The Haunting of Joni Evers

A great walking simulator with some paranormal moments, focusing on atmosphere and story rather than jumpscares. The game explores heavy themes like grief, family and memories in a subtle, emotional way. If you enjoy games that focus on mood and storytelling, this one is worth checking out.

The Haunting of Joni Evers is a lovely, short, and slightly spooky experience that leans heavily on the emotional story of a broken home. It’s not a horror game in the traditional sense, it’s more of a haunting in an emotional and psychological way. The atmosphere is beautifully melancholic, supported by some genuinely delightful voice acting. The story didn’t go quite where I expected, but the final moments, end credits included, managed to water my eyes quite nicely. The also reminded me of narrative-driven titles like Gone Home, Ether One and Dear Esther, short, personal, and bittersweet explorations of memory, loss and family. If you loved those, then this will definitely be worth your time!

The reviews that are most valuable to any individual player probably have more to do whether you share an interest in the same type of games, so I’ll start with the type of gamer that I am. I love story-rich games, ideally where I can make real choices that impact game play or solve a crime, etc. Open-world action RPGs (think lots of side quests & talking NPCs), adventure (solving puzzles) or interactive novels/FMVs make up a large portion of my game library. Summary: Enjoyable story with a good arc and a lot of supernatural sprinkled in Pros: +Interesting family story narrative + Nice arc to the whole thing +Good atmosphere +Voice acting didn’t make me want to mute the sound Neutral: *This has to be your type of game – this is not survival horror (which I’m not a huge fan of) & you’re never in actual danger. You cannot die. *The gameplay is walking around and interacting with different items & listening to the main character talk Cons: -There is no option to move faster, which would have been nice when you’re going back and forth in the house -There is no option to make the talking go faster, which also would have been nice at points

Gone Home with a spooky twist. I found the story dull and nothing original about it, just boring family drama along with some cheap jump scares. Nothing is really explained, everything just appears but it’s really up to you who Skull Man is. You mainly wonder if it’s all in Joni’s head or if it was all a real thing. Pro for me is voice acting, which was good. Also it was fun to go through the relic puzzles.

I have a feeling that this review will get a big long-winded and personal, so here is a TL;DR for those without a lot of time: This is a best-in-class narrative adventure game. If you like things like Gone Home, Firewatch, The Suicide of Rachel Foster, Titan Station, or any of those kinds of games, you should have an amazing time with this one. It is about 3.5 hours long and an absolute pleasure to play in one shot. Now for the more long-winded, personal tirade. [b]This review will contain spoilers[/b]. The idea of writing about that game is a bit intimidating to me. It is a perfect 10/10 experience for me in so many ways. As far as being a walking simulator, it is best in class. They give you the option of choosing how much guidance you would like to receive. Want to have an objective reminder to tell you where to go next? Or do you want to figure it out for yourself? You get to decide. I loved that bit of flexibility. Joni herself is an outstanding narrator. She is believable and human and her internal monologue is realistic and does not feel like a put on for the sake of the game. The environment of her big, haunted house is intimidatingly large at first, but you quickly come to learn the layout and it becomes far more easy to wrap your head around where everything is. The game did something that very few games can do. Despite the fact that it was a sweltering summer day, I felt like I was in a haunted house on a dark and stormy night. That was how able this game was to pull me into its world. I love that feeling. It is the best thing that a piece of art can do, aside from leaving you with something to think about. And boy, this game does that as well. The horror elements were perfectly used. Like any good horror story, the scary parts are a metaphor for something else. In the film the Babadook, for example, the titular monster was a metaphor for mourning and loss. The skull man in this game, to me, is clearly a representation of that ever so tempting ability within all of us to hide behind our bitterness and resentment and cut ties with our own past, even at the cost of the happy memories. The actual subject matter hit extremely close to home for me. That is what makes it so difficult to write about. Joni is bitter. She is the one who did not leave. She is the one who feels abandoned. She has a life. She is the best damned mechanic in the county. She is not going anywhere. It is everyone else that left her, and she is extremely resentful of the way that this feels. Her mom left first. Joni did not understand why, and it seemed like neither did her father. Her sister, Sara, was young enough to not even really remember their mom. We can infer from her internal monologue that her dad, sister, and grandmother have all left fairly recently, abandoning her to this big, historic house all by herself. Joni feels like she had to step up and be a mother figure to her own little sister after her mom left. She is angry at her dad’s weakness. She is angry at her mom’s unforgivable abandonment of them. She is angry at everything. And the scariest thing is… I completely understood why. The situations are not exactly the same, but I feel very similarly to Joni sometimes. I am also one who stayed. I have been through this myself. Everyone else left. And it fills me with anger whenever they imply that it is at all my fault that we do not have the relationship that maybe we should have. ♥♥♥♥ that. I did not go anywhere. I am 100% on team Joni here. Joni ends up destroying the relics that are all deeply associated with the memories of her absent family members. She does not even realize that she is doing it. She is hiding behind her pain and her anger, but throughout the course of the game, she comes to realize that she is also haunted by the connections that she has to the good times. The positive memories. The love. All of that was real. The love that she felt early on is just as real as the anger that she feels now at its absence. By giving in to resentment and anger, Joni is also losing the positive memories of the life that gave her form and made her the person that she is. This is an extremely difficult thing to accept. I do not think that I have reached this point in the process, personally, but I was very happy for Joni when she did. At the end of the game, [spoiler]when she is calling and leaving a voicemail for everyone in an attempt to reconnect[/spoiler], I was a sobbing mess. This is an absolute triumph of storytelling and some of the best of what you can do with a video game. Absolutely incredible.

