One of my guilty pleasures is watching those ghost shows on TV where investigators try and find spirits in haunted places.  So I usually jump at the chance to review games where you get to do that, especially if they’re as cartoony as this one.  In Boo Party, you are a paranormal photographer who has been commissioned to take pictures inside a haunted house.  But when you enter, you find that ghosts from all over are having a giant house party!  So now you must mingle with the ghost guests and talk with them, and maybe some will let you take pictures of them if you do some favors and requests.  But this game isn’t all what it seems.  You’ll find out why by reading this review.  Boo Party is available on Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

All you have to do in the game is walk around with the L stick and talk with ghosts and others with the button.  Sometimes a ghost will want something from you, and you must talk with another ghost to get an item or find it in the sprawling haunted mansion.  When you do, you’ll usually get to take a picture of that ghost.  Take the picture back to your boss and you’ll get Spirit Points, which you can use as currency back at the haunted house party to buy other things from ghosts to help your progress.  Even though you don’t do any pointing and clicking, the game is really like a point and click adventure in disguise.  It kind of has a Maniac Mansion vibe to it, and the cartoony 16-bit graphics make me think of other silly spooky games like Zombies Ate My Neighbors or Photography Boy.

But here’s the thing that surprised me the most about the game.  The pictures that you take are all of female versions of monsters, and they’re all nude pictures!  You CAN turn that feature off and not be able to view the pictures, but it just doesn’t fit the rest of the tone of the game.  But I guess that’s what this site is for, to let parents know about stuff like this.  Other problems I had with the game is that I wish you could get a map that would show you the sprawling mansion, as many of the corridors look the same.  It also would’ve been nice to have indicators telling you which ghosts you need to talk to or who you’ve already spoken to.  I’ve played a few modern RPGs that do this and it would’ve been handy here (even Tears of the Kingdom does this to a certain extent).  Because of those problems and the unexpected nudity, I lost interest in this game after a while.  It’s a shame really, because there were so many other things about this one that interested me.

Kid Factor:

Boo Party is rated M for Mature with ESRB descriptors of Nudity, Strong Language, and Sexual Content.  Of course the nudity and content is in the pictures you can take, but even though you can turn that off, strong reading skill is still required so I’d say this one is best for adults only.

Tags: Game Reviews