Haunting at Cliffhouse: REVIEW

The fun new adventure Haunting at Cliffhouse was done mostly as a one-woman production from Cindy Pondillo, who gave us the simple but entertaining Intrigue at Oakhaven Plantation some years back. 

If you enjoy the Carol Reed games you'll probably enjoy Cliffhouse. Although this is a ghost story, don't worry. You won't be scared. The ghosts here are intended to be intriguing, not to frighten players.

You play as Sarah, a recently bereaved widow. You find a brochure to the Cliffhouse Bed and Breakfast hotel in the mail and decide on the spur of the moment to go there. It turns out to be a beautiful place, but you'll be seeing ghosts almost as soon as you arrive. The puzzles and the plot of a historical, hidden romance begin right away, easily pulling players into the game world.

Cliffhouse continues Ms. Pondillo's tradition of making simple games, although this effort is far more polished than Oakhaven. The puzzles are much more difficult and the story more complex. Nevertheless, we deal with static scenes and stationary cutouts of people, although the characters do come with voiceovers and subtitles. Much of the voice acting is quite good, with Marinda as the standout. The lead actress does very well. She's perfectly pleasant to hear throughout the game, and adds a lot to the experience. 

Of course it's primarily a puzzle game, with the rewards for solutions coming as ghostly scenes that fill out the historical plot. Again, the puzzles may seem simple, but several can challenge players quite well enough to keep attention turned up to high. Several picture-assembly games take some thought, as does a nice jigsaw puzzle and an ongoing scavenger hunt. You can play an ESP game with Zener cards just for fun as many times as you like. The climactic puzzle comes as a nifty logic game, with clues available onscreen. However, once you begin a puzzle there appears to be no way out of it until it's solved, so saving the game before beginning a puzzle might be a good idea. I learned late in the game that you can automatically solve a puzzle by hitting a certain key, but I'm glad I didn't know it earlier. 

I will reveal, however, that you access the save/load/quit screen by hitting the space bar. Nowhere does the game tell you that. It is, apparently, one of the puzzles.

Nevertheless, Ms. Pondillo makes sure players won't experience too much frustration even as she deliveres some nicely involving gameplay. No one should need a walkthough for this game, although players must be certain they access every node and hot spot in order to advance. Some patience may be required, but the cursor is large and changes color to red whenever it touches a hot spot, and all exits are nicely labeled. Players will not be getting lost. Even the maze features a little fairy as an optional guide for maze haters. 

Art and music really stand out here, even in such a low-budget effort. Plenty of work went into the lovely graphics, and the music throughout the game remains equally pleasant and appropriate to the scenes. Nighttime scenes come with hooting owls and beautifully rendered pastels. Appropriate sound effects work well throughout the game without causing any distraction. I was really impressed with the production values.

The Japanese Garden at night, with cursor

OK folks, this isn't a twenty-hour, complex adventure in the vein of Jane Jensen or Jonathan Boakes and wasn't meant to be anything like those major efforts, but it certainly is a highly pleasant way to spend an evening or two.

If you enjoy adventures but don't want to get your hands too dirty with a weeks-long gaming excursion, Haunting at Cliffhouse delivers everything you could want as a fun, intriguing little puzzler. It doesn't claim to be more than it is, but what it is works quite well indeed.

A lovely little game! We'll look for more!