Outwit the strange face of evil in Haunted Halls: Revenge of Doctor Blackmore. Dr. Blackmore is back and worse than ever, and this time he’s focused solidly on destroying you and your fiancé. Now you must race against Blackmore’s madness to rescue not only your fiancé, but also the other people he’s trapped in his web of revenge. No twist is too terrible, or too strange, for this chilling tale of vengeance.

You know, I’ve played a lot of strange games in my time; been left flat-footed by some seriously bizarre concepts. But, to my mind, Haunted Halls: Revenge of Doctor Blackmore takes the crazy cake. Because, damn. There are some seriously odd things going on.
 

The premise really isn’t that bad: there’s a mad scientist who resembles a really far-gone (and tasteless) Doc Ock.  Apparently, you and your fiancé were responsible for spoiling his last evil plans, so now he’s going to take revenge on you.

And not just the two of you: he’s gathered up four other people he has grudges against. So, in order to save your fiancé, you first must save the others. Good so far, right? At the end of the opening scene, you get knocked out, and you slowly come to only to find yourself staring at…a kangaroo? What?
 

And it just gets weirder from there. The paper-reading kangaroo keeps popping up, like some kind of Down Under spirit guide, and he’s got a ton of random animal buddies strewn about the place.

We’re talking lemurs (I think it’s a lemur…), electric rays, scorpions, all kinds of species. But the strangeness doesn’t stop there: at one point you collect an egg from a quail, and later on you get to hatch it out. Having witnessed the laying of this egg, I knew 100% the mother was a quail. Which would explain my surprise when an ostrich hatched.

And I just…what was the point? Why have a quail lay an ostrich egg? Shock factor? Gross factor? Because if they were going for surreal? They did it wrong.
 

But like anything, Haunted Halls: Revenge of Doctor Blackmore had its good points. For instance, the graphics were pretty nice, and I enjoyed the background music. And even though I found the mini-games as confusing and bewildering as the rest of the game, I did really like the hidden object scenes.

In some of them, the goal is to collect items so that they can be used to make or find other items. At the end of the process, all of the items have worked together to give you the object that ends up in your inventory. It had a really nice flow to it, and I love a puzzle that has some logic.
 

But that is about the only time logic rears its ugly head. For the rest of the game, you’re wandering around in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and feeding bread to obligate carnivores. And the most frustrating part of the whole thing was I couldn’t figure out the point of the strangeness.

Why was there a reoccurring kangaroo? And for that matter, why does the stupid super villain keep giving me clues on how to beat him? Look, I know monologing is a staple of villainy. But, most super villains capture their heroes, throw them in a pit for a long and lingering death (or something), and monolog about the glory of evil, thereby accidentally giving the hero a chance to escape. They don’t actively give the super heroes clues, for the love of toast. They just don’t. There’s just a lot of subtly missing, and I resent it.
 

And that’s the crux of the problem: I could not get over the random and pointless bizarreness. There’s suspended disbelief and then there’s whatever was going on in this hot mess. I just couldn’t get over it, and the good parts of the game weren’t worth suffering through situations that would have given the Mad Hatter pause.

And that’s why I turned it off; because I can choke my way through a boring game, or even a strange one, but Haunted Halls: Revenge of Doctor Blackmore was so beyond my abilities to cope, I couldn’t endure. I just couldn’t. Besides, all the random animals popping up kept reminding me of that Mammalogy test I have on Monday (I’m looking at you, Macropus rufus), and while I detest making note cards lemme tell you: it’s gotta be a world better than playing this game.

Why, kangaroo? Why?