Hauntless

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 2 May 2025.

This is an atmospheric Twine-based piece, where you are a professional spirit exterminator investigating a haunted circus, and trying to solve the mysteries of unsettled spirits.

I liked a lot about this. The circus is a richly developed setting for a game world, and I enjoyed learning about the various characters involved with the circus. There’s a lot to uncover and a lot of depth.

On the downside I found the physical navigation around the circus somewhat problematic. I would often move from, say, location A to location B, but not be offered the chance to return to A directly. There is a “reorient yourself” option in the left side of the user interface, which I used a lot. This keeps a record of the locations you’ve visited, and how often you’ve visited each one, and lets you jump straight back to any one of them. Plus it includes hints of locations still left to discover. In this game it is often worth returning to a location you’ve visited before, and the “reorient yourself” list was handy for noting those places I hadn’t investigated too many times.

I found the number of characters and the secrets revealed for them overwhelming, but equally not enough clarity for me personally to rule most out as guilty or innocent of the crime I was investigating. There’s a “notes” section you can access, where you can make notes about guilty or innocent against a character. I just did not feel confident enough about that for the vast majority of cases. Equally there’s an “assignment details” button to reveal more witness statements. It took me a very long time to even notice that let alone use it. I kept on being puzzled when the game would refer to a witness statement, but I didn’t seem able to look at it and read it …

However, I worked my way through, had lots of fun, and managed to identify a key guilty party at the first go (extremely satisfying!). Which then opened up the option of investigating the circus further, or leaving the site. I chose to stay, and bring the game to a satisfying ultimate resolution. Though I had to take a brute force approach to this bit ((Spoiler - click to show)luckily you can try multiple options for how X was killed by Y with Z!).

I did notice a few small typos the author may want to fix. But generally the writing was very strong. Only one expression threw me and I had to google its meaning ((Spoiler - click to show)“bleacher seating” - I knew immediately what that was after googling!).

Nicely done. I was playing for about 70 minutes. Oh and I loved the art. And not done with AI. Well done!