To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 29th

• Game: Spooky Ghosts Dot Com
• Developer: Grizzly Wizard Games, Lone Wolf Technology
• Release Year: 2018
• Available: Itch, Steam, Switch

I realize a lot of the games I've covered so far in the Spooktathlon haven't been all that, well, spooky. But today's entry is different; it has Spooky right in the name! Spooky Ghosts Dot Com can be graciously described as a "mini-explormer": the usual map system, upgrades that get you to new places, dead-ends with collectibles, and boss fights that demand you summon every scrap of skill and pattern recognition to defeat. Just, way smaller.

Spooky Ghosts Dot Com is the protagonist's website: a budget ghost hunter service that you can call when the usual guys are too busy or too NYC-based. Getting a job in the middle of the night, our pink-haired heroine (who sort of has a Ghost Sweeper Mikami vibe in that cover art above) enters a clearly haunted domicile, realizes that the client is a ghost himself who confused the site for a ghostly escort service, and decides to exorcise the entire manor grounds of its spectral infestation. If, along the way, she can pet some kitties and eat a whole bunch of Halloween candy, all the better. Because of the game's shorter than usual length, there isn't as much of the circuitous map design or progress-enabling power-ups: there's around 50-60 rooms total, which isn't as many as it sounds, and there's really only two power-ups in the form of a mid-air dash (needed for a few gaps) and a charge beam (which can also blow down barricades). The rest of the items either help you survive battles longer (the aforementioned Halloween candy pick-up also gives you extra HP) or are keys intended to access subsequent areas.

I will say to Spooky Ghosts Dot Com's laser focus, it can be a challenging game. Provided you're playing on the Normal difficulty - which the game defines as the "true Spooky Ghosts Dot Com experience" - you can't heal except at save points, and with a paltry 10 hit point starting total (19 once fully upgraded, though I couldn't help but feel I missed an upgrade until I saw the "100% Complete!" on the post-game results screen) they drain very quickly. Almost nothing in the game hits you for just one HP: it's usually at least two or three, and spikes even more so. The few boss fights are genuinely challenging as a result, as you struggle to avoid getting hit the two or three times it would take to finish you off, applying the pressure to these larger foes whenever there's a gap in their pattern and you have room to breathe. Your laser gun is relatively fast but even while charged does only chip damage, so these internecine battles can demand a reasonable amount of patience and evasive skill. Some boss fights are genuinely inventive also, like fighting a boss from inside its stomach where every part of the screen - including the floor, ceiling, and walls - count as the boss's hitbox.

Visually and audio-wise the game is fairly barebones, skeleton jokes aside, and clocks in at just over an hour on a blind run with a few deaths. I would say that the core is solid enough though, and works as a microcosm of an Indie explormer with a lot more resources and ambition without sacrificing too much about what makes these games tick. It's as paper-thin as Halloween decorations, but even with my brief time with it I felt challenged at every turn and enjoyed taking my time looking around for its handful of scattered items, conversing with an inexplicably buff shopkeeper spook or the genial teleporter cat (who never did reward me for finding all their smaller, muter brethren; I was surprised that particular side-quest never amounted to anything). It joins the likes of Xeodrifter, Mini Ghost, and Gato Roboto as these bite-sized variants of the sprawling Castlevanias and Metroids that define the genre: ideal if you're looking for a quick explormer fix over a lunch break and not hours of squinting at a map figuring out where the gaps are and where you should go next.

• Quality: 3 Stars.
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.