Play Gahan Wilson’s The Ultimate Haunted House Online

Gahan Wilson’s The Ultimate Haunted House is one of those weird, wonderful MS-DOS games that sticks with you. You wake up trapped in a creaky old mansion with 13 hours to find 13 keys—or you’re stuck there forever. The clock’s ticking, and the place is crawling with monsters, but here’s the twist: you can’t just fight them. Instead, you’ve got to trade stuff from your inventory, like offering a ghost a sandwich or bribing a skeleton with a coin. Get it wrong, and you’ll end up cursed—maybe your screen goes all rainbow static, or suddenly you can’t pick anything up. It’s equal parts frustrating and hilarious.

Wilson’s art gives everything this grimly cartoonish vibe, like a Halloween special gone wrong. The house is packed with little secrets—talk to the right (wrong?) painting or poke around in the cellar long enough, and you’ll stumble on some genuinely clever surprises. But that clock never lets up, and the curses pile up fast. It’s a game that rewards patience and punishes recklessness, which feels fitting for a haunted house. If you’ve got a soft spot for ’90s adventure games with personality, this one’s a gem.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".