Eye on iOS: Volume 10

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The Haunting of Willow Hill

After the sighting of a ghostly apparition terrorizes the town of Willow Hill, private investigator Myles Winter is called to the local cemetery to solve a mystery that the police refuse to acknowledge. So begins The Haunting of Willow Hill, a short and simple, first-person mobile murder mystery. It’s not an attractive, long, or challenging game, but it’s an enjoyable enough, nostalgic-filled experience despite some awkward design choices.

Due to the game’s rather straightforward gameplay and minimal level of difficulty, Willow Hill moves fast enough to hold your attention throughout its familiar whodunit narrative structure and formulaic point-and-tap scenarios. Each objective is rather simple, requiring only a small handful of steps to accomplish a task, such as throwing out trash or using a ladder to climb a tree, but this simplistic approach allows the scenes to change frequently and the story to move briskly enough to build up some momentum. Unfortunately, hindering that momentum are too many awkward, back-and-forth fetch quests between poorly-placed and sometimes inappropriately-attired characters, such as the lone female witness standing in the middle of a modern-day courtyard adorned in warrior princess armor without any provided context.

The character models are fairly lifeless, and the environments themselves are sparsely filled and don’t really cover a whole lot of ground, taking place primarily around a single graveyard and the surrounding area. Oddly, the animation gradually becomes more and more simplistic, to the point that the ending action sequence had me laughing in hysterics with its over-the-top campiness and minimalist execution.

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