Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion

Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion (formerly known as Spooky's House of Jump Scares) is a game created by Akuma Kira (formerly Gregory Klima) and AMGSheena in GameMaker. The objective of the game is to make it through 1000 rooms of Spooky's mansion, and to endure the jump scares within.

An amateur historian decides to investigate an old mansion, only to find themselves challenged by a Cute Ghost Girl, Spooky, to make it through all 1000 rooms and find what lies at the end. While it initially seems harmless, the game quickly goes from cartoonish, playful, and silly to genuinely frightening with threats in the form of the Specimens. They appear as bizarre entities of various kinds captured by the sinister, SCP Foundation-esque GL Labs, and the player discovers Spooky's true plans.

It was initially released on October 23, 2014, and the full first release was issued on July 21, 2015. On December 18th of the same year, the DLC Karamari Hospital debuted, in which the protagonist is tasked by Spooky to explore the titular Abandoned Hospital lying at the bottom of the mansion, and discover what happened there. Unlike the main game, which is mostly randomly-generated, Karamari Hospital has a predefined area to explore, with multiple new Specimens called Monsters, and other strange things. In early 2016, the game's name was changed from Spooky's House of Jump Scares to Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion after German mobile game developer Spooky House Studios put forth a cease and desist because they were attempting to trademark the name "Spooky House". The change is noted in-game by the new name simply being written on tape and pasted over the old logo.

In late 2016, the game got an Updated Re-release under the title Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion: HD Renovation, which included several improvements such as giving the enemies 3D models. On October 2nd, 2020, a new DLC was released, entitled The Doll House or Spooky's Dollhouse, and serves as a definitive conclusion to the story. Taking place immediately after the end of Karamari Hospital, it has the protagonist find and explore a dollhouse-like floor where GL Labs conducted experiments to bind spirits to dolls. With several new enemies lurking in the facility, the player must carry around a spiritually-enchanted doll to solve puzzles, get through doors, and discover the truth behind GL Labs, all while Spooky continues to watch them.

Tropes used in Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion include:

