Disney's The Haunted Mansion

The lantern is the whole idea. Zeke Holloway, a ratcatcher summoned to a Louisiana estate by a dead man's will, carries a light that pins ghosts in place and slowly burns them out of existence, and holding it steady means standing still while everything else in the room comes for you. That tension between aiming the beam and being a stationary target is the engine of the entire game, and it is a smarter foundation than a 2003 Disney tie-in had any obligation to build.

High Voltage structured it as a series of sealed rooms. Doors lock, spirits pour out of the furniture, and nothing opens again until the last one has been dispatched. Zeke picks up other tools along the way, but they mostly exist to soften targets before the lantern finishes the job, which keeps the loop tight and a little monotonous over the long haul. The fixed camera angles are chosen for composition rather than combat clarity, so you will occasionally take a hit from something the frame has politely cropped out.

What carries it is the source material, and specifically which source it chose. The 2003 Eddie Murphy film exists, and the game largely ignores it in favour of the Anaheim ride: the stretching portrait chamber, Madame Leota's floating head, the ballroom waltzers, the hitchhiking ghosts in the mirror. Corey Burton's narration does the Ghost Host cadence properly, dry and amused rather than menacing. For anyone who has walked through the attraction, the pleasure here is recognition — the game lets you stand inside rooms the Doombuggy hurries you past.

It is also a genuinely dark-looking PlayStation 2 game in a period when licensed Disney product usually meant primary colours and a bouncing mascot. The lighting model does real work, since the lantern is both your weapon and often your only illumination, and the mansion's greens and browns hold up better than the character models do. Zeke himself animates stiffly and the boss encounters are pattern puzzles of the most obedient kind.

Nobody would mistake this for a lost classic. The combat thins out well before the credits, and the difficulty spikes in the later gardens feel like padding rather than design. But it understood that the attraction's appeal was never fright — it was 999 happy haunts throwing a party you were not quite invited to, and the game is at its best when it stops fighting and simply lets you look around.