well-defined behaviors and intuitive attacks, and the game never feels like it does anything remotely unfair, but it is reliably extremely demanding. Enemy variety expands as the game goes on, with new threats being introduced almost as intimidating minibosses before being worked into the standard pool, and you learn to deal with them the same as you would anything else.
The challenge forces you to grasp every little detail of your character and the enemies – I can tell you the exact hit point values of nearly every enemy type in the game at a glance, I know how much damage a charged gunner blast does, how many tier-2 charged mage shots will be needed to kill a demon, what can be pounced on by a beast and what angles to safely approach any flying monster from. It’s incredibly gratifying to be forced to get this familiar with a game without feeling like I’m exploiting oversights to overcome bullshit.
Some of the sections between checkpoints can wear you down, every hit you take and shot you miss has the potential to be a real problem for you, and some of the big gauntlets get overwhelmingly hectic if you start to lose the ball. This is where every character’s unique health mechanics come in – gunners get a limited number of crosses to block hits, replenished infrequently at checkpoints, mages only get a single shield, but can spend a Wrath point and hold their breath through a lengthy animation to restore it at will, and beasts passively accumulate extra health from shedding blood.
Almost every boss fight is tight enough that I found myself attempting them over the course of a half hour or more, making the fact that you get a checkpoint right at the start of the fight much appreciated. They’re also just spectacular fights in general, although a few feel a bit too locked to cycles, with long invulnerability periods where you just have to hang out and dodge through attack patterns before getting your turn. I still had a great time defeating them, though, even when I had barely clawed my way to the encounter to begin with.
The equipment is surprisingly deep too, with a small grid inventory that you can place items into for a mission, each one having some pretty noticeable impact, and competing compellingly for the limited space. Besides hidden items found directly in stages, and one awarded for completing the tutorial with each character [which teaches you most of the nuances of that particular class anyway] you can also spend the silver collected from rare locations at a shop to unlock even more options. Silver doesn’t reappear once you’ve collected it, so there’s no grinding for upgrades, just exploration and completion, and it’s worth it. Items like the cylinder that gives gunners a partial reload when they roll are a must-buy, there are items that make certain challenges easier or attack faster, there’s items to improve your survivability, and there’s a ton of variety once you get far enough in.
Some of the stages have a particular item type tied to them that doesn’t have any direct effect, but equipping all four of them and finding the spot to use them unlocks an alternate, challenge variant of the stage’s mid boss, and the reward for going out of your way for these optional fights is a second type of currency you can use at another shop to buy massive 2x2 relics that completely augment your characters… including a baby dragon egg that gives you a pet who spits fireballs at enemies for you. Adorable.
The graphics are stunning – the spritework is outstanding, and the effects are glorious, with enemies becoming visibly damaged and then bursting apart into dynamic chunks of pixel gore, their viscera lingering on stages and still visible if you backtrack. Enemy attack animations have the right amount of telegraphing and intuitive effects, and there’s a sick slowdown when your character unleashes their ult. Music and sound effects are also excellent, and like the difficulty, the quality of the visuals and audio never lets up or slips. Outdoor areas feature impressive, parallax backgrounds, secret locations are identifiable with a keen eye without needing to rub against and slap every wall, and the game is dripping with little details.
There are a few minor faults worth pointing out. One confusing aspect are the key items that are required to access the alt bosses – you’ll collect, or even buy one, and then it just kind of vanishes, with no obvious place to look to see how many you have, what they do, what they’re good for. Turns out you have to press the bumper in the equipment screen to shift to another tab, revealing that they must be equipped and taken into the stages to use them, which is a cool limitation, except that nothing on that screen [aside from a popup the very first time you access it] tells you that that button does anything, not even the tiniest indicator that there IS another tab to look at.
Another thing that could be clearer is how the checkpoints actually work. Some doors have text pop up above them that says ‘QUICK SAVE’ and going through them does indeed ‘save’ your progress, and lets you start from that point, with your current health, Wrath, and collected items, should you die. However, and this is a big ass caveat, it does NOT actually save your progress, as in lock it in to your save file, meaning that if you quit out for whatever reason after hitting a QUICK SAVE door, you won’t start back at that location. Instead, hard saves, which can be reloaded from, only occur at the more infrequent NEXT AREA doors, which then have a big angel statue at their exit to indicate your restart point.
What’s worse, the missions are rife with loopbacks, shortcuts that let you go from spots tens of minutes deep back to the start, so you can bail out in your Jeep and return to your safehouse with your items and silver secured. However, these shortcuts do NOT remain open… coming back will force you to go through the whole first part of the stage afresh, with all the doors and ladders you just opened access to sealed back up. Now, each area does have a second or even third access point, which lets you skip whole zones of the mission once you’ve found them, but using them locks you out of completing mission-wide score/time challenges, and the warning about this probably pushes people who are better off just moving forward with the stage into starting the whole damn thing off from the start every time.
All of this, combined with the genuinely grueling difficulty, means a lot of people are just going to bounce off Haunted Lands without being able to make any real progress. It’s tough, but it’s absolutely worth the trouble, and most of all, I think it’s all totally reasonable once you actually understand the structure. If you put the effort in, and try not to be too thorough on your first visit to each mission, getting to the point where this game clicks is a rare joy. Seeing a group of demons spawn in, snapping off the exact number of shots required to see their flesh slough off, pumping rounds back in as you move forward, always ready for a new surprise, is a feeling that’s hard to match. And despite ‘only’ being five missions long, the game is not short on content at all – it probably took me over 20 hours to finish the final real stage, and I immediately dove back in for several more hours to take another crack at the first few missions with new characters, exploring as thoroughly as I could to find new gear, challenging alt bosses, and even finding a whole bonus stage or two.
Honestly, maybe the biggest oversight of the game is its price – not that it’s excessive, but that it is too low for the jaw-dropping quality that’s come from a solo dev. This game would be an absolute bargain at three times the price he’s asking, and six bucks USD might color it as more of a bite-sized budget title than you’re really signing up for. Make no mistake, this is an indie that’s worth more than a drive-thru value meal, and could easily match up respectably against the biggest names in its league. It is a wonderful game, and one that hits a lot harder than you might expect.
Whatever you’re doing now, drop that shit and go try Haunted Lands. Chances are good you’ll be dashed to bits upon its first level, bitterly embarrassed and desperate to blame the game for every one of your own failings. But endure, and you’ll see true beauty through the blood, sweat, and tears.
Haunted Lands can be purchased on Steam and GOG.
Just bought it. Thanks for the recommendation.
This looks great, is there much of a story?