A-K

• Advancing Wall of Doom: Specimen 7, who appears for a few rooms after Room 410. This Specimen originally trapped the player in Room 411 until version 2.7.1.
• Affectionate Parody: Of survival horror games in general, and various tropes in modern horror games in particular.
• And I Must Scream:
  • The game over screen says that "Your soul wanders an endless maze", presumably trapped in the mansion forever.
  • Specimen 2 makes choking noises as if it's trying to let out a pained screech.
  • When Specimen 8 opens its cloak, it reveals screaming, distorted faces inside its rib cage. Its primary method of execution is "absorption", so it makes sense.
  • Specimen 11's CAT-DOS entry reveals that GL Labs declared it ineffective specifically because the souls of its victims don't remain in the house. Though considering that 11 is most likely an actual demon, and it takes the player to a Pocket Dimension after their death, it doesn't seem like one would fare any better from it.
• Animalistic Abomination: The violent deer encountered before Specimen 8, which is also one itself.
• Apocalypse How: The bad ending for the Dollhouse DLC. The mansion is destroyed, but by not closing the Hell Gate, all the horrors of the mansion quickly run rampant and doom the world.
• Apocalyptic Log: They appear in every mode. The Mansion and Endless Mode have several previous explorers writing series of notes. Most of the Specimens' areas have notes from someone, in some cases, written by those particular enemies' previous victims. Karamari Hospital and the Dollhouse also have notes written by different characters, several of which did not meet a good fate.
• Artistic License Marine Biology: in room 910, there is a room with water behind glass, and slowly over time, a whale swims past. However, this whale features 6 flippers (3 on each side) and a vertical tail fluke like a shark has, which has a bizarre shape. Whether this is supposed to be a normal whale or something else is unclear given the setting.
• Ascended Meme: Unknown Specimen 3 is nicknamed "Spooper", and is (originally) a person in a ghost costume. "Spoopy" is a term used for something comical and "spooky" at the same time.
• The Assimilator: Specimen 8 absorbs its victims to feed its "children". The real Specimen 10 counts as well. Also implied with Specimen 9, who "takes" its victims to add to its own mass.
• Bad Boss: Spooky is mentioned as overseeing the experiments that created Specimen 3, laughing when the head scientist expressed concern at what they were creating before leaving them to be killed. A later log about Specimen 10 talks about a similar situation.
• Bait and Switch Boss: Specimen 10, originally just an easy-to-avoid large worm, was updated so that when it spawns, it will not attack. Instead, the new Specimen 10 will pop up from the latter's head, killing it, and shortly afterwards beginning to chase the player. This is shown in its CAT-DOS entry where after room 500 its entry shows "WRONG SPECIMEN ENTRY".
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Specimen 13 appears as a woman wearing a towel around her waist. The HD Renovation version has her fully modelled, but her chest is not heavily detailed.
• Berserk Button: Spooky resents the fact others think that she is "adorable" or "cute"; she wants to be feared. With this in mind, it's very easy to formulate that Spooky is responsible for gathering the Specimens so she can be feared. One ending pretty much shows that she has been using the ghosts of those that died in the mansion to create a ghost army to terrorise people, so that she can finally be taken seriously.
• Big Bad: Spooky is heavily implied to be responsible for creating and gathering the Specimens that inhabit her house, and spreading the rumours that caused the protagonist to be so curious. She also wants to create an army of ghosts and Take Over the World. She also drops her welcoming act as one continues on in the house, even outright removing the ability to run at room 750.
• Big Red Devil: Specimen 11.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Spooky, despite her congratulations and encouragement to continue onward, she also manages to sound increasingly sarcastic and disappointed every subsequent time she meets the player, and she trolls the player after each quarter-mark. The arcade games demonstrate her brutality, and the December update picture has Spooky smiling over the corpse of Santa Claus, who died to an instance of Specimen 1.
• Bizarrchitecture: The mansion is very deep, each elevator taking the player down further, but there are always more tunnels leading onward. Particularly evident in Endless Mode.
  • The layout sometimes doesn't make sense. One room is just a circle that leads right to the start.
  • One of the randomly generated rooms has a map. Some of the rooms move on their own.
  • Some of the scripted areas also fall under this as they are all likely from some other location. Especially egregious is the domain leading up to Specimen 8, which is a large open forest.
  • Specimen 12 is deliberately designed to be this. It's a supernatural mansion that always changes to fit the surrounding environment.
  • Karamari Hospital seems to show this as well. How one gets there is by the elevator rapidly dropping, causing the floor number to go wild to the point where it disappears. Even Spooky doesn't know how the player found the hospital. And that's not even getting into how the hospital seems to loop in on itself, decaying more with each loop.
• Black Comedy: The game parodies common horror game tropes, so there's plenty of this, especially if it involves Spooky herself.
• Bland-Name Product: The elevator's posters sometime mention "Home Depo" and "Papa Jon's", accompanied by mangled versions of each other's slogans.
• Boss Game: The main game and Endless Mode consists of running through halls and rooms to get to the end, and both have many enemies which will chase you at mostly randomised points. The only non-boss enemies are the Class Shadows in Specimen 4's rooms, and the Violent Deer that only show up in Specimen 8's rooms. This is averted in Karamari Hospital and Spooky's Dollhouse, which are more traditional puzzle-based explorations of haunted locations with monsters interspersed within.
• Brain in a Jar: One of the random rooms that can appear when not being chased by an enemy has a brain floating in a large green jar surrounded by strange machinery. Inspecting the glass container from after room 900 will reveal a password saying: 1235, used for the game cabinet that doesn't seem to function, which then plays a short movie about Spooky's past. The container can be broken, which provides both an achievement and a game over.
• But Thou Must!: In Spooky's Dollhouse, during the nightmare scene with the hobo, pressing "no" on the prompt to plant the gun with him does nothing except produce a clicking noise. The player needs to press "yes" and plant the gun, because that's what Spooky's father did the night he accidentally killed her.
• The Cameo: White Face from Imscared and Lisa from Silent Hills P.T. make appearances in Endless Mode as 2 of the 5 Unknown Specimens.
