The word ‘under-rated’ gets wheeled out far too often in gaming forums, but occasionally the use is justified. Because Cotton Game Studios really are unsung heroes of Xbox gaming. Quietly, over the past few years, they have been trickling out small but perfectly formed point-and-click adventures like Rain and the Mr. Pumpkin adventures. While they haven’t sold in large quantities, they loiter in Xbox Store sales, waiting for gamers to take a punt and get a sturdy little adventure in return.
Dad’s Monster House is absolutely no different, and you can see Cotton Game Studio’s craft improving from game to game. This time round, Mr Pumpkin is left at home and we instead get to control Carlos. Young Carlos is returning to the family home after a doomy and frantic phone call from his dad. His dad is a Dr Frankenstein-like inventor, splicing life forms together, creating robots and trying to manufacture the spark of life himself.
All of this is detailed in a journal – the first item you find in Dad’s Monster House. Cunningly, you can only read the first few pages of it, as a cockroach-like beastie jealously guards the latter pages. You need to find DNA capsules, hidden about the scenery, to feed the cockroach and force it to back off – at least for a few more pages. Regardless of the partial story, drip-fed over the course of the game, the objective is pretty clear: you must find your dad before the mansion claims him.
The mansion itself is a gothic, haunted place, somewhere between Maniac Mansion and Resident Evil’s Racoon City Mansion. Doors are locked behind puzzles that you can’t solve yet, so you are funneled from room to room, searching for a key, whether metaphorical or physical. And as you walk around, audible scuffles, screeches and moans can be heard, making the experience a reasonably tense one.
Dad’s Monster House is a graphic adventure, or point-and-click, if you’d prefer. You have control of Carlos with the analogue stick, and helpful icons appear as you sidle up to things that can be picked up, inspected or used. This bypasses the usual problems that the Xbox has with point-and-click adventures: you can’t actually point and click like you can with a mouse or a touchscreen. The compromise with this kind of control method is often that it makes the puzzling incredibly easy, since you can rely on the game to highlight points of interest. But Dad’s Monster House aims to get its difficulty from elsewhere, so it works perfectly.
There’s a watertight structure at play here, much tighter and more controlled than in Cotton Games’ other titles. Almost every room in the house, once you access it, has one of your dad’s creations in it, and that creation wants something. Dad’s Monster House is near-completely dialogue-less, so this is displayed in a thought-bubble, or through something that is clearly missing: a robot doesn’t have any legs, or another desperately taps on a broken vacuum cleaner.
So, you’re surveying the room, looking for items to pick up and – more often than not – find something scribbled on the wall that might be an answer, code or clue for a puzzle elsewhere in the mansion. You are shuttling from one room to the next (a helpful map keeps you from getting lost) with new items or information in tow, pushing out the boundaries of the mansion and finding something new. It’s a big improvement on games like the Mr Pumpkin adventures, which often just had you rambling in an Alice in Wonderland-style adventure. This is one hub-space that you are pushing out the boundaries of, constantly trying to expose more so that you can find your dad.
Where things start falling down is the puzzles, and it’s the same malady that the other Cotton Games fall foul of. Dad’s Monster House loves two brands of puzzling, and there is a strong argument that they’re barely even puzzles. The first is a lock that requires a specific code to complete it. A radio might need a designated frequency, for example. So, you wander into a room and the frequency is written on the wall. It’s less a puzzle and more connecting two dots, and there’s an occasional sense that you’re going through the motions, rather than deviously unraveling puzzle-knots.
The second puzzle is the graphic adventure stuff. A monster wants a hat. You find a hat. You deliver the hat. The process is extremely literal in Dad’s Monster House, and there are occasions when you might want some logical leaps. Cotton Games are either too worried that you’re going to get stuck, or they struggle to create that kind of puzzle. Regardless, you can sometimes feel like you’re sleepwalking through Dad’s Monster House, when you’d rather solve it like a Rubik’s Cube.
While we’re on the topic of minor criticisms, there’s a slight downgrade on something that Cotton Games often gets very, very right. The incidental characters in their games often ooze charisma. Even though you spend mere moments with them, you get a sense of their wider world, and would love to spend more time with them if you could. But the robots and creations in Dad’s Monster House are punchlines or not quite as engaging, and it’s odd to find Cotton discarding something it usually does really well.
But let’s step away from the criticism for a bit, as Dad’s Monster House is three or four hours of attention-grabbing exploration. More so than any other Cotton Game, there is a sense of place. Day of the Tentacle and Maniac Mansion are the clear comparators here, as you build a mental map of the mansion in the same way that you did those games. Rooms that were closed off at the start of the game finally become available, and there’s a joy in that. The mansion becomes a living, breathing space, and you can imagine people existing here.
And while the puzzles aren’t necessarily difficult in a Professor Layton, deduction sense, if you treat the game as a vast hidden object game then it becomes rather spiffing. You are treating each new room as a scene to be visually scanned, looking for clues and cross-referencing them with the puzzles you have previously found. When you think about it on those terms, the ‘it’s bloody easy’ criticisms start to erode away.
And more than anything, Dad’s Monster House is a mood. There’s a Nightmare Before Christmas vibe throughout, as all of the macabre creations turn out to be friendly and pathetic, and you just want to help them out. The initial tension, played out in your headphones as clanks and moans, dissipates away to create a Burtonesque journey through some lovable, broken characters. If only they stuck around for a little bit longer.
Over these laid-back winter days, Dad’s Monster House might be exactly what you need. A well-constructed, taut little graphic adventure that sticks around for a few hours. It might not offer much that resembles a challenge, but it does offer a Maniac Mansion to explore and plenty of imaginative characters to boot. For £4.99, we felt greedy asking for more.
You can buy Dad’s Monster House from the Xbox Store
