no one here’s been famous in a very long time

This is going to be another strange one. Their blurb explains why:

"Anime, Shops, Town, Slink Mens/Fem Mesh, Toxic Design, Adam, Goth, Signature, Teiko Moxie, Cafe, Kawaii, Mesh, Maitreya, Gacha, MM Board, Kemono, Milos, Mens Clothing, Womens, Kashiu Halloween, Haunted House, Dating, Evermore, Belleza, Wedding Area."

See the problem? "Haunted House" is in there, but...in what context?

But I'm running low on places, so...onward.



So...where is this supposed haunt? This area has some little seasonal decor pieces, but it's mostly just stores (Lolita dresses, Kemono outfits and mods, a selection of Japanese accessory shops) and the dating agency, so...?



Okay, found it, but I had to cam the entire sim to do so, there's no handy transport link. Here's a more direct way to get there.



I dealt with a fair amount of lag; I have the feeling the 'dating agency' part of this sim (Adult, just FYI) uses a lot of scripts.



Why is there a morgue next to the foyer? It's like, walk in the house, turn left, you have your choice of afternoon autopsy or a cup of tea in the kitchen. This is bad house design.



Hello, mysterious floating skeleton.



And there are carnival rides in the side yard.

All in all, it's not terrible. I'd say, if you have a beefy computer, or just want to go through and keep your settings relatively low, go wander. It's mostly prefab action, but good prefab action, so I can't complain. Nothing is obviously Adult on the haunt, it's just the sim's rating.

oh, my god, I see how everything is torn in the river deep

I'm not sure about this one. The actual title of the haunt is --------{---(@ L a L --------{---(@ . Ooookay. And their blurb is buzzword-laden and confusing:

"Grunge,hobo,stormy,rainy,rock,underground,metal,urban,halloween ,vampire,clan,Türkiye,Turkey,Spain,Korea,Japan,Russia, Italia,electronic,freestyle,Brazil,dark side,haunted house,free items,Turk,Türkish,TURKEY,TÜRKİYE,Türkler,hunt"

The only think that's leaping out at me? It's Turkish. That's all I have to go on?



Not impressed already. Hello, Evil Within game rip. Great.



Oh, and hey, Patient Alice game rip. Didn't see you at first, you must have rezzed in after. Is there anything original here?



Walked in, and was immediately attacked by giant spiders making groaning sounds. Cue aggrieved sigh.



Kitchen area is actually blessedly empty of body parts, bloodspatter and rotten food. I'm somewhat relieved.



That's not terrible.



The second floor was completely empty save for this room. I'm not going to bother with the attic. I'm done here.

and when the rattlesnake hissed it in my ear, I knew you’d never get right

I won't lie, Enchanted Fantasy's land bio makes it sound like a store:

"Cemetery Ghost Tombstone Crypt Skeleton Dead Trees Grass Flowers Grave Yard Haunted Castle Fog Mist Raven Rook Animated Demon Spider Witch Rat Bat Fairy Witches Dragon Ghoul Cauldron Web Thorns Pentacle Woods Haunted House Swamp Spell Poison Candle Gothi"

I guess. What the hell.



We open with giant roaming spiders. Not a great start for some.



Yup, it's a store. Or at least a lot of things SEEM to be for sale...



This is a huge door. I mean, look, I know I'm short, I get that, but this is a really, really tall door.



I just can't tell. Is it an actual haunt? Is it a store? Why?



This house was so destroyed the wood of the porch was ephemeral.

Oh, and it's for sale.



I've got no idea. All I know is, I'm out of here.

these folks here don’t come around, they’re so rigid and refined

"Memories of Salem", especially when followed up by the blurb given below, gives me a brain cramp, but I'm really running out of places to go. Cue beleaguered sigh.

That blurb goes thusly:

"Welcome to our Abandoned Haunted Asylum Grounds! The witches have come to stay, and play! Halloween Mini Golf! Halloween, Haunted House, Haunted Asylum, Scary, Haunted, Ghost, Witch, Salem, Witches, Zombies. "

Yep. Another asylum. Somehow tied in with witch-hanging. Great.



Welp, there's the hanging reference.



Effective little set piece, but what does this have to do with Salem?



And what does this have to do with Salem?



One room, four visible characters, I count two blatant game rips (as the three Alices are all the same character from the same game). Please for the love of all gods, can we move on from game rips? It's so boring.



