Spooky comes off like a juvenile prankster who has assembled the horrific deathtrap not out of prime malevolence, but more for her own dark yet frivolous amusement. Despite being home to some truly evil supernatural entities, the mansion sometimes feels like an elaborate practical joke. The Jump Scare Mansion and its mistress possess a mish-mash of chilling horrors and flippant comedy.

The story in SJSM is rather minimal and exists purely to provide flavor to the haunted adventure. Eventually, the player also gets a weapon of dubious effectiveness. Things get a little more complicated later in the game, as there are certain tricks the player needs to figure out to escape the more advanced specimens.

They doggedly pursue you from room to room, but will stop after predetermined points. It’s not the most complex game, and often it is pretty easy to outrun the various specters. When specimens appear, they give chase to the main character through the randomized rooms of the mansion. The monsters of the game, called specimens, are the source of the adventure’s challenge, along with the player’s nerve to move forward. These rooms are usually considerably more elaborate than the others and serve to give some story to the game and usually set up the appearance of a new monstrous resident of the mansion. There are certain specific rooms, however, that always appear at the same spot in the overall sequence. Because there’s a much smaller number of these pre-made rooms than the 1000 total, you’ll see a lot of them repeated over and over again across the course of the game. The house is mostly composed of a limited set of pre-designed rooms which are put together in a random sequence that changes each time the player starts up the game. The player is tasked with overcoming 1000 rooms in the house, and a little counter exists at the top of the screen which keeps track of progress. The layout of the massive titular mansion is procedurally generated. Upon entering the abode, you are greeted by the gal ghost Spooky, who challenges you to survive all 1000 rooms of her haunted lair. As an avid enthusiast of history, you, the player, decide to embark on a mission to explore a local abandoned mansion whose past is shrouded in mystery. Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion by Lag Studios is the next game on my Halloween playlist.

Play spooky's house of jumpscares