Affected: The Manor is like paying $2.99 one-time to enter a haunted house and taking all of your friends and family through it to share in the scares. Though there is no real individual replay value, despite 2-3 slight variations in path choice, it is still worth the money to see how others react. Depending on your own personal feelings for haunted houses, this may be the start of future nightmares or just a compilation of laughable scare attempts.
It wouldn’t be a haunted mansion without creepy dilapidated hallways!
This game is a virtual walkthrough of a haunted mansion and just like in a real world haunted house, you can look around and choose where you want to go, but you have to go down the paths they open for you. Depending on how much time you take looking around (or freaking out!) this experience could take you 10 minutes to run straight through or 30 minutes to stumble around. However, for the length it takes to get through the entire scenario it is limited on actual jump scares. You might want to check it out again, just to see what was through that other door or in that other stairwell, but the scare effects feel dramatically reduced.
Affected: The Manor is fully immersive and the audio is what really helps pull you into the virtual world. The sound effects and music are constant, creepy and drowns out any laughter of others around you. Headphones are of course required to get the full effect. The visual effects are decent, though still artificial looking, the shading and lighting create a nice environment that prevents it from looking cartoon like. As for motion sickness, it isn’t too bad if you limit the controls to the touch panel or a single button on a controller to move forward and use your head for the turning. If you end up using a controller the thumb sticks tend to become a habit to control movement which for me created some motion sickness and reduced the fearful feeling. Requiring people to stand and limiting controls to touch to move forward helps immerse people even further. There is nothing like hearing something behind you and physically choosing whether to look back or flee forward.
If you look at his pic and think to yourself, “that’s cool” than you should probably buy this game!
Despite the limited replayability, I feel that sharing this experience with others is where the true value of this game lies. I have seen steadfast and unflinching to totally freaked out (just at the loading screen!) and requiring a padded room to prevent self-injury. This game is certainly worth a few dollars,especially if you want to see how someone else might react in to the horrors placed before them.
