Haunt: Bathroom Ideas

This will be a pretty quick post, because A) it’s late, and I’m tired; B) my internet has been playing funny buggers, which caused me to lose a lengthy post over on my D&D blog yesterday; and C) I have made very little progress in Haunt.

A lot of that lack of progress probably has to do with the fact that I’m not playing it very much.  It’s not that it’s a bad game; on the contrary, when I do play it I find it to be quite amusing.  It has a warped sense of humour that very much appeals to me.  But I’m just not that into video games right now, and what little time I did spend gaming this week, I spent playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer, which takes that game and mixes up the contents of all the chests.  Look, when a way to make my favourite game of all time replayable comes up, I’m gonna be spending some time on that.  On top of all of the above, I’ve spent most of the last few days doomscrolling on Twitter, and blogging hasn’t seemed all that high a priority with everything else going on.  I’ll try to get things back on track from now on; I really did feel good about maintaining that regular schedule, and I’d like to get back to that kind of diligence.

Okay, Haunt.  When I left off at the end of my last post, I only had one obvious avenue of exploration: the rooms accessible by climbing the ivy at the back of the mansion.  I’d already been up there previously, and found a bedroom and a bathroom.  Before I could achieve anything of significance though, I’d tried flushing the toilet, only for it to spin around and knock me over.  This caused me to crack my head on the bath and die, which is a pretty ignoble way to go in a video game.

There had to be more to those rooms than that, so I made it my first target when I went back to the game.  Upon climbing the ivy, I recalled that you can’t go back the same way; the ivy collapses under your weight and sends you crashing to the ground.  I thought I’d try jumping down, just to see if it worked, but unfortunately it did not, and I chalked up yet another death.  I’m pretty sure now that I’m not supposed to go back that way.  There’s a boarded-up doorway from the bedroom that supposedly leads to the rest of the house, and I’d lay odds that I’m meant to find a way through there (or perhaps a way through from the other side).

The first room I investigated was the bathroom, which had a toilet, a bath, and a bar of soap.  The toilet spinning when flushed seemed suspicious to me, so I decided to see what would happen if I sat on it before pressing the button.  The toilet swiveled around into a secret room, where I found a piece of jade and was also treated to a good old masturbation joke.

The jade was a treasure, but there was nothing else in the room, so I flushed the toilet again and was returned to the bathroom.

The only other thing of interest in the bathroom was the bathtub, so I did the obvious thing: I decided to get in and wash myself.  All I had to do was type TAKE BATH and my guy got in, ran the water, and washed himself with the soap: that’s an efficient parser!  The soap wore away completely, leaving me with a gem, another treasure.

I’d done pretty well in the bathroom, but the bedroom was another matter entirely.  I looked under the bed, and found nothing but dust.  Sleeping in the bed achieved nothing.  There was a mirror on the ceiling above the bed, which was out of reach.  I tried jumping on the bed, which caused me to break the mirror, but I wasn’t able to take the broken glass.  Perhaps if I was wearing gloves I might be able to do it without being cut, but I’ve yet to find any.

I also had no way to get back to the rest of the game.  I wasn’t able to get through the boarded-up doorway, and I had no way of getting down from the balcony without being killed.  I decided to restart, and try to find my way in from the other side.

I had some luck exploring the house from the front door, as I was able to find some areas that I hadn’t been to before.  Don’t ask me how I got there though, it’s a complete mystery to me.  It was pretty late when I was playing, and I was drifting in and out of sleep.  I know that I found an elevator, and then I ended up on the bottom of the ocean somehow.  I died of madness pretty shortly after that, and I wasn’t quite mentally aware enough to get any screenshots, so I’m not entirely sure that I didn’t just dream the whole thing.  Hopefully when I next go back to the game I can figure out how to get back there (assuming that there’s a there to find).

I need to devote more time to this game.  It’s really quite a solid effort, and as I mentioned above it’s funny enough to keep me entertained.  I also haven’t gotten properly stuck at any point yet, which is always a bonus for me: the difficulty is pitched at around the right level so far.  If I can just muster the effort to finish it, I think it’s going to score rather well.