Polterheist

It's perfect for people who love insects since It's filled with bugs

completelty unoptimised, getting 20 fps on minimal graphics, intel core i5 10th gen, intel uhd 640

I have no idea why such game like this exists. It has no directives, no tutorials, no control settings, nothing at all. You are thrown into a game where you have to "collect 6 items" in a haunted house where the ghost is an invisible ducker who you can't even see but ghost will be attracted to your coughing sound. You have to stop coughing by clicking either left or right mouse button which is shown on the screen like a shitty quick-time event but no matter what you do you will attract the ghost and get killed. 0/10 would recommend again.

1. Cough - die.
2. Stand in the wrong place and die.
3. Picked up a thing, died.
4. Looked at the house - died.
5. Blinked and died.
6. Got in the car - dead.
7. Opened the game - died.
8. Closed it - also dead.
9. Died - died.
10 tuberculosis out of 10!

Feels like a cashgrab, or made by a clueless developer, the game consists of character has a cough and you must mouse click left or right which ever it shows to quiet the cough. Which attracts the ghost ending in a black screen. You basically have to find six items and hold F to carry each one, one by one back to the van. Without coughing or walking right into the ghost, which is on a pretty much fixed path of walking up stairs and downstairs

This one was a janky game for sure.
The premise of the game seems fun, a burglar robbing houses that are haunted - that's great!

But...you get out of a Van in an empty neighborhood and casually leave the brights on for the Van which is completely fine, then you walk around and get a torch and some sort of pick.
You can also yeet yourself over the fence and go out of bounds and fall out of the map which is a...groundbreaking feature *wink*.

Ok, so you have your tools and a mouse icon keeps appearing on screen as well as your character coughing.
Introducing the "Coughing Mechanic" where you have to click either the left or right mouse button when prompted (Like a QTE) and prevent your character from Coughing. If you don't, he does a bit of a grumbled cough.
Well, turns out that mechanic is the best one in the game because Poltergeists don't like coughing, so you stroll into this house (that's all unlocked mind you) and then if you miss that Quick Time Event and cough - INSTANT KILL from a Poltergeist.

And that's it. I managed to walk through the house and it's a pretty small house with a couple of rooms. Nothing in there to steal except a Guitar and a laptop. They can keep the Poltergeists though.

Overall, a very dark, un-atmospheric, boring and uneventful game that has a good premise but a terrible execution.

A for Effort on the coughing mechanic though.

The minimum specs are not true. A Core 2 Duo 2.83GHz with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 7470 are not enough to have decent framerate...

It's true what others say about the game: no instructions how to play and how to even interact with the game world. Figuring out how to open a door is not fun and the moment our character enters the house, the ghost rushes in and death. Trying to enter another room and hide is impossible and it seems like we can't really sneak... The coughing and mouse clicking to try and prevent it is really a terrible idea here - simply sneaking (if we could) to avoid the ghost would really suffice. I really tried to press on time the mouse buttons to avert the coughing, but most of the time it just does not work.

Gave up playing after a few minutes. Don't buy unless you have a modern and strong PC. And immediately play the game to check if you want it. You can request a refund when you play under 2 hours and under two weeks after purchase.

This game is glitchy. Sometimes your mouse highlights a button to press, then doesn't, then it does again. And I couldn't be able to pick of the easiest item to get, the flashlight. The only way I COULD pick it up was to randomaly mash my mouse. The game is pretty looking and the UI is semi-great (in my own opinion). At mount, you will randomly breathe, hear noises, which is not explained if it is a way to know if the poltergiest is near you or not. Also, somehow windows are a illusion and if you try to look at one window, you could see the trees behind the house. This game is glitchy, not worth it, but my advice to the makers is to work on the glitches of their game, and THEN sell it.

