Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion is a great game. It is a very simple game in which you need to traverse trough rooms to progress. Each room harbors a monster or creature that will kill you instantly. You need to avoid it and simply run for your life. Initially, there is about a thousand different rooms so enough horror and scares for a lifetime, all in a free little game.

In the first rooms, you meet a cute ghost, and in the rooms that follow, a stupid little monster is coming towards you, easily avoidable. You take a look at his disgusting face, have a quick laugh and move on.

However, after 10 rooms, the chills go down your back as you suddenly need to do certain tasks before the door to the next room opens. You need to find items, pull levers or simply traverse trough some maze to find the right exit. When you do not have a straight path or goal, the terror that some vile thing is stalking you really kicks in.

The graphics are greatly done. The worlds are fully 3D and the framerate is butter smooth. The creatures and beasts are all in 2D, giving an unsettling contrast to the environments.

The sound and music in this game is nerve wrecking and when some ghost lady catches your @ss and is in your face, her scream can be felt trough your spine.

The controls are really simple, but a button to run is all you need in this endless nightmare.

Speaking of vile things that are stalking you, the different creatures and monsters can be really disturbing. Some just look a little scary, but others take control of your whole screen by smearing it with blood, images and horrible visions. It is these kinds of abominations that made me sh!t my pants.

Later on, the rooms are also getting f*cked up. Suddenly you are in space with 1 door in the middle of the room, this door leads to limbo, in which a monster is coming to you. If you can still move, you look behind you and find another door. When you look back, the monster is right in your face.

The whole gameplay loop is just going along and see how far you can get. However, experiencing new horrors and disturbing sh!t with every run is part of the whole charm of this game.

Overall, Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion is a work of art on its own and free to play. You just need a beer, some fresh diapers and a lot of ALT+F4 macro's assigned to your mouse and keyboard.

Definitely recommend this game.

I really like its style, it’s very cute and can be quite scary, but I can’t look over the fact that it is also very repetitive.

It has its moments, but they are separated by long stretches of nothingness. The same rooms over and over again, the same enemies chasing you, or just silence, while you go from one door to the next.

I believe that the randomization of every room really hurts the experience. For some reason, they wanted to have 999 rooms, so they had to fill the place with empty space to reach that ridiculous number. You can find some good rooms, but you usually encounter the boring ones.

That repetition, or even tediousness, kills horror in my opinion. Sure, there might be good atmosphere to keep you on edge, but you are doing functionally the same thing in every room, searching for the next door. And yes, some enemies can be unnerving, but they are, for the most part, the same chasing type of enemy from your average horror game.

It really would have benefited from a tighter concept.

Now, all of that sounds negative, right? "But why the positive score?" I hear you ask. Well, this one gets saved by the 2 extra campaigns: the hospital and the dollhouse. They are exactly what I wanted, tighter experiences with a clear direction. They are honestly great and make the whole package worth it.

PROS:
- Unique, intelligent horror-parody game, but with some genuine scares.
- It's a very high quality polished experience, which is rare for a free game.
- The sound, visuals and gameplay form a beautiful mixture: spooky, mysterious and black humour. It has
- Some 'procedural' elements give endless re-play value (and "endless" mode)
- The art design is a delightful mixture of cute and macarbe.
- Delicious nostalgia feelings, the many references and environments borrowed from classic horror games (like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Amnesia, etc.)

CONS:
- No mouse sensitivity slider, no controller support. Some minor control issues (getting stuck on walls/objects)

SUMMARY:
This game is a beautiful little gem. You can tell the devs poured their hearts into it and it's probably the best free game I've played on Steam. No microtransactions, no catch, and it's a very polished experience (unlike many free games we see). If you like horror games then I would highly recommend giving this a try. It's clever, it's very unique, it's a bit spooky, and it's great fun.

EXTENDED REVIEW:
Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion (formerly known as "Spooky's House of Jump Scares") is a unique tongue-in-cheek indie horror game available FOR FREE on Steam and or Indiedb. I call it a horror game, but it's really something else, something quite different. The game is a beautiful mixture: it's both spooky and cute, it has genuine tension and scares (beyond the "jump scare" variety) but it also intelligently pokes fun at the horror genre in general, referencing a slew of classic horror games and films. The game also has some "procedural" elements; the mansion that you explore changes each time. Furthermore it also has some light puzzle elements.

The concept of the game is simple: you've plopped down in this gigantic mansion and you're tasked with finding the mysterious secrets hidden within. The "mansion" has 1000 rooms, which you must navigate to reach the end. It starts off quite slow and light-heated: it feels a bit like Wolfenstein 3D, walking through these rather featureless halls with the occasional "jump scare" that pops out of the wall, a cardboard ghost or cupcake on a stick.

As you travel deeper through the mansion, the danger escalates and the atmosphere comes more threatening and grim. Still though, throughout the process, you are occasional visited by the mansion's key inhabitant, Spooky, a girl little ghost girl who frequently explains things to you, or more often tricks/taunts you, or pokes fun at you in your plight.

This game is like a love letter to the horror genre. I recognised countless enemies, environments, cheesy sub-plots of horror tropes scattered throughout the rooms, including the environments themselves and the enemies. Highlights included the Amnesia, Silent Hill and Resident Evil sections. It's a short game, can be beaten in a couple hours, and overall it's a delightful, light-hearted spooky experience. The idea of exploring 1000 rooms sounds quite boring, but really they do so much with this simple formula.

I have only a couple minor complaints: firstly, you can't adjust the mouselook sensitivity. Secondly, you often get a little bit stuck on walls, objects, ledges, etc. Also, no controller support (or at least I couldn't get it working). But these aren't big issues.

This game is a beautiful little gem. You can tell the devs poured their hearts into it and it's probably the best free game I've played on Steam. No microtransactions, no catch, and it's a very high quality polished experience (unlike a lot of the free games). If you like horror games then I would highly recommend giving this a try. It's clever, it's very unique, it's a bit spooky, and it's great fun.