If you liked games such as Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch, I can pretty much guarantee you'll like The Haunting of Joni Evers. Good story, good voice acting, *really* good writing, immersive spooky vibe that doesn't rely at all on cheap jump scares, absolutely my sort of horror game. I really hope the developer has more games in the hopper cause this was a hell of a debut title.

Great for fans of Gone Home, I really liked the narrative as well as the environments and the exploration aspects. It was spookier than I thought it'd be, but I'm also a scaredy-cat. The puzzle mechanics were easy to figure out and suited the story well. BUT I was playing on Steamdeck and struggled with slow loading textures, stuttering, flickering lights (not the spooky kind) and a few crashes. I don't think there's a way to adjust graphics in this game to make it work better on the Steamdeck, apart from v-sync, motion blur and cinematic aberration.

Hope you enjoy slowly rotating objects

HoJE seems very familiar at first—clearly in the tradition of Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch, as the player-character Joni—the elder sister--arrives home to explore the dark, rambling family home in a fierce thunderstorm that knocks out most of the lights. As familiar as this seems for the genre, the further one goes the more it becomes clear that HoJE is pushing the walking sim (or strollplayer) in unexpected directions. Childhood terrors (ghosts, specters) are used as a metaphor for the fear of family secrets that must be confronted, as they are in Gone Home, but HoJE leans into horror more directly, with more complexity and a deeper stratum of myth. The Cunningham house is indeed a “terrible place,” labyrinthine and queer in its challenge to familiar domesticity, but its riddles do not resolve around the crimes of an uncle Oscar (Gone Home) or a Mark Jefferson (Life Is Strange). Rather, the house is embedded in an extended, if elusive, mythscape of paranormal forces along the Oklahoma/Arkansas border that breach into the house and Joni’s interior world. While Joni confronts emotional conflicts that prevent her from reconnecting with her family, HoJE manages to keep the breach open to this mythscape, with its terror and its wonder. Rather than a dismissible or vanquished metaphor, it keeps its mythic world balanced against (or within) the family drama and its resolution. That is a remarkable achievement for a studio’s first release, and this is matched by the game’s evocative score, nuanced and effective voice acting, and polished art style. If this is the first world across the Causeway, I am definitely on board for the next. Highly recommend!

I love this game! The story, the characters, the emotions I felt at the end. My friend gave me the chance to play this game and I thank her for that. I would also like to thank Causeway Studios for making such a master peace of a game. The story, every emotion, the final resolution, the letting go was perfectly in place. For anyone that reads this, I would recommend this game 100% and more, all my support for Causeway Studios and I can not wait to see what your next release is going to be! Keep up the great work!