This is just god awful in so many ways first off there is waaay too much bloom going on so everything seems to almost glow and you can't even turn it down not to mention I couldnt even make it 2 mins inside the house I just seem to die I figured out that the the quicktime instances that show up on the sceen for the coughing but I just think the coughing is a stupid concept.
if you lasted longer than 2 mins in the house I salute you. this game is not worth the buy at any price I regret buying it and worse thing is I cant even refund it now because ive had the game for too long oh well I guess best thing I can do now is warn others so they don't make the same mistake.

bad.
Cough, and die.
Also convulted as hell, literally no physics.
Glass...more like air. Literally. You can just walk through windows.
Though, was a ton of fun to play with my friends as we laughed. So if you're looking for a game so bad youu can laugh at, this is worth the price of admission (if heavily discounted)

I would recommend on sale and hope for a game update.
Game looked promising. Developer just needs to release a patch and try a little harder and this could be a fun game.

• Graphics looked nice.
  

• Mouse not locked to the game thus moving to other monitor screens.
  
• Coughing & suppress it with left/right mouse clicks a problem because of the above.
  
• No immersion with staying aware of where cursor is to keep it in the screen.
  
[*] Seeing through blinking eyes? Or the game screen keeps flickering. It's annoying.

When you start you don't have a clue what you are doing as there is no loading screen with controls or menu option or anything from the developer to clue you in. A mouse icon keeps popping up and after a couple times I realized this is to suppress the coughing.

Which lead to the most annoying thing..mouse is not locked to the game screen and im using 3 monitors. Even in full screen your mouse is everywhere except where you need it. Not a problem at the start, but once in the house...
Sigh. Death. Restart.
I tried moving the game to my last monitor so that i could just pan to the right.. super annoying when trying to get into a game of this nature so inevitably I would turn left and then oh noes a cough to suppress and no i don't want to open a new sticky note!

Also for me personally, hearing that constant coughing...ugh. This just annoys me, like the heavy breathing in Through the Woods. I don't want either of these sounds the loudest noise funneling into my ear when im exploring.

I would love to give a more in-depth review but sadly because of the cough and my mouse rarely being in the game window to prevent it i just couldn't get very far. Because ya know.. Death. Restart.

I'm honestly just so upset that this game is going to be tied to my Steam account forever. I don't even have the self-worth to refund my $0.49, this game has broken me.

It looked fun, but I don't particularly like it. It took me a while to find out just how to walk, not to mention opening the doors. Course I immediately died after entering the house. The continuous blinking bothered me, ended up getting a headache from it, and it lagged a bit.

I try not to review games unless I feel like I've really experienced them but this one doesn't seem to deserve that kind of time investment. Plot and atmosphere will often drag me into a game and this one isn't very strong in either. Sure it's creepy, but 'house in the middle of nowhere at night' isn't exactly unique or inspired and as far as I can tell the plot is 'you're a burglar, there's a haunted house, burgle the haunted house'.

I'm unsure why, but it ran terribly on my machine which is pretty decent. So my guess is it's poorly optimized or something like that. I had to lower the resolution to about 1280 and turn down the graphics to get it to move without chugging. That complaint out of the way, we'll get on to the meat of my complaints.

Tracking the sole ghost I experience in the game seems to consist of listening to it stomping around this house and trying to not get it's attention. Problem is, the ghost is so heavy-footed that half the time it feels like it could be anywhere in the immediate vicintiy and the house feels so small that you're never very far from it. And (again maybe it just hated my machine) when it would get me all I saw was a static square blip in front of me armed with a scream.

Speaking of screaming, that cough function was just a terrible idea. Your professional burglar of a character seems to have a nasty cold or some of the most sensitive lungs around, and that minor and randomized QTE to not cough only distracts from anything else going on. A purely obnoxious function thrown in to try to add more gameplay depth and challenge and I hated every second of it.

That's it, that's my experience. Didn't manage to nab any items, didn't manage to survive for more than a moment or two in the house. I get it a 2/10 for a spoopy atmosphere. That was the sole high point.

