The Conjuring House Gameplay

[Lottie Dedinas]

Ifyou can make it through the dull tutorial and ignore the embarrassing voice acting, The Conjuring House serves up some memorable scares and does a good job of maintaining a tense, paranoid atmosphere. The graphics, while repetitive in the extreme, are at least well done and establish the clich but still entirely effective sense of dread you get from a classic haunted house. The lighting engine really sells it, with periodic flashes of lightning that make you jump, and distinct a warm or cool pallor to various areas that work well as vague landmarks. I just feel like this game could have been a whole lot better with more diverse map design and some gameplay smoothing. Rym has some great tricks up their sleeves and when The Conjuring House works it can really scare the pants off you, but so much of it is undermined by monotony or amateurish game design.

I've been gaming off and on since I was about three, starting with Star Raiders on the Atari 800 computer. As a kid I played mostly on PC--Doom, Duke Nukem, Dark Forces--but enjoyed the 16-bit console wars vicariously during sleepovers and hangouts with my school friends. In 1997 GoldenEye 007 and the N64 brought me back into the console scene and I've played and owned a wide variety of platforms since, although I still have an affection for Nintendo and Sega.

I started writing for Gaming Nexus back in mid-2005, right before the 7th console generation hit. Since then I've focused mostly on the PC and Nintendo scenes but I also play regularly on Sony and Microsoft consoles. My favorite series include Metroid, Deus Ex, Zelda, Metal Gear and Far Cry. I'm also something of an amateur retro collector. I currently live in Westerville, Ohio with my wife and our cat, who sits so close to the TV I'd swear she loves Zelda more than we do. We are expecting our first child, who will receive a thorough education in the classics.

The Conjuring House, the first title from RYM GAMES, locks you into the depths of the eponymous house, surrounded by an enclave of ghostly cultists, eldritch monsters, and violent spirits. However, a dated gameplay experience leaves more of a fear of playing the game than of the terrors within.

When your crew of paranormal investigators goes missing inside of Atkinson manor, and the front door to the house magically seals, you find that the only way out is to destroy a series of cursed objects scattered throughout the various floors and secret chambers. The evil power of these relics fills the space, engulfing every inch of the building in ominous and mysterious energy. The sound of rolling thunder and rain on the windows, combined with the methodical tapping of your own footsteps, ground you firmly in the house. It sets the stage for a difficult stay in a dreadful place. Unfortunately, once the atmosphere loses its novelty, the rest of The Conjuring House is more frustrating than frightening. Recycled visual assets and an astoundingly high number of locked doors create an aggravating and circular journey.

Both mechanically and visually, The Conjuring House feels like a game designed for an older generation of gaming. Turning too sharply while sprinting causes you to stop running. Squeezing through narrow crawl spaces takes ages. Interacting with the environment is unresponsive, and is doubly difficult when the cursor disappears from view. For a game that is so heavily dependent on suspension of disbelief and immersion, the overall design seems almost at odds with its intention, and this is only made worse by its poor visual clarity.

At its climax, the game wholly embraces its eldritch nature and launches you into an incomprehensibly dark, mind-bending world. A new version of the house is raised around you, made up of hallways that lead into themselves and doorways that open to holes in the ground. Dramatic tension builds quickly as you clamber over levitating furniture, past walls of eyes, and ducking past terrifying tendrils, but the tension collapses on itself just as soon as it begins. For those brief moments though, there is a glimpse behind the veil into what could have been.

3a8082e126