You might be thinking, “This is all so serious, can’t this Cook guy just enjoy things?” I can and I do! Be assured, I have enjoyed everything that I have written about here.
As an author, I like it when someone spends time thinking about my work, because people invest in what they value. That’s what these posts are: investments of time and thought in other peoples games.
Ghost Hunt
Dee Cooke
spoilers
Halloween is my favorite holiday, and it always has been. This was my childhood assessment of major American holidays:
- Christmas: Presents and time away from school. However, a lot of that time away was spent with extended family, which often felt worse than school.
- Thanksgiving: No presents, less time away.
- Easter: Candy, egg hunt. But agoraphobia in a church.
- Halloween: Candy, costumes. Best decorations. Best pop culture/media. Secular wonder.
There is a certain type of children’s Halloween story that draws me back to the feelings of delight and excitement I associate with Halloween, to those bright spots in my youth. Ghost Hunt is one of those stories. Why is that? What would child Drew have loved in Ghost Hunt?
The protagonist, living a possibly mundane life (making an exception for the coffin in the basement) is suddenly in a world of magic, where ghosts and magic boxes are real. As a child, I always wanted to flip the switch that would reveal the hidden mysteries of the world. Here, that switch is the coffin.
Having flipped that switch, the child has a simple quest: round up escaped ghosts and get them back into the box. Along the way, the protagonist gets to do other things I would have enjoyed, like staying out of trouble with parents and outsmarting siblings. There is a ghost under a witch’s hat! What child wouldn’t enjoy discovering such a thing? Surely some adults would, too. I can’t be the only one.
I also enjoyed the delineation between the magical world within the house and the mundane, adult world in the garden. The kids are always in the know in these stories, and it’s the adults who don’t know what’s going on. In my experience, this was often true.
The puzzles aren’t hard or even terribly puzzle-like, which is great. I didn’t so much want to solve problems as I wanted to imagine my young self making progress and feeling quite glad for it. There was a kind of double enjoyment for me here, as I both enjoyed playing in the present as well as imagining myself playing in the past.
Besides what has already been mentioned, the child-centered narrator of Ghost Hunt, which never speaks as a patronizing adult, is an essential feature of this kind of story.
The author has already said that a post-release is planned. It will include not only a bit of polish but new content as well! I look forward to it.