Spooky title for a spooky game, right? ...RIGHT??? Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look Realms of the Haunting, a curious hybrid of a first person shooter with an inventory based adventure game, steeped in occult lore, developed by Gremlin Interactive and published by Interplay in 1997. This is a surprisingly tricky game to comment on given that it has both questionable and ingenious gameplay mechanics, coupled with superb visuals, decent acting in the FMVs, yet largely forgettable music and some of the worst controls ever seen. (Which can thankfully be improved with patches but still...) Also, despite the name and premise, this isn't all that scary of a game. :P ------------------------------------------ Additional Information and Corrections: * If you want to watch the Ross's Game Dungeon video covering this game, here's the link, though be warned he spoils almost the entire story so if you want to play through the full game yourself first, save this link for later! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_oS9XBxlwM * Here's a link to grab the game from Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/292390/Realms_of_the_Haunting/ * Or, if you'd prefer the GOG release, follow this link: https://www.gog.com/game/realms_of_the_haunting/?pp=91dfde1d6e005e422f64a59776234f1f4c80b5e4 * For some curious reason some of the cutscenes have framerate issues... and not as in the emulation or CPU can't keep up, but as in the drops in framerate are baked into the FMVs themselves. I'm... not entirely sure how that's even a thing... :o * There's actually a surprisingly small amount of graphic violence in this game. So little in fact I was able to cut around it to present the episode without a mature content warning. But rest assured, there are ways to see enemies die spewing copious amounts of blood and there's also dead rats littering some sections. * Something I missed about the controls is that if you hold BOTH the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously, you can look around with typical mouse-aiming like you'd see in most first-person games, but you can only start doing this from a standstill and it's cancelled the instant the mouse cursor travels over something interactive, so... it's still not an ideal solution. :P * One thing I will say about Ross' coverage of the game is that he missed an interesting notion about the game's ending, which again I'm not going to spoil, but it's not actually a cop-out ending because there's no way to know what events led to the situation presented, nor no way to know how much of what's revealed is fact or fiction; maybe all of it, maybe none of it. It's one of the few times I'd say an ending like that actually works, as in most cases, yes, that kind of ending would be stupid. :B * Apparently, the "patch" is just a conversion for the UK version into the US version, which had the customizable controls by default. The GOG releases uses the UK version, thus why it's lacking that feature. Again, early releases on the GOG platform, such as this one, didn't always turn out as good as they could've. :P ------------------------------------------ Pixelmusement Website: http://www.pixelships.com ADG on Pixelmusement: http://www.pixelships.com/adg Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html Kris' Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/kasick @Pixelmusement on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pixelmusement