Welcome House 2 (1996)

Name:Welcome House 2 - Keaton and His Uncle
Number:247
Year:1996
Publisher:Gust
Developer:Gust
Genre:"Survival Horror"/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:2 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (110W/79L)

There's a certain measure of apprehension when you see a video game sequel released the same year as the original game. By default, it means that unless you carved up a bigger game into smaller chunks, you've spent less than a year on this game. This isn't really a problem during the '80s, because you generally just focused on a gameplay loop, or even during the early '90s. Id did their best work in around four years. But by the time 3D models started getting good enough to resemble something?

Welcome House, in case you forgot/missed it, is a Japanese-exclusive PSX game centered around a man called Keaton visiting his uncle's mansion. These days, it reads as a strange parody of survival horror games. There's no real enemies or threat of violence, but it plays like the genre, looks like the genre, and feels like the genre.

There's going to be a lot of this, often just as "telegraphed".

This time around, Keaton's been living with his Uncle Parkinson for a while, but uh-oh, it's the Fourth of July and his prankster Uncle has set a whole bunch of explosives off in his room. Turns out, he's set the entire house up with similar exploding presents. So much so, that he's rigged phones to explode. You better get used to this, because everything in this game explodes.
 

There's going to be a lot of this.

Which sounds like an exaggeration, but the game is practically non-stop explosions. The game really ramps up the physical comedy, to the point that it centers around it. Were it not a comedy game, the mansion would be a deathtrap. Bombs, phones turned into bombs, pits, mechanical traps and even bear traps. Parkinson probably got himself on a few lists with the purchases he made for the events of this game.

Control-wise, the game is unaltered from the first game. Tank controls, circle opens your item menu, square functions as your general action button. Once to use something in front of you, hold down and move forward to run. Start pauses, opening a map, press it again and you get the save menu. In general start functions as an accept button and cross as a cancel button. Which caused me a bit of confusion at first. 

Unlike in more serious games, a sign labeled danger is an indication that you should use it.

Much like the original game, this is advertised a polygon cartoon. In this case, it feels more like a description of gameplay than the general style of the game. You only interact with the game just to engage the game's jokes in the sequence the developer wanted. Everything else is an illusion, you get things like descriptions of objects and rooms, but they don't ever tell you something beyond what you can see in front of you. It's one long joyride.

But the game does have a problem. While it does flow well for the most part, once you stop for whatever reason, it becomes apparent that the game is basically just a series of events that happen, and your contribution is just advancing the plot. Actions that advance the gameplay are either a matter of gameplay, using an exploding phone, obvious, key and door, or random luck, walk through a doorway in a certain way.

One of the descriptions you get when first entering a room.

A good example of this is a room on the second floor with four big cabinets. You can enter here beforehand, only to find nothing inside. What you actually do is wait until later, when Napoleon the Dog flees in here after you get stabbed by him in military regalia. This makes no sense in context either, you just randomly turn away while chasing him around the room. Once you get him inside, whenever you open a cabinet, he appears in the opposite row. How do you solve this? You go to another room, sit on a random chair, which puts a "kick me" sign on Keaton's butt.

Which is not helped by the game following this up by making you give this axe to a lady of the pool, as in, a water elemental that appears in Parkinson's pool, who then gives you the choice of three axes, only one of which advances. I'm also reasonably sure that in order to get this axe exchange, you need to actually go down, talk to the guy repairing the diving board, go up to the second floor where a set of stairs upwards are, which somehow causes the board to be repaired, then return. Not exactly a series of puzzles which tends towards anything but random actions, but at least I understand the logic to axe lady of the lake and axe against chain of same color.  

Keaton gets his revenge against a statue.

Unlike the last game, there is no long awkward backtracking sequence once you seem to reach the end of the game. Instead, it's put all across the game. In a certain sense, the game suffers for this. It's obvious what the really big things you need to go back for are, but all across the game you get little ones which make you go back and forth across most of the mansion. For a game that isn't that long, it's odd that there's such blatant padding in it.

There's voice acting this time around, which is nothing special. They're doing the job you expect them to do and doing it well, but the job isn't special. Nobody rises above the level of the archetype they're expected to do. Because of what the game is, this wasn't ever not going to be the case.

Admittedly, out of context it just looks like a guy laughing at a dead dog, which is a different kind of weird.

The ending of the game is quite spectacular. In order to stop Napoleon from pranking you, you need to bait him with a bottle of booze. Which is in the spirit of what this game is imitating, but damn, it's pretty ballsy to do something like that. That seems like a risky move, even in the '90s. Then, after finding all the objects you need to open Parkinson's secret bedroom/viewing room, you get treated to one, spectacular final explosion. No wonder there wasn't a Welcome House 3, there was no house anymore. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
None.

Non-Enemies:
With the exception of Allegro, most of the characters are one-note and only state and offer simple things, only ever being more than scenery when the rare puzzle comes up involving them. 1

Levels:
Not having a last-minute point in the game where you have to go all across the mansion again and seeing the bizarre changes the game has made over the course of the game does wonders to improve the quality of the place. 4

Player Agency:
Same as last time. I feel like the game could have used a sidestep function, it really, really could have used that. 3

Interactivity:
In addition to the usual look/use actions, you get a lot of choices. Sure, these choices are often for things you have to do, but you get the option. 3

Atmosphere:
While I didn't much care for playing the game, I must admit, the cartoon violence and what awful prank Keaton would fall victim to more than made up for it. 6

Graphics:
It's cartoony, but charming. Keaton gets a wide variation of animations for the various calamities that befall him, albeit he's pretty much the only character with more animations than the usual you'd give a character who walks and talks. That said, it is very obvious that whenever something calls for an object to lose part of itself, the model completely changes. 5

Story:
It's the Fourth of July and let's just have the most explosive one ever, and boy howdy, does it ever deliver. 4

Sound/Music:
Low quality but fitting sound effects and a smooth jazz soundtrack. Unlike last time, when the tracks played in different rooms somewhat randomly, you get some degree of control, since there are radios in numerous rooms you can change the song on. Which doesn't apply to the licensed songs you can find around. These still only work on the jukebox, all one of them that I found. 5

That's 31.

I feel like I was very harsh on a few aspects last time. Despite taking longer than I should have on it, it was enjoyable as an experience, at least. One of those odd games where it could be said that a let's play is the better experience than actually playing it. Since you won't get the joys of wandering around a big mansion wondering what you have to interact with in order to advance.

Next time, another spooky game, albeit, one that's also not quite the usual fare. It's Elvira - The Adventure Game, an adventure/RPG hybrid which is one of the first games to lean into horror more seriously.