The Haunting of Joni Evers review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

A creepy, poignant but fairly straightforward exploration of the emotional damage that bedevils one multigenerational family

Have you ever been home alone at night, during a thunderstorm with rain bashing against the windows, cracks of lightning casting creepy shadows? That’s scary enough, but then imagine all the lights go out, and the house is suddenly filled with lit candles you didn’t put there yourself, and huge colored letters appear in the middle of the room, hovering, seemingly addressing you. That part you hopefully haven’t experienced personally, but it’s precisely what happens to the titular character in The Haunting of Joni Evers. It looks great and it’s all very Edgar Allan Poe – there’s even a reference to one of his poems in the game – though you’ll soon discover that piecing together the dark secrets of the Evers family women is a very linear journey, concentrating much more on the narrative than gameplay.

Primarily featuring straightforward first-person 3D exploration, this is an eerie tale about three generations of women haunted by a mysterious demonic entity named the Skull Man, who has hijacked their home. It’s like Gone Home or an interactive young adult novel but with a supernatural twist, filled with love but also anger, jealousy, resentment and something otherworldly to make your skin crawl. “The sins of the mothers,” if you will. As you move from room to room, you will uncover the history of Joni and her sister Sara, their mother Lilith, and their grandmother Noreen bit by bit, bringing back memories and stirring all kinds of emotions in Joni.

Despite the paranormal backdrop, this particular story concentrates mostly on Joni’s feelings evoked by memories of dealing with her family members in the past. The Skull Man is never more than a McGuffin to force Joni into a quest to admit to herself that her childhood wasn’t as bad as she thought she remembered after all. The actual presence or nature of this mysterious entity is never explained, though there are some references to Joni’s sister investigating folkloristic legends about strange black dogs with their grandmother, which might have something to do with it, but that is likewise never explained.

Playing as Joni, you don’t travel to any exotic locales here, just remain inside her house – or I should say, giant mansion. The place is huge, obviously lived-in but currently deserted except for Joni. The rest of the family is now scattered across the country, for reasons that become obvious as you progress. When I came upon an exterior photo of the residence hanging on a wall, I racked my brain trying to mentally fit all the rooms I had explored into the building displayed in the picture. And I hadn’t even gone upstairs yet!

But exploring houses in games is like a hobby horse for me. I enjoy snooping around, inspecting objects, reading documents, totally violating people’s privacy. (I don’t do that in real life, promise!) It’s even more enjoyable when the setting is convincingly photorealistic. Kitchen, living room, dining room, bedrooms, bathrooms, a library, a game room, an artist’s studio, a garage and basement – they’re all designed in great detail here. Put this in VR and it would be like walking through a real house. Until you notice the bookshelves are filled with dozens of copies of the same twenty or so titles, that is.

You can play The Haunting of Joni Evers with mouse and directional keys, or with a controller. As in many first-person exploration games, there’s a small white dot in the center of the screen. Even from a distance, you can see available hotspots in a room, displayed as little circles. Move close enough and the circle changes into an icon. When clicked, the speech bubble icon will cause Joni to offer an observation or description of the object, while a hand icon allows you to pick up the item or document for closer inspection. You can also turn things you’re holding over and look at them from all directions, though there are no hidden secrets to uncover that way. Some items you can carry with you, but only when the game explicitly demands it of you, and even then there’s no active inventory to choose from. You can only carry one thing at a time, so picking up a new one automatically drops the one you were already holding, all within a fairly confined space.

One of your first tasks is to clean up the kitchen after a party the previous night. You must collect all the glasses, dishes and rubbish, which you then have to deposit in the dishwasher or garbage bag, but it’s all done automatically with a one-click interface. You can choose to have your goals displayed on the left side of the screen all the time, or only when there’s an update, or you can even decide to hide them completely and simply go by what Joni says.

After going to bed that night, things start to get interesting. The power goes out and you have to find a flashlight in order to change the fuses. Suddenly Joni sees words appear out of thin air. Thinking she’s still somewhat drowsy from sleep, she basically ignores them at first, until the arrival of the first of several floating orbs of light, each a different color. They are will-o’-the-wisp-type entities that address Joni directly to warn her about the Skull Man and help her with getting rid of him through urgent comments such as “He’s coming” and “Follow me.”