• Can't Move While Being Watched: Specimen 6, Monster 4 and Unknown Specimen 5 either don't move or move very slowly when in sight. Keeping them in view for too long causes them to teleport though.
• Cats Are Mean: Subverted. Cats seem to be a reoccurring theme of safety. The cat before the Specimen 7 encounter is nonthreatening and offers cryptic advice to the player. There are also two possible poster showing a cat in the elevator room, one of which displays a motivational message.
• Cat Scare: The titular "jump scares" of Specimen 1 take this to meta levels. The first one might be startling, and they become a silly running gag in a game that is initially just advancing to the next room and reading notes. Once the real threats start appearing, they play this trope straight, potentially scaring the player despite still being just (mostly) cute spring-loaded cutouts because one is on edge and preoccupied with avoiding the monsters.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The game starts off pleasant and cheerful, but this changes at room 60, where the first hostile Specimen is introduced. The game becomes increasingly dark and intense from that point.
• Checkpoint Starvation: After room 300, save rooms only appear every 100 floors instead of every 50, except for room 750.
• Controllable Helplessness: When the player is killed by Specimen 8 or 11, the player is taken to another area where they move forward until they reach the Specimen. Once the player moves close enough to them, it takes them to their death screen. The player can also turn when stuck in the endless hallway, as they wait for Specimen 9 to "TAKE" them.
• Creepy Doll: Many of these appear in the dollhouse DLC, with all but one of the new enemies being dolls.
• Cute Ghost Girl: Although Spooky's as cute as a button, she hates people calling her cute, and wants them to fear her instead.
• Cute Is Evil: Spooky looks cute, but wants others to be afraid of her, and is responsible for the Specimens in the mansion.
• Death of a Child: After room 900, the brainframe room gives the protagonist the password for the last machine in the arcade room. If the password is used, the last machine displays a cinematic about Spooky's past and ultimate motivation. It reveals that Spooky died as a young child.
• Defanged Horrors: The game certainly seems to be this... at least for the first 50 rooms. Then the fangs grow back.
• Disguised Horror Story: On the surface, the game looks very cute, and for the first 50 rooms, it's a silly Affectionate Parody of common horror tropes. However, the game doesn't stay cute for long after that.
• Disturbing Deer:
  • The Violent Deer appear as normal fawns until one gets too close, to which they suddenly attack the player with their Scary Teeth while growling.
  • Specimen 8, also known as the Deer Lord, lacks the pretence of appearing innocent at all, appearing as a floating figure sporting a spiky-horned deer head with Glowing Eyes of Doom and a missing bottom jaw. It floats through the air and through walls, intending to assimilate the protagonist into itself, beckoning them to "JOIN US" all the while.
• Downer Ending:
  • The Good Ending occurs if one hasn't used the axe too much. The ceiling collapses and kills the player after they defeat Specimen 9, turning them into a ghost. Spooky immediately drafts the player into her ghost army to Take Over the World.
  • If one uses the axe frequently, the Bad Ending occurs. Spooky says that the player will make a fine Specimen and presumably makes them one.
  • The bad ending of the Doll House occurs if the Hellgate was not shut. The protagonist inadvertently causes the horrors found in the mansion to run rampant in the outside world.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: In the good ending, right after the player defeats Specimen 9, the ceiling collapses and crushes the player. Spooky then tells them that they died in a tragic enough way to become a ghost.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Inverted. Completing the game with Specimens turned off results in a half-hearted congratulations from Spooky and the protagonist telling their peers how boring their "adventure" was. Considering the above-mentioned Downer Ending, this is relatively happy.
• Easier Than Easy: The HD Renovation has an option to disable all Specimens. Scripted rooms can still be encountered, but their respective Specimens will not appear at all and the game skips the final boss fight, going straight to the credits screen. According to Word of God, this feature is intended for people who want to enjoy the game, but are unable to due to finding the Specimens too scary.
• Eldritch Location: The mansion's rooms don't make sense and seem to wind on endlessly, and Specimen 12 is a "mansion inside a mansion". A room supposedly containing a map of the house is incredibly unhelpful due to some of the map sections moving on their own.
• Enclosed Space: There's no backtracking or exiting, even when there is an enemy.
  • Some corridors are just straight halls, sometimes only as wide as the doors.
  • The Pocket Dimension for Specimen 11 is essentially this with no way out except for it killing the player.
• Endless Corridor: A random room possibility, where it gets narrower until the player cannot move, at which point Specimen 9 kills them. Later in the game, a certain randomly-spawning room subverts this, appearing endless and dark but only having one way to go, thus eventually revealing a door.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Specimen 9's CAT-DOS entry mentions that Spooky ordered it to be destroyed. When Spooky orders something destroyed, it must be very bad.
• Evil Matriarch: Invoked with Specimen 4, who is a ghost who is implied to have become a ghost due to some trauma that cost her an (presumably) unborn. She's so desperate to have her baby back that not only does she mistake living people for her children, she swallows them whole to place them back inside of her, letting her delude herself that she has returned them to her womb, where they "belong".
• Exact Words: At room 750, Spooky decides to "reward" the player by making it so their stamina can't deplete at all... by preventing them from running to use it up. Though technically, swinging the axe shows that Spooky really did give infinite stamina, she just took away its primary function.
• Expy: Most Specimens and Unknown Specimens are homages to various horror tropes and media.
  • Specimen 5 and her area are homages to the video game series Silent Hill, which is known for its rusty, bloody and metallic settings, foggy environments and visceral hallucinations.
  • Specimen 6 is heavily inspired by The Happy Mask Salesman, with some serious Ben Drowned undertones to it.
  • Possibly unintentional, but Specimen 8, the Deer God, is reminiscent of a 4chan greentext creepypasta about a soldier and his experiences with a deer/goat-man monster that attacks his squad while training.
  • Specimen 10 is referred to as "that thing".
  • Specimen 12 and its host are references to Clock Tower and The Shining. A man is possessed by a supernatural mansion, and is sent to hunt visitors.
  • Subverted with White Face, as it actually is the villain from Imscared rather than an Expy. Likewise for Lisa, who is based on the character of the same name from Silent Hills' Playable Teaser.
