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Haunted Heir

Explore a creaking mansion, appease restless ghosts, and discover who deserves the family fortune.

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Game overview

Inheritance wrapped in hauntings

Created for Spooktober 2024, Haunted Heir mixes visual novel storytelling with point-and-click exploration. Day/night cycles shift what rooms you can access, puzzles hide keys to sealed wings, and narrative choices determine whether you and your companions survive long enough to claim the treasure.

Built in Ren’Py using Remarkable Games’ template, the jam project includes inventory management, branching scenes, and multiple endings influenced by the clues you uncover.

Controls

Visual novel essentials

  • Left-click: Advance dialogue, interact with hotspots, and solve puzzles.
  • Right-click / Esc: Open the Ren’Py menu to save, load, or adjust settings.
  • Scroll wheel / Page Up / Page Down: Review the dialogue history/backlog.
  • Space / Enter: Quick-advance dialogue when revisiting scenes.

Why play it?

Jam highlights

  • Atmospheric art and audio set a classic haunted house mood.
  • Puzzles and inventory choices add gameplay beyond standard VN dialogue.
  • Open-source Ren’Py project—fork it to build your own spooky inheritance tale.

Tips

Survive the mansion

  • Revisit rooms at night; new clues and apparitions appear after sunset.
  • Inspect every hotspot—some inventory items hide in the UI corners.
  • Save often before major choices so you can explore alternate endings.

Our take

Why Haunted Heir is a strong Ren’Py jam story

Haunted Heir stands out among haunted-house jams for how much it squeezes out of day/night cycles and room revisits—returning to familiar spaces with new clues helps the mansion feel like a real place rather than a one-off backdrop. Inventory puzzles layer an extra bit of gameplay on top of the visual novel structure without getting in the way of the story’s pacing.

Because it’s built on a reusable template and fully open-source, it also serves as a great reference project for anyone wanting to make their own spooky inheritance tale in Ren’Py. You can treat this demo as both a short horror read and a starter kit for your own experiments.

Who will enjoy it?

Fans of narrative-driven horror and visual novels will appreciate Haunted Heir most, particularly if you like exploring dialogue branches and multiple endings. Players seeking high-intensity action will find it slow, but as a jam-length ghost story with some mechanical depth it’s very solid.