I don’t really remember much of the story behind Haunting Starring Polterguy. What I do remember is that you play the ghost of someone that died through the actions, or inactions, of some family (it was a rental and didn’t have the manual). You decide to get revenge by doing what all ghosts do: you haunt things.
You start with the ability to haunt small stuff: knickknacks, kitsch, and the like. Once you jump into something you gain the ability to make it do something scary. Your immediate goal is to scare the people as they meander around the house. The more scared they are, the more power you get. The more power you get, the bigger things you can haunt. Haunt the big things like the furniture and the floor, and you might scare them out of the house. Scare them all out of the house, and you win! Well, you win that house. The family apparently then moves to a new house where you get to start all over again.
Possessing mundane objects and making them do clichéd horror movie things is kind of neat at first, but for some reason, it gets old fast. I made it through the first house before I gave up. A friend I was with at the time managed to get to the third house before he succumbed to the Undying Mediocrity. I understand now that he was close to the end of the game. I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of the game, it’s easy enough that I could probably blow through it in a couple of hours, but once you’ve seen what each of the possessed items do, the novelty wears off fast, and then you’re just button mashing for the win (BMFTW) instead of genuinely having fun.
Or, at least I was.