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 28th

• Game: Corinne Cross's Dead and Breakfast
• Developer: Bad Chalk
• Release Year: 2016
• Available: Itch, Steam

Well, this game was adorable, and ended up being fairly close to another game I covered recently for my Indie Game of the Week feature named The Lost Art of Innkeeping (IGotW 181). Both concern running a hostel, both were made in RPG Maker though eschews any combat turn-based or otherwise, and both tend to juggle daily responsibilities and financial bookkeeping with timed events and a game-wide deadline (Dead and Breakfast is but a week in length). I think most notably though, is that both games focus on compassion and empathy over the more conventional video game skills: to be a good host, you must attend to the physical and mental (and, in a literal sense here, spiritual) needs of the clients in your care.

Corinne Cross is a college student who is given a task by her mother to housesit for a mutual friend for a week. Julia Styron, the friend in question, recently lost her son Gale who was Corinne's age and has since been hospitalized for her grief. After the first few nights in the house, and meeting the odd old woman who used to run the cemetery and funeral parlor next door, Corinne realizes the ghosts of the recently deceased are occupying the house; what used to be a bed and breakfast for the living is now occupied by ghostly guests who demand a similar level of service. The game then alternates between the daytime, where Corinne can go shopping for supplies and visit Julia in the hospital, and the night-time, when she converses with the specters, attends to their needs, and eventually helps them move on to the afterlife.

The gameplay is relatively straightforward, though it does require a good memory (or a notepad open nearby) to keep track of the items you need to buy during the day and to remember to plant and water the flowers in the garden (Corinne's main source of income), and really exists as a framing device to tell a few simultaneous side-stories about the wayward spirits staying within and the lives they once led. Each spook has an ending to pursue, reached both by spending time with them and assisting with their unfinished business, and the game maintains an easy gameplay loop between what amounts to simple chores and conversing with its characters. It's very basic - which I mean less as a derogatory statement but more in a casual, approachable sense - and takes about an hour or two total even if you do everything, though there's also a New Game+ variant with slightly tighter requirements and additional scenes. It's also saccharine (in a non-cloying way), cute as a button (as you can tell with the graphics in the screenshot above), and absolutely not terror-inducing in any way, shape, or form. Only one ghost wanted to eat my soul, and that was the angsty punk-rock teenager who was soon sorted out with some sisterly bonding.

If your idea of good Halloween entertainment is a charming, bittersweet story about being an empathetic friend to spirits to help them move on, then Corinne Cross's Dead and Breakfast is the breezy Indie hotelier sim for you. Fans of the harder stuff might want to try the Bates Motel Simulator instead, which isn't a real game yet but hopefully might be one day.

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity Rating: -2 S.T.A.R.S..