You play a disembodied pair of eyes wandering around a darkened four-story house. You're there to find the three pieces of an urn that once belonged to a man named Zachary Graves. But the house is haunted by Zachary's ghost, and occupied by tarantulas and a bat. If they touch you, you'll be 'scared to death' and lose a life. You have 9 lives.
The house is completely dark, but you have an infinite number of matches to light a small area around you. The match works for a limited time and another one has to be lit. The match also goes out when there's a monster in the same room with you. With a match lit, you can find items in the rooms: A master key to open locked doors, a scepter to protect you from the monsters, and the urn pieces. You can only carry one of these at a time (the urn assembles as you collect the pieces, and is considered one item).
The monsters wander from room to room and floor to floor. If a monster enters the room, or you enter a room with a monster in it, it'll give chase. At lower difficulty levels, if you leave the room, it'll go back to wandering; but at higher difficulty levels, it'll keep chasing you from room to room. Zachary's ghost can pass through locked doors, and the other monsters can too at higher difficulty levels. When there's a monster in the room, the wind blows, blowing out your match, and lightning flashes (or not, depending on the left difficulty switch setting).
There are nine Difficulty Levels, ranging from Easier Than Easy to Nintendo Hard. At level 1, there are no doors, the walls are lit, and you can see if a monster is in another room. At level 2, the scaring starts. It's completely dark, and the rooms are separated by doors, so you don't know if there's a monster in the next room. Even if you stand still, a monster could wander in from any direction. Higher levels lock some of the doors, have three tarantulas instead of one, make the monsters more aggressive, make the bat steal your item, speed up the monsters, make Zachary's ghost immune to the scepter, and let the other monsters move through locked doors.
The game was remade for the Wii and Xbox Live Arcade, and another re-imagining of sorts called Haunted House: Cryptic Graves
was released on PC in late 2014.
Yet another remake was released in 2023 as a Rogue Like simply titled Haunted House.
An exclusive 3D remake was included in the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration as one of six Reimagined games. The gameplay is similar to the original, in which the player explores several haunted buildings as levels, avoiding enemies and collecting pieces of an artifact. The original game is also available in the collection, and a homebrew game Return to Haunted House was added in a free update.
No relation to the 4K TRS-80 Text Adventure Haunted House, nor the Gottlieb pinball table.
Haunted House provides examples of:
- Action-Adventure
- Adaptation Expansion: The 2010 remake gives greater story detail to the saga of the Haunted House like depicting Zachary Graves as a Byronic figure driven by tragedy, as well as detailing the exact nature of the Urn's magic and why it was broken into three pieces to begin with.
- All There in the Manual: The plot.
- A Winner Is You: The screen flashes and some spooky music
resembling The Twilight Zone theme plays. - Backtracking: If you don't have the master key, you'll do a lot of this.
- Bat Out of Hell: The bat is one of the three enemies.
- Bedsheet Ghost: Zachary.
- Blackout Basement: The whole house.
- By the Lights of Their Eyes: Even when you've lit a match, only your eyes are seen. This is changed in the remake.
- Collision Damage: Zachary, the spiders, and the bat all damage you by simply touching you.
- Cut and Paste Environments: All four floors are exactly the same; six rooms in a two by three grid. Only the locations of stairs and locked doors are different, and in the dark, you can't see them! Only the status bar can tell you which floor you're on.
- Difficulty Levels: Nine in the Atari 2600 version, used to great effect. Each variation adds new twists rather than just being faster.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: The urn.
- Empty Room Psych: Well, there are 24 rooms, five objects, and three or five monsters, so...
- Evil Old Folks: Before his death, Zachary Graves was a mean, rotten old man who was hated by the community for his attitude. He was also a thief who stole a magic urn that belonged to the town.
- Excuse Plot: You are trying to recover a magic urn that belonged to the town, while dodging the ghost of Zachary Graves, the bat, and the spiders.
- Fan Remake: One was made in 2004.
- Fan Sequel: The homebrew Haunted House 3D for the Atari 5200.
- Featureless Protagonist: Two eyes, with pupils that point where you're going.
- Averted with the remake, which starred two siblings investigating the disappearance of their grandfather (who, incidentally, was the guy the pair of eyes belonged to in the 1983 original). If they have no source of light ready however, only their eyes will be visible as a Call-Back.
- Game Over: You lose the game when you run out of lives.
- Grumpy Old Man: The manual reveals that prior to his death, Zachary Graves combined this with Evil Old Folks. He was a mean, rotten old irritable grump. He wasn't just grumpy though, as the manual clarifies that he was actually evil and stole an item that belonged to the town.
- Haunted House: The house is haunted by the ghost of Zachary Graves.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: Very tricky with only one inventory slot.
- Invincible Villain: Zachary on levels 8 and 9, where he is not affected by the scepter.
- Locked Door: Starting at difficulty level 3.
- Meaningful Name: Zachary Graves. While everyone dies eventually, it's fitting that a man with the last name "Graves" would become a ghost instead of passing on.
- Palette Swap: The tarantulas.
- Pre-existing Encounters: Difficulty level 1.
- Roaming Enemy: All three enemies wander around.
- Scoring Points: You get a score based on how many matches you use and how many lives you lose. Lower the score, the better it is.
- Shout-Out: If you beat the game, The Twilight Zone (1959) theme plays.
- Spiders Are Scary: The spiders will scare you to death if they touch you.
- Survival Horror: May be the Ur-Example (which would also make it Older Than the NES).
- Top-Down View: You view the house in a "blueprint" style, as though from above.
- Video-Game Lives: Nine.
- Video Game Remake: The PC / Xbox 360 / Wii remake, which gave the game 3D graphics and a more complex story.