It's creepy and it's spooky...
YUMIKO IN THE HAUNTED MANSION
(Fun Forge, 2012)
Darkness. Horror. Suspense. Anxiety. New pants. A fair number of survival horror games over the past few decades have revelled in the joys of putting not much on the screen. Silent Hill, Resident Evil and especially the Amnesia series of games loved nothing more than plunging you into darkness at an inconvenient moment, and sometimes for a long spell. When done well, it can be an effective way of terrifying the player and saving on graphics, which can put their feet up and have a rest while the programmer goes through their repertoire of BBC Sound Department horror movie effects. Easy, programming, isn’t it?
This phenomenon (who let those Muppets in?) wasn’t really a thing back in the Spectral ‘80s though as far as I can recall. I suppose Alien by Argus Press was dark-ish, and it was fairly scary when the green bulbous-headed one suddenly popped onto the screen. Maybe not quite as gulpworthy as in Alien Isolation decades later, mind, but not bad for the time. There have been a couple of more recent Speccy games which have employed darkness as a game mechanic though, and I’m going to tell you all about them in the next paragraph, once I’ve stopped for a brew.
Ah, that’s better. So in 2013 those pesky Mojon Twins gave us Tenebra Macabre, an ordinary looking platformer, one might think, but not so. The lights regularly go on and off and muck up your jumps worse than going lupine in Knight Lore, causing you to land embarrassingly on spikes and spooks alike. It’s both clever and annoying all at once. And in 2020, RetroWorks released The Lost Treasures Of Tulum, where your li’l explorer edged his way through various caverns bit by bit, as his light only illuminated a small amount at a time. Another cunning twist on the theme of falling over things in the dark, but more fun than when that happens in real life. I fell over a suitcase once at uni in such circs, bashing my face a bit, after perhaps a snakebite or two too many.
In 2012, the fun-sounding Fun Forge released Yumiko In The Haunted Mansion, made by Leszek Chmielewski Daniel from Austria, with music by our old friend Yerzmyey. He seems to have made a large number of puzzle games over the years, including Quest for Witchcraft (a previous Curiosity of the Modern Age, no less), the ‘probably not as dodgy/interesting as it sounds’ Pussy: Love Story From Titanic, and self-styled ‘crap game’ Saving Jessica Lynch. That one was an adventure for a change, which was entered in 2012’s C.S.S.C.G.C., where it was up against such indisputable classics as Alan Partridge’s Traffic Cone Dash, David Blaine’s Binge Bonanza and Bros: The Music Box. No idea how it did.
And it’s in Boriel BASIC. Boriel is an open-source BASIC compiler (thanks internet), which is presumably ace at making your games less slow and clunky, and hopefully works better than most ‘80s compilers seemed to do. It must work pretty darn well as this game certainly moves faster than The Oracle’s Cave and Football Manager put together, classics both of ye olde arte of BASIC(e).
Poor Yumiko and her parents were driving along in their automobile (diddly diddly doo da doo) when they had an unwanted crash smash and had no choice but to stay overnight in a big, spooky mansion. It’s happened to us all at some point. Her folks switched off the bedroom lights for the night, then were rudely taken hostage by a phantom called Yami. In her room, Yumiko still had her lights on, but heard all the kerfuffle, so her mission to avoid becoming an orphan begins!
She must simply light all the magic candles in all the many rooms of the house, one at a time, to pee Yami off royally. The place is haunted generally so other ghosts mill around the place snuffing some of the candles out, then tittering annoyingly. There’s a time limit and 32 levels of the mansion to illuminate, so she’s got her work cut out for her, the poor little anime gal (i.e. she has no nose).
These days frequently the best thing about many a Speccy game will be the music. It’s amazing what can be achieved and just what a difference it can make to any gaming experience. It’s understandable that games ain’t quite what they used to be – people aren’t getting paid to make them any more, it’s almost purely for the love of it – but areas like sound and graphics still often prove to be as impressive as ever. And the music in this game is fantastic – quirky, spooky and quite varied as you go through the levels. We’re lucky that we’re seeing (okay, hearing) the absolute best that the machine has ever had to offer in this respect.
And the game’s not bad either. We’ve got some nice big graphics and a decent amount of colour, given the gloominess of your average haunted house, and it’s quite playable too. You can call up a map at any point helpfully, on easy level at least, as otherwise things get a bit too frustrating. Helpful objects can be found here and there, and suddenly seeing a ghost near you from time to time can come as a bit of a shock. Though they’re generally not too bloodthirsty, just a bit disconcerting. Although when they blow out a candle which will take you an absolute age to get back to, negotiating narrow mazes of corridors all the while, you’ll want to roast them alive.
There are plenty of options to ramp up the difficulty level, all the way to ‘madness’ if you really want to, which means fewer map viewing opportunities and more vicious ghosties. This helps in making things more frenzied, but ultimately at the cost of playability in my humble opinion. No matter, it’s nice to have the option. On the whole Yumiko In The Haunted Mansion is not bad to have a whirl on, as it’s not often you get to play a game that begins with ‘Y’ is it? I'll leave you to think on that one, and no, you can't have Yie Ar Kung Fu, I thought of that first.
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