Horror Games: SL’s TOP HAUNTED PLACES TOUR & HUNT

While Second Life simulators aren’t traditional horror games, they can be classfied as such. But sometimes, horror sims become something with more uses than simply a location to visit. SL’s TOP HAUNTED PLACES TOUR & HUNT is an example.

Type: Region/Haunted House
Theme: Integrated Horror Sim
Duration: 45-65 minutes
Location: Quincentiv
Area: 65536 m2
Lag Level: Low
My Horror Rating: Ride: 5/5, Zone: 4/5

You spawn at the center of the region (or whereabouts) when you teleport to this sim. You appear in a landing area with freebies and community-engagement conveyances.

The whole region is Halloween/horror-themed, but due to its spacious nature, you might not notice it yet.

In the landing area, you can get the notecards by Carolyn Avro with the compilation of all the sims of the SL’s Top Haunted Places Tour and Hunt for this year.

This is a killer resource. I will be visiting as many sims on that list as I can. As of this writing, it’s six notecards for a total of 115 Halloween simulators, that’s a lot!

The community-engagement objects are:

• Join the Group Sign (SL’s Top Haunted Places Tour and Hunt)
• Visit the Group’s Flickr Page Sign
• Freebies Dispenser (bag)
• Landmark Dispenser Sign (Halloween Shop)

If you turn around 180 degrees from the landing position, you’ll see the manor, the main attraction of the region. It’s full of stuff inside.

The rest of the sim is rather sparsely decorated. The lack of clutter in the outdoor spots of the whole region (except interiors) makes for a very tranquil exploration experience.

The region containing this sim is a cool experience but I didn’t rate it 5/5 because I thought the empty space between the exterior spots (which are worth a visit too) made the region feel kind of empty.

That’s understandable, though. In Second Life regions and parcels support a limited amount of primitives; the virtual world’s building blocks. If you over-develop an area of your region the rest they suffer because each thing you add is a primitive less; you can’t develop a region and add things to it indefinitely.

That in the exterior of this region-wide sim there aren’t blind spots at all makes seeing everything there’s to see in this region very easy; one just needs to walk near the edges in a circular, surrounding path one or at most two times to see everything there’s to see outside the haunted house.

Manor

What to say about this great haunted house sim? I haven’t visited a dark ride or haunted house in Second Life for more than a month and this one came with an emotional load.

For starters, I’d say it has spooks and mechanics that are much more sophisticated than what I had seen up to now.

One thing that is worthy of mention is the ghosts. It has a lot of different styles of stunts, spooks, and props. Still, the ghost spooks were the best. Some very stylized ones and that from the moment you open the main door and step inside.

I said that it came with an emotional load because this sim gave me the whim whams as soon as I opened the door.

The creep factor of most of the stunts other than the ghosts is high, and many of them are interactive, so you have to touch them and experiment with them for them to trigger.

The manor has two floors (at least that’s what I found on my first visit) a ground one and a mezzanine first floor. The interior design is gothic and follows a believable logic but the surprises awaiting in the rooms are many and very well thought out.

Visiting this sim, late at night, with all the lights out and using immersive technology like headphones or a VR headset might make for a genuinely scary experience. And this statement is something I don’t get to make often about Second Life horror simulators.

Workshop

Walking around the region you get to see the other horror spots.

The first thing I thought when I saw this attraction was “what’s this? the workshop of the devil?” and it pretty much looks like it. I didn’t enter it, because I used it to take two comparison screenshots for the guide I wrote.

Desert House

I don’t know if this house was intended for visitors to explore, but I didn’t dare to go inside. It looked personal so I didn’t even try to see if I could enter it.

At least it was cool to watch the yard, that was decorated for Halloween (like pretty much all the other spots of this region), and had a very nice prop, a jack-o-lantern’s tree!

Haunted House RARE

The domain of King of Halloween and Madmoiselle, two very chillaxed skeletons. Since this spot is one room only it takes barely five minutes to visit it.

It has a handful of cool horror props that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Conclusion

I found this 2017 video when searching for the group on non-GBY search engines

Should a horror fan visit SL’s TOP HAUNTED PLACES TOUR & HUNT -Halloween? Totally! This is the kind of horror/Halloween simulator that is so much well done that it’s bound to sit well with horror and non-horror fans alike.

I have been searching for ghost trains and dark rides in SL on and off for like ten years now. What I haven’t done until this year was doing it during October.

I always thought that October was the less beneficial month for me to connect to Second Life because of the crawl that upcoming Halloween induces would cause increased lag and me never having bleeding edge hardware to run the platform all maxed out would not enjoy it.

For me it was unfortunate that I didn’t find this group earlier. I searched many times both Second Life and the web in search for sites and pages dealing with the subject of creepy simulators, but the search engines don’t seem to give importance to them.

The key for me to find this group was when I searched for horror simulators (or a similar keyword) on Flickr. I should have figured it out earlier, that it would be more direct to search on Flickr since the SL community seems to have a preference for that platform to share screenshots.

Can These Amusements be Called Horror Games?

As I see it, hardly. They are a quite different form of enterainment where you do not need to follow a preconceived path. In that sense they are similar to open-world/sandbox games.

© Bholenath Valsan 2021 — Horror Games: SL’s TOP HAUNTED PLACES TOUR & HUNT – Horror Games