  • Otto is a parody of Freddy Fazbear.
• Eye Scream: Dying to Specimen 6 shows a cutscene of one of the protagonist's eyes being held open with a knitting needle being lowered into it. It cuts away before anything is shown.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Spooky is a Cute Ghost Girl with a perpetual smile on her face and is prone to some adorable mannerisms. She is also responsible for the house in the first place and with the help of GL Labs, is the one who brought all the specimens there. A couple of Apocalyptic Logs tell that she left two different GL Labs facilities to fall to Specimens for her own amusement. The minigames also show that she seems to find the suffering of others amusing as well. The Christmas update picture also helps show her true nature by her having a Psychotic Smirk while looking over the corpse of Santa Claus.
• Failed Attempt at Scaring: While alive, Spooky repeatedly attempted to scare people, but never succeeded. Her final attempt involved setting off firecrackers to scare a PTSD victim. Unfortunately, it went too well, with her victim shooting her dead out of surprise.
• Fan Disservice: When first seen, Specimen 13 from behind appears to be an attractive woman wearing only a towel around her waist. The start of her death screen also displays a pretty face, but then shows a Nightmare Face.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Many of the scripted areas and the monsters that accompany them seem to be based around some sort of horror element or genre, with little rhyme or reason. Justified in-universe as Spooky and GL Labs are searching for and finding these anomalies to make the mansion more dangerous.
  • The Unknown Specimens in Endless Mode share this theme, all representing different horror elements.
• Featureless Protagonist: Aside from being an amateur history enthusiast and potentially having had trauma of some sort before the game, there is no information presented about the protagonist. Even in Specimen 6's kill screen, most of what little of the protagonist's face is in-frame is in shadow.
• Final Boss: Surprisingly enough, there is a boss after the 1000 rooms. It's Specimen 9's true humanoid form, and the player has to use their axe to bounce back its energy balls and attack it.
• Foil: Specimen 8 and Tirsiak seem to be this to each other. Both are horned demonic creatures with a connection to arctic cultures' mythology, and both want your flesh to feed their "children", but Specimen 8 (a prey species) wants to absorb victims to makes them a part of itself, whereas Tirsiak (a predator) is only interested in hunting.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Specimen 8 is suggested to not be malicious, and instead just a Papa Bear to the deer. Despite this, he'll still chase you if you don't attack any of the deer.
• Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die: As the game proceeds, Spooky's words begin to sound more like this.
  • In Karamari Hospital, her tone is surprisingly more friendly, even if she is still quick to leave. The DLC is implied to take place after the main game, where the protagonist serves Spooky, so it makes sense.
• Guest Fighter: White Face from Imscared is one of the specimens exclusive to Endless Mode.
• Guide Dang It:
  • Figuring out that the axe can be used on some Specimens can be difficult. The violent deer can be killed with it, and wooden barriers can be chopped down, but if one tries to use it on Specimen 8, it does nothing. This can cause some players to immediately dismiss the axe as just a utility tool that is worthless against all Specimens.
  • Karamari Hospital is more focused on exploration than the main game, but for the most part it's pretty straightforward - the keys display what they're for, so one knows where they need to go. However, the medallion gotten in the Morgue doesn't show its purpose. Compared to the easily understandable keys, this is quite unintuitive.
• Haunted House: The main premise, although the various enemies seem to have been brought there from various locations rather than be part of some mystery.
• Horrifying the Horror: In Karamari Hospital's New Game +, if one kills every single monster, the Demon Child at the end will be terrified of the protagonist and beg for them to not murder them too.
• Horror Comedy: The game ostensibly begins as an Affectionate Parody of shallow horror video games reliant on cheesy Jump Scares, but quickly develops with proper scares of its own once it starts introducing hostile enemies. Even past that point, however, there's still a mix of lightheartedness and deliberate absurdity to keep it from becoming a full-blown horror game, largely thanks to Spooky herself being a mix of adorably snarky and genuinely unsettling.
• Hologram: One of the trailers features Spooky sparking and dissipating, indicating that she might not actually be a ghost girl. It's just a red herring.
• Infinite Supplies: Spooky is behind the creation of a massive underground base with rooms that can rearrange themselves (and this seems to be technological rather than supernatural). She also has an organisation that may rival the SCP Foundation in influence, and is capable of capturing and containing Eldritch Abominations. Spooky is also the ghost of a 12 year-old girl, so exactly how she has acquired such resources is completely unknown.
• Interface Screw: Most of the enemies mess with the controls or visuals in some way. These include slowing the player, changing the appearance of the rooms, making the doors invisible, and affecting the player's vision.
• Invincible Boogeymen: Most of the enemies cannot be fought, and all that is possible is to outrun them, until one eventually loses them. But if they catch the player, they will attack and possibly kill them. A few specimen can be hit with the axe to neutralise or teleport them, and the Husks can be defeated with 3 to five axe swings.
• Joke Ending: If Specimens are turned off, when the player makes it to room 1000, Spooky say that you can leave and that she will contact you if anything changes. The protagonist tells people about the empty mansion, but nobody believes them.
• Jump Scare: It's in the game's title, but the actual scares (Specimen 1) are pretty harmless; though the sounds they make and their appearances become increasingly more disturbing, they can't harm the player at all. Other things won't jump out at the player, but are far more deadly.
  • An update later added an entity named Howard to the game that will Jump Scare the player by chance if they encounter a looping room.
• Kaizo Trap:
  • One room layout is a small circle. Because it loops on itself, enemies that can go through walls can easily get hits in.
  • Enemies can attack during the transitions between rooms. Players who don't know they can open doors while facing away from them may have a harder time getting past Specimen 6. This is changed in the HD Renovation, where the player is invincible as soon as they start entering.
• Killer Rabbit: The deer in the forest area attack if one gets too close.
• Knight of Cerebus: Specimen 2, the first hostile enemy, marks where the game unquestionably begins to become more straight horror.

