Goosebumps The Game Review

Are you ready for a trip down memory lane? If you, like myself, grew up in the 90’s there’s a good chance you grew up with both these things: Goosebumps and point-and-click games. This game combines the two! It’s a short game, aimed towards children, but if you grew up with the books and the series you will get a kick out of all the characters in the game from the old books. The game starts with a cutscene with two movers driving their truck telling ghost stories. They end up derailing, crashing their truck in a suburban american street, close to the house of our protagonist. Kicking off the game, we start at school tasked with retrieving our cell phone from our locker. Doing so, we are free to roam the map, interacting and collecting a whole lotta stuff. Upon returning home we learn that our house has become a haunted version of what it was. In the truck outside we pick up different weird objects, a shrunken head, a canister, a top hat. Following is a lot of small puzzles throughout the game, taking you through the town meeting different monsters and obstacles.

Within your house you find three ghost children, whom you are tasked to help so they can move on to the afterlife. To complete this task you must find something from their former life, and give it to them. In your house you also meet your aunt Dahlia, an old woman who are very adamant that you drink her prune juice (a reference to the series, where Aunt Dahlia is a witch that steals the youth of children by making them drink her prune juice). Throughout the game we also encounter other well-known Goosebumps monsters – The Beast from the East, Fifi the vampire poodle, the green monster blood, the lawn gnomes, mannequins and Chronby the Troll, just to name some of them.

After you have travelled the map thin, completing small tasks here and there you end up at the mall, preparing for the ending. When you enter the book store, the final room of the game, you find the game’s antagonist – Slappy the ventriloquist doll. We learn that the monsters has escaped from the books of R. L. Stine, and Slappy has no business wanting to return to them. After a bit of talking Slappy attacks you, but you are saved by R. L. Stine himself (whom you called eariler telling him of the trouble), who forces Slappy back into the book. Thus concludes the game, you saved the neighbourhood, your house is back to normal and your parents are safe!

Playing through Goosebums the Game is not a lenghty process. The game is short, but it has plenty of places to visit. Aimed at children, the game is not really scary (it has a couple of jumpscares), but it hits the nail on the nostalgic factor. Getting reminded of the stories that used to scare you as a kid is a lovely experience, and the game does a good job incorporating the monsters into the story (as good as it can – a lot of them are just there as an obstacle or a puzzle, but I think it’s the thought that counts). The puzzles are not hard – but if you screw up your character will die. If this happens you can simply press replay, and you start over before dying, so it is of little consequence. You can complete the game in a few different ways, skipping puzzles, completing some of them different ways etc. which is cool. All in all, the game is a short but sweet homage to our childhood terrors, and if you ever was a fan of Goosebumps this should provide entertainment for you. Even better, if you have a kid, play it with them!