 SEGA DRUNK! Thanks to Adam for requesting this on my Patreon page. This is an unusual game for the Sega Genesis, with an unusual title too, haunting starring Polterguy. What, as opposed to haunting starring James Woods? Did Polterguy go on to star in anything else? Anyway, this game is unlike any other 16-bit game I've played. The goal is to haunt a house and scare people? How can that work as a game? So you play as Polterguy, a recently deceased guy turned ghoul who's seeking revenge against the family that's supposedly responsible for his death. The instruction book implies that Polterguy got killed in a skateboarding accident, caused by a poorly made skateboard assembled in a factory owned and operated by renowned cheapskate, Vito Sardini. He cut costs by firing employees and replacing them with a shoddy, ill-maintenanced assembly line of machines. So all the skateboards being made are all cheap pieces of crap, to the point that apparently one cost Polterguy his life. The book even makes sure to mention that Vito Sardini weaseled his way out of a wrongful death lawsuit, just to make him really unlikable. So since Polterguy is evidently stuck in purgatory, he's decided to whittle away his time by haunting the family responsible for his death. Vito, his wife Flo, and the two kids Tony and Mimi, although I'm not sure what they have to do with anything. But the haunting spans four different houses that each have 12 rooms. What you do is you activate these spots called Fritems, which allow you to take control of inanimate objects and load them with traps. The goal is to scare the ever-loving crap out of the family, and you can see their status in the lower right, and get them to the point that they all run screaming from the house. A dartboard will turn into a bleeding eyeball, you can possess a chair and fly it around, ghouls can appear, all sorts of weird stuff going on, and yeah, as you can plainly see, the graphics and sprite animations are hilarious. It's almost like a rated-R Zombies 8 My Neighbors. Furthermore, there's three different types of Fritems you can activate. You just press the A button to jump into them. Blue Fritems come alive when a family member wanders close enough after you jump in and out of them quickly. Yellow Fritems need to be activated while the family member is already nearby, so there's a bit of timing involved there in order for it to work correctly. And Green Fritems enable you to directly control stuff, like making household objects come to life and float around. Bear in mind you can only use each Fritem once, and sometimes a person will just avoid what you're doing and wander into another room entirely. Thankfully, there's a map available to use to keep track of everyone. As you're chasing the family, they drop this ectoplasm stuff each time they're scared out of a room, so you gotta collect it because it's required to activate each Fritem, and not only that, it runs out on its own if you waste too much time screwing around. If you run out of ectoplasm, you're sent down to this hellish dungeon where you gotta collect each drop of the stuff in order while avoiding enemies. Keep doing that until a portal materializes to take you back to the house. This is the only part of the game where you can die, or die again, I guess. You can also collect spells and objects down here that you can use for further scares topside, and you can activate them with the C button. So yeah, this is a game of management. You gotta manage your scares, manage your ectoplasm, and manage your time efficiently so you can proceed from room to room and house to house so you can see the whole game. Personally, that was my incentive to keep going further and further in this one just to see what kind of crazy scare the developers came up with. Also, what helps is the freedom you have. Haunting-starring Polterguy oddly has kind of a sandbox quality to it. You can pretty much go anywhere at any time. Interestingly though, the same rules apply to the family since when they run out of a room, they could go anywhere themselves. The goal, of course, is to drive the entire family out of the house. So you want to use the map to get the person closest to the door to the outside, and that can get kind of frustrating. Speaking of which, this game can get pretty tough the further you progress because eventually there's enemies that appear in the house and drain your ectoplasm, and there's the family dog who can sniff you out and bark at you and ruin your traps. No saves or passwords here either. So yeah, Haunting-starring Polterguy is unlike any other 16-bit game. It sounds kind of boring on the surface. I mean, you're just going around scaring a bunch of people, but like I said, it's a game of management and balance, and it's not easy. Of course, it helps that the game is great-looking, the isometric viewpoint fits the gameplay perfectly, all the rooms look great, the sprite animations are unlike anything I've seen in a 16-bit game, and the sound design here is fantastic. The screams add to the game nicely. The only drag here are the dungeons and the fact that there's not a whole lot of variety in the gameplay, but even still, Haunting-starring Polterguy is a fascinating game that really stands out among its peers. Plus, if you're into horror stuff with tons of blood and gore, you'll like it that much more.