Game Reviews: Mysteries of the Afterlife and the Eerie Present

In a month rife with original indie games, including Animal Well and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, there has seemingly been something for every player. The creativity continues with Hauntii, Crow Country and Paper Trail, even though one stumbles a bit.

Hauntii

The inventive characters in Hauntii speak few words, but those words can pierce. “I hate you,” one cute devil says after you climb meandering steps to reach him.

This 10-hour adventure game by the studio Moonloop can be slightly subversive as well, all the while musing upon what the afterlife means. Hauntii, a tiny, faceless Druid-esque being, embarks upon his trek energetically. But the point of his cowl hood droops behind his head, perhaps from the sheer weight of finding out he’s died.

In this invitingly artful, mostly monochromatic world, Hauntii soon meets an Eternian, seemingly an angel with flowing hair. Hauntii’s green eyes become wide with attraction. She lifts him to the heavens, where they ascend hand in hand to observe sparkling constellations — a wonderful representation of love at first sight.

As it can be with relationships, she leaves. To find her, it’s key to remember who you once were by collecting lustrous stars hidden among trees or locked away in cages. As you search, the characters encourage you to stay in their world, a place where you can always be safe. There’s nothing good where the Eternian is, they caution.

Yet it’s not safe where you are either.

A giant, chained Bell Guardian, its mouth twisted down like a Melpomene mask of tragedy, employs minions to kill you. Hopping beings that look like Q-bert with legs might stomp on you. With haunt ability, I inhabited these trumpet-nosed creatures to jump quickly past enemies. If you stray from your appointed path into a roadless blackness, red eyes appear nightmarishly. Linger for too long, and you’ll lose your life.

Haunting to shake pine trees reveals pieces of hearts for health, and an occasional brilliant star. Collect enough and you’re lofted into the heavens to complete a constellation. From high in space, silent stick figure vignettes appear to show momentary hints of your life, like tender parental hugs after being bullied by a teacher. That these memories have so much emotional impact is a credit to the creators.

Hauntii’s most gobsmacking achievement is the Wickland Carnival. On the midway, a gangly grim reaper sells ride tickets in exchange for a portion of your soul. The line is long with adults and children, all happily queuing up to sell their very essence. As the camera pulls back, the long shot reveals a spectacular roller coaster that rumbles at the north end, looping twice as it’s bathed in fireworks and its harried passengers scream gleefully. Gaining admission to the rickety ride is another puzzle Hauntii needs to solve before his journey through Eternity is complete.

Crow Country

A homage to the original PlayStation era, Crow Country is made for nostalgia lovers who don’t mind graphics that aren’t presented in 4K, and who love a puzzle game that requires concentration and note taking. It is especially inspired by Resident Evil, from 1996, the console’s classic survival horror game.

Here, you are Mara Forest, a brown-haired investigator in a white dress who searches for the missing entrepreneur Mr. Crow. She’s a no-nonsense, generally delightful presence who has limited ammo to protect herself from the grossly mutated creatures that appear in an abandoned amusement park, the eponymous Crow Country.

Inside, the overall mood is creepy rather than horrifying. Eeriness pervades. The soundtrack, full of long, tense notes and gruesome screams, gets under your skin. Nothing is really as it appears. There’s the mechanical Great Fairy of Fairest Forest, which spins around to reveal a walkway once the proper code is entered, leading to more disturbing denizens. A tiny house requires crawling on hands and knees like Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

The puzzles in Crow Country, from SFB Games, move from simple to quite complex, and there’s much backtracking hither and yon for clues and items to aid your tasks. I used a reporter’s notebook to write down hints that the park’s staff members left on the walls. The world map is quite extensive with its many rooms, goony surprises and mild humor. One area is called the Mush Room. Inside, the Mushroom King sits alone at a long, dark dining table with unlit candles.

The mutated beings often come from the grim shadows. Shooting them with a laser-guided pistol isn’t always accurate. And turning to run away using the D-pad is a learning experience. (If you merely want to explore Crow Country’s many appealing peculiarities without fear of being attacked, there’s a mode that stops mutants from appearing.)

Yet the primary answer to the mystery is one you might overlook. If you miss checking your inventory to read a crumpled yellow paper that Mr. Crow handed over during the 10-hour game’s finale, you won’t realize the potentially dire situation the world may encounter in the future. One eerie battle is won. But the indication is that there may be more later, thus setting up a potential sequel.

Paper Trail

In Paper Trail, a top-down fairy tale, you fold, unfold and fold again until a path is revealed to pass an obstacle in a world rendered in moody watercolor backgrounds. I quickly recalled my childhood distractions like folding paper into planes and more intricate origami but ultimately became flummoxed by all the folding.

Here in the seaside community of Southfold, a lightning storm complete with damaging winds wreaks havoc, and the eel fisherman who has been trapped because a bridge crumbled asks for assistance. Dragging and folding the game’s edges as if the screen were a piece of paper, you discover a new way to traverse.

For some reason, the fisherman worries whether Aunt Maude survived the storm. How does he know her? Do they have a secret relationship? It’s not revealed, but the puzzles become more intricate from there.

Maude has been eating pine cones because she’s been trapped by the squall’s damage. That’s when Paige, an 18-year-old aspiring astrophysicist whose parents don’t want her to leave for college, comes to the rescue.

Paper Trail, an eight-hour experience by Newfangled Games, is published by Netflix and playable on smartphones and all major consoles. I chose to indulge on Nintendo’s Switch because of the larger touch-screen. It’s not always easy, however, to pull portions of the screen to lead Paige to a new path. It’s more difficult when the virtual paper edges sometimes become stuck, regardless of the hint button’s how-to diagrams.

Paige moves though some compelling environments, beautifully detailed and inked like a children’s book. I particularly lingered over a sunset pond just outside a cave in which she takes refuge. Fold the edges properly to reveal a green-hued morning with a white antlered stag far in the distance.

After journeys through swamps and snow, Paige eventually gets to college. Despite the apparent symbolism that the path to higher education isn’t always an easy one, this trek wasn’t always worth the effort. The story is paper thin and the origami-influenced gameplay mechanic doesn’t always bend the space-time continuum.

Hauntii was reviewed on a PC and is also available on all major consoles. Crow Country was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 and is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S. Paper Trail was reviewed on the Switch and is also available on all major consoles and smartphones.