Handy Harry's Haunted House Services

About Handy Harry's Haunted House Services

Handy Harry's Haunted House Services came out on Steam in Early Access in July 2020, made by Bismuth Studio. Its premise is a job: you and your coworkers are sent to do routine service work for a customer, and the company always gets the job done, whatever haunts the house.

Each level is a randomly generated maze of dusty attic rooms. You split up with your flashlights to find the faults, burnt-out fuse boxes, broken floorboards and leaky pipes, fix them, then flip the master switch and escape. Story mode has twenty levels for up to four players with boss battles; free play takes up to eight, and there is an endless mode, a hardcore modifier with bigger levels and faster ghosts and no respawns, and a PvP mode where one player is the ghost.

The fear is simple. The attics are nearly black, the flashlight is, in the store's words, admittedly mediocre, and one of four types of ghost is somewhere in the dark, each deadly in its own way. Screenshots show narrow rooms barely lit by a torch and two small eyes catching the light at the end of a corridor. Proximity voice chat means you can scream, but only those close by will hear.

The tone around it is jokey, with silly hats and outfits bought with batteries you earn by surviving, and players tag it as funny as well as frightening. It suits groups who want short, cheap rounds of being hunted in the dark between laughs.

How to play Handy Harry's Haunted House Services

1. Host or join a game, in story mode with up to four players or free play with up to eight.
2. Spread out through the attic with your flashlight and find the broken fuse boxes, floorboards and pipes.
3. Repair each objective quickly while listening for the ghost.
4. Flip the master switch once everything is fixed.
5. Get out alive to earn batteries, and spend them on outfits in the shop.

Tips

• Split up to find the faults faster, but stay close enough that someone hears you over proximity chat.
• Learn the four ghost types, since each kills in its own way.
• Try the PvP mode as the ghost to learn how the hunter sees the attic.

Questions