I honestly hate giving bad reviews but I felt like I didn't have a choice for this one. I think the overall concept of the game was okay but how the developers executed this concept was just flat out awful! You know a game is pretty bad if you feel like you got ripped off after paying not even a DOLLAR for it!

First of all, you can't see what's killing you so you have to just hope and pray that the invisible asshole is not near you. Even if you hear it downstairs and you're upstairs, it's 100% of the time upstairs right next to you. Also did anyone have the hardest time just trying to get into the freaking house?

Second of all, why in the BLOODY HELL is this guy going into a haunted house with a killer ghost inside in the middle of nowhere to steal everyday objects? The thief couldn't find a non-haunted house to steal these items from? If the thief was stealing very rare gems, paintings, or items of the sort, that would be a somewhat legit reason to steal from that house.

THIRD of all, why didn't the guy wait to rob this place until his whooping cough went away? So much for being a thief when you're literally coughing every five seconds and it's so FREAKING LOUD! I understand that the developers were trying to make some sort of mechanic that would make the game some what challenging, but why did they make it IMPOSSIBLE?

I'm not going to say REMOVE THIS GAME FROM STEAM, because I believe that the developers can fix this game if they really put their minds to it. But until that day, I'm sticking with my thoughts on this game. Also Steam wouldn't let me refund this game because I didn't play until a month after I bought the game.

0/10 would refund again.

Literally one of, if not, the worst game I've ever played in my life. Sloppily thrown together with terrible game mechanics, it gives you no backstory, no tutorial, no nothing. You're just thrown in and expected to figure it out. It took me some time to figure out how to get into the house and when I did I instantly died. Again and again.

Since there's literally zero information on the developer/publisher, Kiddy, and this is their first game on Steam, let's just jump right into the gargantuan waste of effort that's known as Polterheist, or Poltergeist, depending on where you're looking. Yes, it's this name mix-up business that should be your first clue that the developer literally gives zero fucks about their product; while the store page says Polterheist, as does the artwork for it, the purchase button says Poltergeist.

Anyway, you play as an asthmatic burglar with a blinking problem who wants to rob this house that he has visited before. I say that because this game has a coughing mechanic, where you must click either the left or right mouse button at the right time to stop from coughing, and the character blinks... a lot. Seeing as he has been to the house previously, the idiot should know that it's haunted but for some reason he just decides to go back anyway... just roll with it. You are then tasked with stealing six items from the tiny crapshack of a house, but good luck getting past the second one before the ghost that roams the hallways kills you. You'll be inside the house, looking for the items on your robbery list, and the lights will cut out; OoOooOOOoo, spoopy. If you notice a flickering glitch near you, that's the ghost; it touches you, you die, you go back to the beginning of the game.

There's zero information provided by the developer on how to actually play this game; good luck guessing and figuring out what to do and the controls in which to do it. There's zero activity from the developer in the forums, despite numerous threads asking for even the slightest bit of help. There's zero signs that this developer wants to take the criticism from the community and make their game a better one. In fact, since Polterheist's release in February 2017, the only communication from the developer is when this title went -90% off. The gameplay lasts for 2-3 minutes at best, and the environment is made to feel larger than it really is by the inclusion of faux-buildings that have no purpose, yet the normal price for this title is $5.49 CAD, even at $0.54 the game feels like a major rip off. Avoid entirely, and do not support such lousy developer practices.

...It's also entirely convenient that nearly every English written review is negative, but all other language reviews are positive. The developer's first language is not English.

Rating: 0.5/5.0 - Abysmal, avoid it like the plague.

I have to admit I was glad to be able to read a synopsis in proper English. Some point out the typos in the text; either I have much lower standards or the developer made some corrections following the initial publishing.

