I never played Haunted House, but I'm guessing it was as brutal as this game. Maybe I didn't slow down enough.
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@TobyThePoser Thanks for giving this a go!
Haunted House on the Atari had 9 difficulty levels - this remake is based on the hardest one. The Atari version had some differences that I think made it harder than this. One was that you could only carry one thing at a time, so you were either carrying the key or treasure, but not both (in the Atari version, it was one treasure with 3 pieces you had to assemble). The doors also didn't stay unlocked once you unlocked them, so if you didn't have the key, it was pretty easy to get lost finding the open path out. And while I think that my monsters move faster, the ones in the Atari were pretty relentless, blew the match out from farther away, and wouldn't let you relight it in their presence. I tried to balance making it challenging with making it possible to escape. Even in my play testing though, I did die a few times, mostly when the random monster respawns after dying were fairly close to my location and made it hard to escape.