Halloween: Sweet Home

Merry Weenmas, folks. It was that time of year again. Since I won our annual bet, I got to decide this year's Halloween game. We settled for the old 8-bit classic "Sweet Home". You ready for this?

Sweet Home bro, did I see you on MTV Crypts?

I mean, I *do* like sweet homes. What has it got like a heated blood pool or something? Mausoleum couch? I’m ready. So, what were your expectations for this game?

I knew a little bit about this game. I knew it was a spooky game, and that it was an RPG by Capcom. I also knew it was based on a movie, and that it ended up blossoming into the Resident Evil franchise. It's an NES-era game though, so I did expect a lot of shenanigans like brutal difficulty, and poorly translated cryptic nonsense.

It's not a Sweet Home without tense opening door cutscenes.

Yeah I thought this game was going to be more of a pain to play, somewhere between Parasite Eve and Final Fantasy 1 I guess. All the technical limitations of NES games and the obtuse difficulty and instadeath mechanics of early horror games. I was to be pleasantly surprised.

I guess it definitely did have some of that, but on the whole I thought it was a weirdly reasonable for a game of its era. Anyway, let's introduce us to our crew.

• Allie: A cool dude with a lighter. Doesn't use his lighter to light the way, but does burn ropes.
• Tobi: A nurse looking character. Not much of a fighter, but did have an infinite supply of pills in her first aid kid.
• Isaura: The burly cameraman. Essentially a clue-gather-er.
• Ico: A lass with a key. The mansion has many types of keys, but this generic master key works on a surprising amount of locks.
• Jinks: Someone with a vacuum cleaner, but is oddly a real powerhouse.

Now you might be thinking that these items slowly start getting odd the further you get down the list, but they kinda make sense. We accidentally did a gender swap for everyone, as the game just asked us to name five characters, and we had no clue who was going to be what.

All from different walks of life, all day-drinkers.

So the goal of the game I guess is to explore the mansion and take photos of the frescoes around the house, which all had the same image but revealed secret hints for how to progress further. Sometimes the frescoes would be dusty and you would need to use the vacuum cleaner on them. There were also lots of other hazards around the house such as holes in the floor to be crossed with wood bridges, broken glass areas to be swept, burnable ropes, locked doors, etc. Though there are some hazards that could result in losing your party members, having Tobi reading the manual and briefing me on what to expect made the game far more reasonable than I expected. There are ways to carry on if you only lose a party member or two, but we were able to make it through without losing anyone.
The combat was also fairly reasonable. As a survival horror, you had very limited amounts of heals to use wisely throughout the game but we used them sparingly and found it easy to end up quite over-leveled just by navigating the mansion naturally. There were a decent amount of spooky RPG monster designs to fight, what were your favourites? Mine was the “worms!!” Because they looked like macaroni cheese and made me hungry.

Creepy pasta.

I liked the one where just a regular dude had his back turned on you. And after a turn in combat, he turns around and he reveals he's a terminator skeleton man with half his face missing. He had the very unique moniker of "MAN".

Were there any parts that spooked you? 

The game's pretty full of spectacularly unimpressive jump scares. For some reason whenever something is about to happen, the game pauses, a slow DUN DUN DUN DUN jingle starts building up and BOOM, a thing pops on screen. Since you know it's coming, you pretty much never get caught off guard. I say "pretty much" never, because there's one guy that got me several times. One of the monsters is a ghoul, who's upside down. They look pretty silly, but them being upside down is enough of a twist that it caught me off guard. I love 'em though.

Truly, he turned that frown upside down.

While the game was pretty reasonable, fun even!? We managed to lose a bit of momentum towards the end when we started needing a lot of unique items, including several different kinds of door keys. Due to the limited inventory system, we were constantly swapping out items we didn’t think we’d need again… and being wrong. 

Yeah, basically all the characters can only hold two items each, and the parties are split up more often than not. If you want to pick up a new item, you usually have to drop something else. That sounds simple enough, but the moment you need a unique item back in a large haunted mansion full of monsters, you can probably guess that finding where you left a specific thing can be trouble. Since we decided where we left items behind, it wasn't something we could look up either. We'd have to retrace our steps, and speculate when we might have used a thing last. It's tedious, but the confusion and chaos did work into the game's atmosphere's favour.

They're always in the last grave you dig up, am i right?

Besides losing our keys, the pacing of the ending was pretty good and it kind of wrapped up the way you might expect a NES era game to. A cheerfully bizarre final stretch, a cryptic boss battle and a quick finale.

On the whole, I did have a good time with it. I could recommend it, assuming the prospective player has access to save states. There's a couple of "how was I supposed to know that?" insta-death traps in there that are fine if you can quickly reload, but would otherwise probably be frustrating and unfair. On the whole though, the home was pretty sweet.

Clowns!? This is a haunted house, not my twitter mentions.

I give it a macaroni cheese worms out of 10. It’s modest and not very spicy, but it tastes good and makes for a comforting atmospheric late autumn feast. It can also be enjoyed by cats.

Don't let your kitties snack on macaroni unless you want to be cleaning up a real horror story.