Ghost Haunting Demo Lets You Raid the Afterlife, LucasArts Style
A free demo of Ghost Haunting is on Steam: a pixel art point-and-click about a girl who decides to fetch her grandmother back from the dead.
There is a new name to add to the list of studios trying to bottle the old LucasArts magic, and this one has put its intentions on the letterhead. Three Headed Monkey Studios and publisher Daedalic Entertainment have released a free demo of Ghost Haunting on Steam, and on first showing it knows exactly which games it wants to be.
The heroine is Gigi, eight years old and not much given to asking permission. On holiday she finds out that her grumpy grandpa Giovanni is a famous ghost hunter, and draws the obvious conclusion: if ghosts can come here, she can go there and bring Grandma home. Egging her on is a talking pumpkin demon by the name of Baron Butternut. Grandpa has not been consulted.
Old school, with the edges sanded down
It looks the part. The pixel art is chunky and warm, the rooms are crammed with junk that begs to be picked up, and commands are built the classic way, as a sentence along the top of the screen that joins one unlikely object to another. The humour is dark but friendly, in a world that promises partly dead zombies and an Invisible Olympic Committee.
What it does not want is to be as stubborn as the games it loves. The full adventure will come with a hint system, hotspot highlighting, fast travel and a score, so getting stuck for three days on one puzzle is strictly optional. The studio says the demo should feel like finding a forgotten adventure from the nineties again, “except without the floppy disks.”
The demo arrived on November 4 as part of Steam’s Point & Click Showcase and will stay up now that the event is over. It is voiced in English and German, with text in twelve languages.
Who is making it
Three Headed Monkey Studios was founded in Cologne in 2023 by filmmakers Tali Barde, Marco Grönwoldt and Marian Grönwoldt, and makes films alongside its games. Daedalic needs less of an introduction around here: this is the house that gave us Deponia, The Whispered World and Edna & Harvey, and seeing its name on a new comic point-and-click feels like old times.
Ghost Haunting is due in 2027 on PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation and both Nintendo Switch consoles. The demo is free on Steam, where you can also wishlist the full game, and there is a new trailer to go with it. You can watch that on our Ghost Haunting page too.
