Hauntii Review

Back at the start of 2024, Hauntii came out of nowhere during a Steam Next Fest and was easily the best demo that I played. It had everything: beautiful art style, emotionally engaging story, rich soundtrack and unique gameplay that captured the essence of a twin stick shooter. Everything remains from the demo, but but unfortunately this was a distilled version of the game operating at an extremely high level. The full game cant maintain the high bar with some pacing issues and frustration in between the excellence, but it’s still worthy of your time, especially at its twenty dollar price point.

Twin Stick Spooker

Hauntii is unique, which is a challenging task to accomplish nowadays. It’s part mystery, part exploration, part puzzle, and part twin stick shooter. The premise of Hauntii is alluring as you awaken as a ghost with no memory and your journey is to remember. Trying to piece together history and relearning memories is done by collecting stars to build constellations which unlock another chapter of your life to relive. This is where Hauntii shines

Hauntii has a very unique look with its line drawn art style and two toned color palette. The score itself often wades into Legend of Zelda territory with large orchestral moments, pavlovian jingles when you solve a puzzle and somber melodies.

When you combine these elements with the twin stick shooting where you need to haunt people and items to solve puzzles there is a lot to like about Hauntii.

Scary Stuff

Unfortunately, the strengths of Hauntii are truly held back from shining. For every pro there is usually a con. Although the art style is gorgeous, it can sometimes cause gameplay issues with depth perception and losing track due to lack of color.

The other major speed bump on the path to recapturing memories is the slow process of trying to find stars to build constellations. Exploring can feel aimless at times and even when upgrading your dashes, movement feels about 15% too slow. This is exacerbated by the amount of long and winding paths to explore, along with having to revisit certain areas looking for more stars.

Then there are also a fair amount of quality of life issues that could easily be fixed post launch. Not being able to remove a hat once you tried it on, seeing how many stars you have when you are not at an altar would have helped, you are something thrown into damage when exiting a haunting and there is a lack of damage indication or health bar for enemies, which leads to not fully understanding if you are doing the right thing and how close you are.

With the slow movement speed, it would have been nice to have a fast travel system at the start of the game, if you wanted to go back and look for stars in other regions. The other big fix would have been to start at full health after death when you respawn at a checkpoint. This is especially frustrating when you have to do areas multiple times due to low health.

Verdict

Experiencing a game that feels unique is an endangered species. The art style is refreshing, the score is near perfect, and the story was extremely touching. Unfortunately, there were some pacing and refinement issues that limited the emotional impact of the story and ultimately held Hauntii back from being the next must play indie darling, which is what I expected after playing the demo.

Hauntii is still a good game with an emotional charged story, great score and delightful visuals that is worth your time and it will be exciting to see what Moonloop does with their talents next.

7/10