Haunted Domains Review

With Halloween just around the corner, what better time to release a time management game based on you, playing as Sheila Sullivan, running a hotel for the creatures of the night? You'll be bringing food to ghosts, doing laundry for wizards (insert wizards sleeve joke here), fetching witches' runaway cats and tending to good ol' Dracula himself.

One thing that can be said for certain about Alawar Entertainment's Haunted Domains, is it's addictive. I had only just received the game, and intended on doing a five minute trial run to make sure everything was working correctly, two hours later I finally stopped playing.

Playing through the tutorials, you're introduced to the meat of the game - a very samey interface, a normality with these time management games. There are three floors to your haunted hotel: the ground floor, where your guests wait to be assigned a room, this is also where food and drinks are stored; the middle floor and the top floor have the rooms your guests will be staying in.

Each type of creature has its own comforts, as it were, with ghosts being the easiest to please - you assign them a room, take them their luggage, they will then require food, then they'll require more food, then they sleep for a while, then they're ready to leave. Each creature has a sort of pattern like this, but you can have so many guests at once, with more waiting to be given a room, that you can get flustered and forget what you're doing, thus adding to the challenge of a fairly simple concept.

You are given money for helping the guests, and the faster you help them out, the more money you get. Money can be used to upgrade your hotel, your dog (who is a storage chest with legs...), and your shoes; the better shoes you have, the faster you can move. Upgrading star ratings of rooms requires money too, but once upgraded you can get stars as a reward, these stars are used to upgrade the rundown garden outside. There are a ridiculous amount of garden upgrades, with three upgrades per category (e.g., three path upgrades, three fencing upgrades). This can have you trying to replay levels earning more money and stars to get the best out of your hotel, as certain upgrades give certain benefits.

This is the meat of the game, progressing through the increasingly difficult levels, while making money to upgrade your hotel, adding rugs, better quality rooms, spiders webs, letting your chest dog carry more items, the usual. After ten levels of upgrading and helping guests, you can then move onto a new area, where you'll start from scratch, but get new ghosts and creatures with new requirements. It's a touch that adds more mayhem to the proceedings.

Aside from the games 'story' mode, there is also an Endless Shift mode, which is as you'd expect - you and your hotel, lasting for as long as you can. You have five hearts at the beginning, and if you're not fast enough and a guest becomes disgruntled and leaves, you lose a heart; lose all five, and it's game over, man.

During your time in your haunted locations, you'll be hearing some background music which, unfortunately gets really irritating, in fact I found myself muting it a couple of times. It's hectic and fits the theme of the game well enough, but it's grating enough to get annoying at times. Although I'd say it's not necessarily a bad thing to say the worst thing I found about the game was the background music.

Graphically the game is nothing to write home about, but it has a certain charm to it. The ghosts in particular have a certain comical look to them, which may not be scary, but it damn sure beats the grotesque monstrosities one would usually associate with (and gets saturated by, in) Halloween themed/related games. The hotels themselves are all well enough designed, but again, nothing spectacular, although they can start to look pretty nifty once you start upgrading - but it's all cartoony, so overall it's more graphically interesting than impressive.

Time management games have the problem of all being too similar, where you'll have a set of tasks thrown at you, then repeat ad infinitum, but Haunted Domains changes this somewhat with it's breaking up the stages. Ten stages with creatures with very specific requirements, you'll get into a routine, where you think you're on a roll, then it'll mix it up, throw you into a new location with all your upgrades gone, and ask you to start learning new routines - it works well and adds to the addictive nature of the game, there's something inherently addictive about it, despite the fact it could be seen as monotonous.

Not exactly your typical Halloween themed game, where the developer tried to make you reach for clean underwear; here, Alawar instead wants you to reach for a towel to dry of the sweat as the games picks up the pace, asking you to frantically help your undead customers and I, for one, am happy to oblige.

Haunted Domains will be available for PC, Mac, iPad and iPhone.