Game Review: Gumball’s Haunted House Prank

Gaming doofus reporting for duty! In the sights: Gumball in Haunted House Prank.

Just in time for Halloween comes a Pac Man inspired browser game from the good folks at Cartoon Network. Your mission, should you choose to accept it ( sorry) is to guide Gumball Waterson through a Haunted Mansion where his friends are trapped. As with arcade classic Pac Man, your nemeses are the ghosts within the mansions maze like walls and getting caught by one costs you one of your three lives. You can turn the tables on the fiendish spectres though, as downing any potions you collect turns you into a wraith and you then get to chase your tormentors; be wary though, the potions effects are fleeting and you’ll find yourself back on the receiving end of a haunting all too soon.

As you divine your way around the mansion you must pick up orbs to gain points and if you manage to swallow a potion and catch a ghost you find your frightened friends hiding beneath the sheets of the ghastly visage, scare as many school chums as you can whilst you collect orbs and pumpkins and soon you will racking up more points than a goth kid has black tees.

Gumball’s Haunted House Prank is a good looking game, our titular hero comes dressed in his little Halloween costume from season 1 and the layouts are bright and clean, there’s no chance of getting lost in this house. The controls are very simple to use and pretty intuitive for a browser based game; if I have one criticism of Haunted House Prank is that it’s repetitive. Although each level get’s increasingly difficult (and is liable to have you howling with frustration rather than fright at times), there is not much in the way of  variation.

Having said that, this is my only concern with the game. I’ll let you in to a little secret, we get some of these games on the UK version of Cartoon Network’s website but not as many; games like Haunted House Prank are free and the rapidity at which Cartoon Network churns out new ones is a thing to behold. If I was a kid, I’d be delighted with these games (I also wouldn’t use the word delighted) and would never leave the Cartoon Network website. Haunted House Prank isn’t going to win any awards for originality or advances in gaming but hey, it’s free, what more do you want?