Goosebumps HorrorTown

Sometimes it's fun to be scared, and for more than 25 years, the Goosebumps books have been giving kids reasons to sleep with the lights on. Now those same kids can cause a few scares of their own with Goosebumps HorrorTown. At its core, this is a pretty basic city-building sim. You've got a small bit of land to put down buildings and decorations, which give you resources and townsfolk, which you then send on small quests to earn enough XP to level up and expand. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. What breaks the cycle up here is the horror element. Over the course of building your town, you'll get access to special buildings and characters that you can send out to terrorize the streets. Build up the fear in town enough, and you earn milestone rewards. It's essentially just another resource to farm, but it also helps break up the monotony.

Speaking of monotony, that's easily the game's biggest weakness. While it's interesting to watch characters' quest lines play out at first, it's not long before you realize that they're all the same. You're either building something and waiting for it to finish, or you tell someone to do something and wait for it to be done. In fact, most of the game is spent waiting for something to finish. There's an option to speed things along by either using sparse in-game currency or watching ads, but neither is ideal. As a result, you're either spending actual money just to move things along, or you're spending more time watching sponsored videos than playing the game. Eventually, things break down to where you'll log in just long enough to set things in motion before finding something else to do with the rest of your day. Despite this, there's an odd sort of appeal to crafting your own little suburban utopia, then listening to the screams of the happy townsfolk as they run for their lives from garden gnomes, zombies, and, of course, the masters of all fear: clowns.