![]() ![]() With the only way out blocked, Ada must search the manor alone to find her friends and hopefully escape. The figure would have seized Ada, too, if she didn’t suddenly develop psychic powers that repel the mysterious evil. Not long after they enter, Ada’s friends are snatched away by a chuckling cloaked figure. If anything, Sunshine Manor ups the cute factor visually speaking, which creates a tense psychological clash when the game draws deep from the horror well.Īda and her friends dare each other to enter the notorious Sunshine Manor on Halloween night. Only that adventure was surviving a vicious killer dressed as a bear mascot with a deranged grin on its face. That invoked nostalgic memories of the games of a different era, with sprite-style characters going on a fantastical adventure. This will be of little surprise to anyone who played 2016’s Camp Sunshine the game this serves as a prequel too. It’s presented as being comforting, enticing even. In the case of Fossil Games’ Sunshine Manor, there’s a clear warning given as to what horrors await child protagonist Ada in the opening flashbacks, but the disarmingly adorable throwback visuals mask the deliciously dark-hearted journey Ada is about to take. When the thing is a house with a dark past, you know the shit is going to hit the fan the second those kids step over the threshold. Whether by intentional design or serendipitous happenstance, it helped me to personally feel more tethered to the game and Ada.Many variations of the ‘kids on Halloween decide to go check out a spooky thing’ as the spark for a horror story. This harkened back for me to my days of playing Silent Hill 2 or Resident Evil 2. When interacting with an object, Ada often reacts with hilariously flat observations that feel at odds with the eerie nature of her surroundings. Much to my surprise, Ada can interact with anything and everything in the environment, from rusted old cars to grandfather clocks that keep time for nobody. For instance, when initially trodding the dim, abyssal halls, my instinct was to examine as many things as I could. Sunshine Manor doesn’t take itself too seriously however and I believe that it's highly aware of the tropes through which it treads and simply means to manipulate those to tell a fun story of its own. It also isn’t necessarily new to have a smart-mouthed child with more integrity and resolve than most adults as the protagonist. Children that make dares and pay disproportionately high consequences aren’t really new to the horror genre. Narratively, the game isn’t reinventing any wheels. ![]() The development team knew how to keep things from entering tedium and executed keeping players hooked almost flawlessly. I was satisfied with the variety of ways the abilities I had were put to work. Instead of haphazardly chipping away at boss health by using a magical attack, you’re often asked to deflect the boss’s attack back at them or dodge their attack entirely to view that the boss has taken damage. When you are, it's usually a boss fight where how you attack is fundamentally changed. Rarely are you locked into a mano a mano match to the death with a hulking beast. Even as you traverse the demonic “upside-down” realms of the manor, many of the murderous enemies can be dodged or juked. Attacking isn’t something religiously asked of the player. Fossil Games took care to develop these mechanics. Combat is pared down and simple, but highly effective and engaging. These abilities both use the same power gauge, depleting it entirely with each use, giving players a clear choice between fight or flight. In addition to the memory puzzles and exploration, the game's protangonist, Ada has two psychic powers to aid in her quest a speed boost and an AOE attack. ![]() In wading through that thorough lack of expectation, however, I found that Sunshine Manor is a tight, well-paced thrill ride, with “less is more” gameplay, a quick wit, and a soundtrack that just hits different in all the right ways. I'd expected to play through it, tolerate it, and go about my day not feeling emphatically one way or another. I’m painting this picture to provide a deeper understanding of my predisposition when sitting down to play Sunshine Manor, an 8-bit horror game published by Hound Picked Games and developed by the two-person team the pixel art game studio Fossil Games. That is to say that 8-bit games were something that I just sort of missed and to this day, I never really feel drawn to them. Having been born with a Sega Genesis controller in my hand, raised by the Super Nintendo and ejected just a few years after the meteoric boom of the 16-bit era ensured that I'd be wrapped up in the state-of-the-art technology my parents were keen to adopt as their first gaming consoles than anything before my time. ![]()
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