Games: Hauntii—Journey Through Death, Possession, and Eternal Navigation

Why would you want to make a game about death? “To me, it’s fascinating,” says Leo Dasso, director of Hauntii, a game about navigating eternity as a ghost. All of us have to cope with the changing circumstances of life, and death is the most extreme change of all, he says. And because death is universal, Dasso thinks the story will be of interest to everyone. “As far as I know, nobody’s immortal,” he laughs.Not that he wants to put a downer on things. “Often stories or games about death can kind of be morbid, [and] we really didn’t want that for this game,” he says. “[Kirby creator Masahiro] Sakurai says that no matter what, a game should be entertaining first.” And so it is with Hauntii, which sees your friendly ghost meeting a cavalcade of curious and often funny entities as they travel through the afterlife.Hauntii is partly inspired by Dasso’s experience of moving to South Korea to teach English and having to adjust to a completely different way of living, just as the titular character in his game has to adjust to a post-living world. But, interestingly, the mechanics of Hauntii arrived ahead of the story. “It was a twin stick [shooter] before it was a game about ghosts,” says Dasso. Twin stick shooters – where one analogue stick controls movement and the other controls the direction of fire – typically feature endless waves of hundreds of enemies. But the foes in Hauntii are relatively few and far between. Instead, the focus is on possessing objects by shooting at them.Initially, firing and possession were assigned to different buttons, but Dasso found during testing that users tended to ignore the possession mechanic in favour of shooting everything in sight. But now, as you spray projectiles this way and that, you might notice that when they hit a tree or a pillar or rocks, a bar begins to fill up. Keep shooting the object, and Hauntii will hop inside it when the bar is full.Dasso says he wanted to reflect the playfulness and experimentation inherent in another game about possession, Super Mario Odyssey. Hauntii has been designed to reward players for trying different approaches. Rather than tackle foes head on, you could hop inside a nearby turret to take them out. And like in Super Mario Odyssey, there are paths that seem impossible to reach until you work out the trick to getting there.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsKeza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming”,”newsletterId”:”pushing-buttons”,”successDescription”:”We’ll send you Pushing Buttons every week”}” clientOnly>Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionStartling sound effects are twinned with a beautifully ethereal soundtrackAnother big influence is Ico, the 2001 PlayStation 2 game about a young boy helping a girl called Yorda to escape an imposing castle. “The influence of Ico on Hauntii is just tremendous,” says Dasso, and indeed there’s a sequence where the character crosses a perilously high bridge that’s a clear tribute to the 2001 game.A companion is introduced early on, a celestial being called Crisp. Initially, she appears monstrous, an Old Testament angel with far too many eyes, but later she settles into the form of a young girl. Crisp attempts to fly Hauntii upwards, transcending to a higher plane. But Hauntii is pulled back down by chains. Escape won’t be so easy.The audio is, fittingly, haunting, with deep bass rumbles signalling the gathering of nefarious spirits whose grasping hands attempt to drag the protagonist down through the floor. These startling sound effects are twinned with a beautifully ethereal soundtrack by composer Michael Ward, who Dasso says was inspired by Austin Wintory, the man behind the soundtrack for Journey and the upcoming Sword of the Sea. Visually, it’s line drawings in black and white, offset by the occasional splash of colour. This was partly a pragmatic choice: “I had to choose a style that is fitting with a very small production budget,” says Dasso. But suggestion is powerful. “There are a lot of scenes where it’s just the outline of something,” he says. “And then people fill in the blanks with their minds.” Hauntii will be out on PC and consoles in 2024

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