Realms of the Haunting

When this game was originally released it was poorly advertised as yet another FPS shooter ala Doom, Blood, and their ilk. It is not. Instead it is a superlative FPS horror action adventure with a great deal in common with the original System Shock (except, you know, set in a haunted manor house and the strange dimensions associated with it). This game is all about atmosphere, story, thought, occult mystery, and yes, quite a few bloody battles with otherworldy horror. While the graphics have no doubt aged poorly, this is a rare gem. If you liked System Shock, or the Penumbra games, or even Clive Barkers Undying (which is a pure shooter but has some slight atmospheric similarities) then get this game! It is a true treat to see it re-released!

I’ve recently been browsing some older gaming magazines I inherited from my older brother, and happened across a review of an older game that caught my attention. The game was the 1996 Realms of the Haunting – a rather daring combination of a classic adventure game and an fps (!) of all things, promising a dark atmoshpere and an opportunity to explore otherworldy realms. Now, I mentioned the game is a pretty strange marriage between an adventure game and an FPS. And in my mind (but please note that I am by no means a veteran of EITHER of those genres) it works quite well. You explore the mansion, read documents and solve puzzles as you would in an adventure game, but you also get several weapons – a pistol, a shotgun, a magical staff shooting projectiles, an exploding blunderbuss and a magic sword, and use them to battle an assortment of demons and monsters. And I feel like it works quite well by providing you other obstacles than just the puzzles, and other activities to engage in other than just walking around and exploration. That isn’t to say the combat is super engaging or groundbreaking, in fact, shooting at enemies seems a bit “flat”, I never really felt that much strength behind the things I was shooting. The game also contains plenty of cutscenes with live actors. The actors, by the way, were most likely the developers themselves, because their “acting” is wonderfully cringy most of the time, to the point of being actively hillarious in a couple of crucial story moments. Overall, it’s not like Realms of the Haunting was a masterpiece, but it was a pleasant surprise to me and an overall enjoyable experience with an interesting approach to merging two very different types of gameplay. If you want to see how it plays before you decide whether you’re interested you can check my blind lets play on my youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov4GhENC9Cw&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWWb0xEa59RGj4Bk8l2G8AfV&index=1&ab_channel=LittleDwarf

I've loved this game since it was released in 1996. I still own the CDs (it came on four CDs). It's weird, wonderful, and maintains a strange, threatening experience all the way to the end. Game-wise, it's a little odd. It's ostensibly an adventure game with many riddles and puzzles to solve, but it's structured as a first person shooter. Ammo, weapons and health are few and far between, which often forces you think about how to avoid encounters with much of the opposition. You get a sword early on, and I found it my go-to for most of the game. The story will be incoherent and jumbled until towards the end when it all makes gruesome sense. It's mostly propelled through FMV scenes and unlikely many games from the same time that utilised video, it's remarkably free of ham-acting and hand-wringing. This story will take you through some incredibly varied areas - you start out in a mansion, but will visits mausoleums, tombs, locations on other planes some of which are bizarre. There's certainly a lot to see and do in this game with very little repetition. In summary, it's weird and marvellous forgotten classic, and I'm glad GoG have it.

An atmospheric gem of the haunted house/action-adventure/ego-shooter subgenre(s). Highly underrated at it's time and one of my personal all-time favourites

I consider RotH to be one of the top 5 games I've ever played, in the same category of excellence as System Shock, Deus Ex, and Thief....I mean, just head and shoulders above the crowd.