The Haunting of Joni Evers

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The Haunting of Joni Evers review
Samuel Corey

Review

Ghost Story

Object Toucher 2000


I'm generally not a big fan of Walking Simulators. Most dispense entirely with the "game" part of video games, and if the story you want to tell requires so little player interaction, I have to wonder why you're bothering with making a video game at all. The Haunting of Jodie Evers is cut above the other entries in this genre though, if only because it manages to have a compelling protagonists with a simple, but effective arch.

Said protagonist is the titular Jodi Evers, a depressed car mechanic in Oklahoma who is carrying around an almost comical amount of loathing for the various members of her family. From her deadbeat dad who was too disorganized to be an effective parent, to her successful sister who escaped the worst of life's privations, to the grandmother who failed to instill any sense of discipline into the wild family, it seems like Jodi has a grudge against anyone who shares her genetic material. The one that Jodi hates the most of all is her Mom, the woman who abruptly abandoned the family to run off on wild adventures when Jodi was a little girl. This kick-started the family's disintegration and forced Jodi to grow up way too fast to take care of her loving but nonetheless dysfunctional family.

Jodi layers on her early-30s angst a bit heavy at the start of the game and does nothing but be a whiny bitch for the first hour of gameplay. She complains endlessly about all the various grievances she's been carrying around for the last couple of decades, especially towards her mom. It's not very fun to be around, and if I were with Jodi in real life I would be constantly trying to divert her away from the family trauma and onto something less tedious like the weather or the latest football game.



Her constant negativity is music to the ears of a supernatural entity called the Skull Man though, who is using it as a way to break into our dimension. Just what the Skull Man plans to do once he's loose in Oklahoma is anyone's guess, but he's obviously up to no good. If Jodi is going to stop the Skull Man she'll need to recover the good memories of her time with her family to create a shield. In the process, she will see things from her family's perspective and discard the emotional baggage she's been carrying since childhood.

It's a nice message, and one that rings true, because "to understand all is to forgive all." Nobody's family was perfect, but for most of us, our parents and siblings were trying their best. If we could look at the world through their eyes, we might not always agree with their actions and decisions but we would be able to understand and forgive them at the very least. I hear too many stories of people losing contact with their families over trivial disputes and silly arguments. Life is too short to hold these sorts of grudges.

To recover the positive memories she has with her family, Jodi has to walk through her (absurdly large) childhood home and find objects with special resonance. She can then take those objects to other objects to call back various memories both positive and negative. Since this is the primary gameplay loop, it means that the environments of the game are positively littered with small mementos and knick-knacks, giving the whole house a realistic and lived-in feel. Though it's admittedly a bit hard to believe some of these items would be just lying around, like the envelope full of cash that Jodi's mom left her before she vanished.

Not So Scary Stories


I noticed a Red Flag with this game about five minutes into playing: When you examine a movie poster for a fictional 1980s horror movie called Night of the Reapers II, Jodi comments that the protagonist in the film was a trailblazing figure for women in horror. This is an absurd notion, as by the 1980s all the trails had been thoroughly blazed for women in horror, with the majority of horror movies having a female protagonist. Indeed, this was a trend that started much earlier, with there being plenty of examples of female heroes and monsters throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Hell, the first oldest cinematic example I can think of would be Daughter of Dracula from back in the 1930s! If we count literature, the tradition of scream queens goes back even further with characters like Laura and Carmilla in Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla and Marjorie Lindon in Richard Marsh's The Beetle.

Hearing this extremely silly line of dialogue gave me a start. "Oh no," I reflexively thought. "The developers of this horror game don't know anything about the horror genre."

Perhaps this is a bit unkind, after all not everybody obsesses over the intricacies of post-war horror movies like I do. Just because you don't know about Wait Until Dark or Blood of Dracula doesn't mean you can't write a genuinely spine-tingling tale. Unfortunately, in this case, my initial snobbish dismissal was right on the money, The Haunting of Jodi Evers has no idea how to be scary.

The most effective scare in the game is catching a glimpse of a mannequin draped in a white sheet suddenly standing motionless in a room it could not possibly have gotten to. I'll admit that this gave me a reasonable startle when it happened, though when the game proceeded to pull the same trick another four or five times the power of this simple scare quickly evaporated. As it became more familiar, it became less and less scary. Beyond that, the game's only trick is to suddenly flash a scary skull face across the screen, which is so rudimentary and unimaginative that it is only one step above saying "boo."

I suppose that a very small child might be scared while playing The Haunting of Jodi Evers, but small children are the least likely to appreciate the game's unusually mature story. The result is a game that seems at odds with itself.


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7.0

fun score

Pros

Main character is well written and well acted, The core moral of the story, while simple, is compelling, Unusual level of care put into the environment designs.

Cons

Main character is a whiny bitch for the first half of the game, The game is not very scary.