And out of nowhere, an animated gif from Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. I mean, okay, I love the film, I've made no bones about how much I adore how, in the two hours of that sequel, the main witch character does absolutely everything wrong with a willful cluelessness that is adorable...but how does she fit into the asylum set? And how does any of this fit in with Salem?



This was the first time I realized that I'd actually been here before, when it was a radically different haunt. As I recall--and the reason I'm not going to link the earlier entry, but it's likely somewhen around 2015--I wasn't much impressed with the first version, and surprise, I'm not much impressed with this one. As an average, everyday, haunted-asylum-and-cemetery piece, it might work, but with the added weight of the "Memories of Salem" title, the entire thing tilts to one side then simply collapses into nothingness.

I only have one question, really: where's the mini golf? I didn't see anything like that. Was it somewhere else?

home is the needle and thread for the hole in the lifeboat that it put you in

So, between one thing and another, if I continue doing two haunt entries a day, I'll need six more, plus this one, to finish out the month. And I already feel like I'm scraping the very bottom of the holiday barrel, here. It's kind of depressing. But I will soldier on, I just may drop to one haunt covered per day.



In other news...why? I mean, seriously, why? Does Flickr think I'm not a native English speaker? Because this would make sense if I were from France or Uruguay or the Congo. It makes no sense when I was born in the US, raised monolingually, and, for the most part (outside of a smattering of words here and there) remain monolingual? I don't understand.

In the meantime, we're doing PULSE's Hallows event! And...it's a strange one this year. From their notecard:

"You are an average office worker in the year 2037 living in the shining city of Neo-Innsmouth, Massachusetts. Recently plagued by nightmares and fits of insomnia, and a strange 'dry eye' syndrome, concerned higher ups have sent you to a Psychological Institute called Arkham. It is said they use experimental treatments to aid the afflicted. It is a busy center, or so they say. Even in the future, life is just as stressful...."

Just so everyone knows going in. There usually are disturbing images, disturbing bits of story, gore and the like in these events.



So, the game starts off by walking into the doctor's office, and sitting down for the exam. Next thing you know, you're...here, and nothing at all makes sense. And the game is on.



Why...why is there a goat? Why is the goat eating a fish??



WHY ARE THERE DEAD GOATS??



Every City Hall looks like this, right?



Why...why are you whispering? Why aren't you moving? What's going on?!?



And why is the doctor a hologram? She wasn't before...



There's still room for humor here and there. There are some puzzles, but solutions can be found, or in a pinch--the very first one, I had to use this option--you can join the in-world Pulse Games group and ask for help there. Nothing is impossible, just...arcane and mysterious.

The HUD to play--which is required--costs L$50, and lets you record both your game progress and keep track of where you stopped, if you have to restart. (By that I mean, it will remember game points, but if you port away and don't take a landmark back to where you were, you'll have to start from the beginning.)

But some caveats--Ivey, one of the game designers, usually throws the HUD free the last week, because she and her team really put their heart and soul into this. They want everyone who wants to, to go through. And there are tons of prizes to find, this year in the form of little fish. They are everywhere; I'm fairly sure I didn't find all of them, and I came home with 59 prizes! Everything from gowns to eyes to furnishings to tattoos. Mostly tilted female, but don't worry, guys, there are some male and unisex items, too.

But I won't lie, this one is...odd. I've gone through it one time all the way through, and ported back to start from scratch just to search for fish, and I'm probably going back at least once more, because I don't entirely get the story. When I say arcane, I meean arcane in the old sense--enigmatic, baffling, incomprehensible to mortal minds. I get the basics--I'm just lost on how exactly it lines up with why I, a lowly clerk, went to be examined in the first place.

But it is fun, spooky, eerie, rings changes on both cyberpunk and Lovecraftian themes, and challenging without being impossible. Do go if you have a couple hours to kill (assuming you want to find all the prizes). And leave no stone unturned--you'll want to explore everywhere you can get to. And I, at least, through a combination of climbing and leaping, was able to get to quite a lot...

it pierces me slowly, pulling me through

Have I been to Slaughter Creek before? Name sounds familiar. Their blurb, not so much:

"Based on a Real Life Haunted House ...

Land"

Huh. Okay, guess I can check it out.



So, between going through and putting this up, turns out that yes, I have been here before. And the last time, three years back, it was horrifically laggy with a separate HUD for 'special effects'. This time around, they've improved vastly--no HUD, no lag-drenched landscape, so...that's good, I guess?

