A promising start, with a couple of small flaws.
Overall, Haunted University makes a good impression. The renders are well-crafted, the colors spot on, the shots interesting and the characters unique and interesting in their design. The game also features music that mostly fits the scenes and some of the pieces can give you quite the earworm.
You play a young student starting at university despite his parents disapproval. Strapped for cash, you're living in the mixed dorms, trying to navigate this new life and the relationships and friendships that came with it. There's a pretty big cast of very different characters, with very different personalities and not every one is likeable (so far). They all seem to have different outlooks in life and pursue different goals, making them feel grounded and real.
Despite the early friends you make, not everything's all rosy. The sorrority seems to be guided into a new direction that seems to favor nasty and mean girls, while the frat boys are bullying people around campus.
But there's a twist: the university is haunted, people have been disappearing recently, and even some of your fellow dorm members seem to be noticing eery things happening.
All in all, it promises to be a story with lots of different characters, a youthful vibe of different characters building friendships and relationships, all with a mysterious & spooky spin.
There's a couple of downsides and areas of improvement though:
There's some spelling and grammatical errors (he/she him/her getting confused) as well as using spaces before exclamation marks and question marks.
Some of the choices don't allow much indication for what consequences will follow. For instance, I don't know if some of the choices I made completely closed those characters paths or not. This is especially tricky because some girls that seem to possibly be romance interests or options (Kimberly) are so far quite dislikeable and its hard to know whether I want anything to do with them this early on.
Overall, it's not quite clear who the main romance interests are (the album seems to indicate its Kimberly, Dina and Sakura - who barely appeared so far)
and what the harem tag relates to or how and in what way the other characters will be involved.
Also, Timothy is way too cute looking and there's no gay tag, so that's a problem.
Lastly, I should mention the scene so many people here seem to get wholly upset about. A character that does not seem to be a main love interest has sex with your roommate - that's how you meet him. There's a couple ways how you can handle that, two of which are in my opinion quite funny.
Some people seem to be unable to handle that. Not every character, it turns out, is a lifelong virgin waiting for you to be their first, and this has shocked and horrified some of the early reviewers. What a nightmare!
If your skin's tough enough to handle a brief glimpse of university life involving other people, and you like to try a slice of life mixed with horror/ghost story, this might be a game to watch out for.
I, at least, am looking forward to the next update - and hoping for a couple of improvements. (Give us Timothy!)
