1,000 Rooms of Cute Terror

October 23, 2016 8:52 AM

You have been invited to visit a haunted mansion owned by a ghost named Spooky. Can you survive all 1,000 rooms of jump scares? Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion is a free (Steam and Indie DB) 2.5D FPS puzzle survival horror game. Despite its cute exterior, there's more to Spooky's house than meets the eye.

The game is relatively simple. Move using typical WSAD controls, look with the mouse, interact with the E button. Levels are divided up into 50 rooms, which provide scares, puzzles, and exposition in the way of notes and other interactables. The game contains disturbing imagery, (um...) jump scares, and some flashing lights. It's a fairly light-weight game graphically and built in Unity, so it should run on most modern Windows PCs. There is a Mac version (not sure if it's the same) available at the Indie DB link above the jump. Spooky's was developed by Lag Studios.

SPOLERS AHEAD: Kotaku review: "Cute, yet terrifying." and Polygon video overview, "makes even the most adorable ghosts kind of scary."

posted by codacorolla (7 comments total)

The game was originally Spooky's House of Jump Scares, but they had to change it due to a copyright claim from a mobile game development studio.
posted by codacorolla at 8:55 AM on October 23, 2016

I met Psychobilly at SXSW a couple of years ago when she was developing this game. Glad it made it past the finish line!
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:44 AM on October 23, 2016

I'll just point out that the Polygon video features one of MetaFilter's top three favorite McElroy brothers, Griffin.

oh shit rugs!!
posted by books for weapons at 10:01 AM on October 23, 2016

Where is the information that this game was developed in Unity? I'd heard before that it was developed in Game Maker and the indiedb profile lists the engine as "custom".

It is a great title though and definitely recommend to anyone who's a fan of horror games. Never would I have imagined that cute cardboard ghost cutouts could be made scary.
posted by girih knot at 11:09 AM on October 23, 2016

Oh, I'd heard from the person who told me about the game it was developed in Unity. I couldn't really find anything other than the "custom" engine, which I took to mean a Unity framework. I very well may be wrong.
posted by codacorolla at 11:17 AM on October 23, 2016

I don't get to play games much anymore, but sometimes at work I get long chunks of time devoted to staring at spreadsheets or fixing JIRA workflows, and when that happens I like to watch other people play games. And Harshly Critical's playthrough of this was a favorite.

Also I am a big wuss and can't play horror games -- even cute ones -- because I get freaked out easy.
posted by offalark at 2:17 PM on October 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

The scariest thing so far is the performance - I'm getting 11 fps on a GTX980. I must be doing something wrong.
posted by synthetik at 6:48 PM on October 23, 2016