You'll start things off in a separate skybox that's effectively, if neutrally, decorated--fall trees, abandoned birdcages, a pentagram made of round white stones. Not terrible.



I already do, what's your point?



So the main house is...odd. There is enough lag present that every door I clicked would start the creaky, door-opening sound effect, and I was able to walk through the--to me--closed door, and about ten seconds after, the door would open soundlessly behind me. Kind of freaky, but unintentionally so, it was just a factor of minor lag.

On the plus side, this I thought was effective. No specific sounds associated, just the implication that something large and mostly unseen was going to crawl into the room. Nicely atmospheric.



This is from the second house, where there is another corpse with full-on male nudity, that reminded me this is on Adult land. I deliberatley did not raise the gamma on this, because it's just out of nowhere--after a mostly eerie landscape and a fairly effective first floor of the main house (I never found the way to the second floor, if there is one), this cabin seems a total 180 degrees in terms of tone.



Another out-of-nowhere moment: cute cat, yay, cute little coffin-shaped house, yay, bloodspatter vendor out of nowhere. Bwuh?



But hey, there's always time for cuddles.

it’s the pain of undoing the tearing in two

Why does Milena Doll Creations show up under a search for "haunted house"? For that matter, why does Athenaeum? At least Athenaeum has "Haunted House" in their land bio, but it's the 24th and 25th words respectively.

I went back and looked at Milena's blurb, and yep, "Haunted House" is there too, the 28th and 29th words respectively. Do they actually have haunts? I don't care enough at this point to check.

Grimly Fiendish Holiday Haunted Rides and Haunt...huh, what does their land blurb say?

"It's almost Halloween! Come and Trick or Treat on our street, visit the Evil Dead cabin, see the traditional Haunted House, and ride the Haunted Hayride! Afterwards take a date, the family, or come alone and ride the Tunnel of Love for a relaxing trip!"

Okay. I'll give it a shot.



I decided to try the Haunted Hay Ride. The truck is apparently transparent. Warnings to the phobic: the first area features spiders.



The farm apparently features aliens. Fun.



After a neat little monster concert I couldn't get good shots of, we fall back into the typical: carnival clowns, evil torture equipment. And they were doing so well.



IT's sewer scenes, yeah, seen it...



The next area was raining and overcast and I had no clue what they were referencing until I saw this. Oh, it's Sharknado. Okay, I'll give them points for clever, even if Sharknado was a truly terrible film.



And back at the Overlook. Yawn.

Overall, I can only comment on the one ride, I only did the one thing--they do mention more in their ad. That one thing isn't awful, just derivative, and there are some nice visuals along the way--the chiefest of which is the transparent truck. Sounds like a truck, sits like a truck, looks like a ghost. That is kind of neat.

never put themselves here, so undone at the seams

Ah, yes, the infamous Linden haunted house is back. This one has always bothered me slightly simply because of how gory and disturbing it is. After years of the Lindens telling us that blood, gore, viscera and intimated violence will always be classified as Adult, they throw something like this up on a General sim. Dafuq, to be blunt.



Though to be fair, I've always liked the ghostly TV.



All right, this is something I just don't get. There have been two major changes through the initial 'house' (slash asylum) portion that I can see: first, they seem to have taken about half the corpses and made them more shimmery, partially metalized (which I guess reduces the visual violence level? Not sure why, because the rest of the corpses and corpse sections are still bloody and visceral). The other big change I'm noticing is the addition of burping pumpkins and weird little eye insect monsters that sound like flies. Whuh?



Like, I don't...I don't understand it at all. Either you're a cutesy haunt and you have twee little haunted things, and it's all for fun and show, or it's a serious haunt with real horror. The Lindens seemed to have decided on both this year? That makes zero sense.



And it's not like the eye bugs aren't cute, they are...though the fly buzzing sounds around the piles of meat and former humans is disturbing...but...I just don't see why they had to be included. Toss in the burping pumpkins and the widdle monsters and the buzzing eye creatures and tone down the violence and blood? Great. Or keep the violence and blood and get rid of the cute touches. PICK ONE.



The rest was pretty much the same, with the addition of the weirdly cute touches, as noted: Freddy's basement, Carrie-Ann's house, IT's sewer. Not much has changed from that since last year.

I just don't get the burping pumpkins and the eye bugs. I just don't.