I like the concept of the game: you play as a burglar and your job is to steal half a dozen items from a house which is, apparently, haunted by an apparition. Your gameplay consists of walking downstairs and upstairs looking for the items shown in your notebook. Occasionally, your protagonist is about to cough - you need to press either the left or the right mouse button to conceal your cough. Call it the indie game version of the so-called QTEs (quick time event)!

This earned the title the "coughing simulator" and other such names. I found the concept refreshing, though. And what happens if you do not press the button on time? The ghost roaming the house hears you and catches you. This is practically the gameover unless you manage to run outside. This is, of course, impossible if you are upstairs.

Sadly, this is pretty much all the good that can be told about Polterheist (I also appreciate the pun in the title). While the graphics are decent (I hate the strong white colours, though, that look like as if they were emitting light) the ghost is barely visible. It is difficult to know where it is - we hear footsteps and occasionally a flash of light but that's it. It is as if it teleported between the two floors - you have to somehow notice it is already downstairs so that you can finally use the stairs.

The menu looks decent but there is no control options. You have to figure out the controls yourself. If you are an FPS veteran you find out eventually that F is responsible for the interaction and your mouse wheel brings up the inventory items. Once you find a a desired object you have to press and hold F - this allows you to pick it up and take it to the back of your van. It is ridiculous to see this menu is missing and there's no option to change the key bindings.

You get bored if you invest 15 or so minutes into Polterheist. It has a great concept but a terrible execution. Also, the developer called "Kiddy" might have slightly changed his name - this is an oddly similar name to the one who released Grizzly Valley (an equally weak title with a great idea).

Normal games give you a mission/objective when the game starts. This game just throws you into the front of the house not knowing what to do. I found out what to do, by reading the "ABOUT THIS GAME" info. It does have some work built into the game along with a nice atomsphere but the game just fails. The cough and blink mechanics just makes the game even worst, Also too dark causing you to just say F it!

Stay away from this game. Not worth the mere .50 cents. No info on control scheme or what you need to do, if you manage to pull up the list of items you need to steal you still can't find anything because you died in like 20 seconds. I still haven't even made it to the 2nd floor.

I made a Let's Play video so you can see it without wasting your own money:
https://youtu.be/zwZxEJ4Grjk

I had hopes it was good becuase it looked interesting, played for awhile while recording and it was okay continued to play after the video to figure out the game better before the next video and I couldn't even get to the 2nd floor. The first time you play it's a little creepy but it quickly loses its appeal. Just avoid.

At fist i looked at this game and thought it was a nice idea. The graphics was also nice. So i started the game three times and two of them i died right when i entered the house. I didn't understand sh*t.
On the third time i explored the outside first and found a flashlight that didn't illuminated anything. At first i thought it was out of batteries, then i realized that only the shadows get lit. So i entered the house and died again.

So i quit the game and thought i might be missing something, so read the game description again but there was anything useful. So came here to read the reviews then started to REALLY learn about the game. At first i thought my spec wasn't enough for the game because the screen was constantly flickering, later i discovered it was intentional! It's some kind of blinking system.
And then i learned that the character has tuberculosis or something like that and you have to cover your cough to don't wake the spirit or something.

So, for now i'll just put the game aside and see if my faith get restored later (A.K.A get polished).

This game had such a good premise, the atmosphere was great, but failed massively in gameplay
You go in one, small house with a few rooms.
There is a ghost that follows a fixed path.
Avoid it.
Dont cough.
Find items.
You just die after a certain time.
The end. Restart
Come ON. I was so hyped to play this, as I LOVE quiet, creepy, alone horror games, but this turned out to be a massive disappointment

Not much to spoil but I hid it anyway so you could decide. The game is worth maybe $1 if that.
Your character has a cough and you must mouse click left or right which ever it shows to quiet the cough. Which attracts the ghost ending in a black screen. You basically have to find six items and hold F to carry each one, one by one back to the van. Without coughing or walking right into the ghost, which is on a pretty much fixed path of walking up stairs and downstairs.