The Haunting of Joni Evers

Genre:	Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Paranormal, Psychological, Surreal
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Photorealism
Gameplay:	Walking simulator
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

While Joni herself has a marvelous voice actor, professionally switching between different emotions, unfortunately these will-o’-the-wisps can only communicate through written words. They aren’t accompanied by a voice of any kind; it's simply text, in different colors depending on which entity is “speaking.” I found the presence of fully formed, two-dimensional dialogue floating in a three-dimensional space looked a bit weird graphically. Yes, it’s a supernatural story, and unexplainable things often happen in them, but the “magic” words here contrast badly against the level of realism of the rest of the game. It would have been much more effective to see the words appear as they’re being written on flat surfaces as you explore.

The will-o’-the-wisps also affect Joni’s consciousness. She gets headaches, her field of vision blurs, and she hears whispers coming from objects that weren’t previously highlighted as hotspots. Examining them triggers the manifestation of a particular item in the middle of the room – like a painting, or a Polaroid camera – holding important memories of Joni’s sister, mother, grandmother, or a combination of them. Each hotspot examined solidifies this key object even more, until it’s totally there. That item, however, is then destroyed by Joni herself, under the influence of the Skull Man feeding nothing but bad memories and emotions into her head, basically possessing her for a brief moment of destruction. This gameplay element repeats itself several times as you move through the various rooms.

You can’t explore the house as freely as you would like, however, at least in the first half of the game. There’s a fixed path that Joni has to follow. Rooms are blocked off by either locked doors for which you need to find the keys, or by Joni herself saying she has no business there yet and needs to go to another room first. The game doesn’t even provide clues as to where you’re supposed to go next; instead, Joni seems to intuit the next location automatically, offering no explanation why she should go there. This strict linearity made me feel like I was on rails and just along for the ride. Thankfully, this is no longer the case during the second half, when the preliminary exploration part is over and the time comes to take action.

After Joni has figured out what those will-o’-the-wisps really are, you will need to perform several “rituals” to restore those key items you destroyed. This too is a repeating gameplay element, which centers around Joni’s relationships with her family members. As you explore their individual rooms, you must find mementos that will trigger happy memories, to counteract the bad ones the Skull Man is trying to drown you with. When you have picked up just such an item, for instance a greeting card, you have to hold it next to several other items in the room that are now glowing, further simplifying your search. Joni will then reminisce about the meaning of this connection, some holding good memories, others holding bad ones. It’s your job to find enough good memory items and put them in a ritualistic circle that the will-o’-the-wisps have drawn on the floor. This effectively restores the items, which you can use later for the final exorcism of the Skull Man.

The actual haunting of the house manifests with appropriate jump scares. The Skull Man likes to switch off all the lights, leaving Joni in the pitch black, and to take over a television set to talk to her. But he also blocks Joni’s path by posting mannequins in hallways or in front of rooms, draped with a blanket. These “guards” often seem to be chasing you around, though they don’t actually DO anything. Nor do they have to, since their mere presence is terrifying enough. That instinctive dread of danger, of constantly expecting them to visibly move or even lash out at you, is enough to give you chills.

There is no manual save function but your progress is automatically recorded at regular intervals. With the game taking only four hours to complete, I didn’t miss the option to save whenever I wanted, especially because you can’t die or wind up in some unwinnable state. A very handy addition here that I would love to see in other games is that the exact time of the last save is always displayed in the menu screen. When I wanted to quit and noticed it had been several minutes since that last checkpoint, I continued playing just a little longer to trigger the next one. It might not be much, but it did spare me from doing some of the same tasks over again when I came back.

The brief time I spent playing The Haunting of Joni Evers stirred loads of emotions in me as well. But then, I am quite susceptible to the feelings of others. I still enjoy reading the occasional young adult novel, which often involve dealing with other people while searching for your own place in the world. And that’s exactly what Joni’s quest here entails. She went through some bad stuff with her family, and because of that has lost track of the good stuff. She doesn’t understand the decisions her family made, because she’s never truly grasped who they are and what drives them. Instead of being just a terrifying boogeyman, the demonic Skull Man is a means to finally open her eyes and see the essence of her parents, sister and grandmother. 

Final Verdict

Perhaps this entire process is meant to be completely symbolic and nothing but imaginary; who’s to say? Either way, it’s real to Joni, and in guiding her through the game, it is good fun to search through her family’s massive house, gather nostalgic items and perform rituals, constantly on your toes for manifestations of the Skull Man. The gameplay is easy and rather formulaic, but The Haunting of Joni Evers is more than a simple horror game, with a lot of drama to wade through as well, making this a very intimate-feeling experience that is sure to tug on your heartstrings.

Johnny played The Haunting of Joni Evers on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.