L-Z

• Leitmotif: Most enemies have a chase theme, though it doesn't always play during re-chases. For example, Specimen 6's is something that wouldn't be out of place in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
• Ludicrous Gibs: How enemies die in "Mall of the Spook".
• The Many Deaths of You: Each of the Specimens (with a few exceptions) have their own methods of killing, which are either described in word or visually shown on screen, ranging from being Eaten Alive to Eye Scream. No matter what, one's soul is trapped in the house.
• The Maze:
  • A randomly-spawning room of the main game, which requires trial-and-error and a little memorisation to find the right path.
  • The final phase of Karamari Hospital before finding the exit has one where Monster 5 chases the player.
• Medium Awareness: One set of notes is written by a person aware they're a character in a video game, and desperately hoping they're the protagonist rather than a doomed side character who leaves notes for exposition.
• Mobile Maze: The house can be rearranged at will. This is shown in a random room with a supposed map of the place, which is completely useless as it keeps rearranging itself. There is also an option to "change house layout" on CAT-DOS, but only shows an error message.
• Monster Clown: He's docile, but one can be found behind bars in The Doll House DLC. Leaving and coming back will show the bars broken, with the clown nowhere to be found. He shows up randomly throughout the dollhouse once it escapes, but will never attack; it just acts creepy.
• Monster Mash: All 4 modes have a wide variety of enemies, in terms of both appearance, mechanics and backstory. All up, there are 27, not counting Specimen 1, the Clown and minor enemies.
• Mood Whiplash: The game starts out as a completely harmless parody of horror games, with a Cute Ghost Girl and adorable "jump scares" that pop out of the walls. It turns genuinely scary at room 60, where Specimen 2 shows up. The game then continues to frequently whiplash between lighthearted parody and sheer dread, with Spooky's antics and some of the notes you find falling into the former category, while the Specimens themselves (other than 1) providing the latter. At the end of the game, after another humorous encounter with Spooky, the player has to fight an intimidating Final Boss, set to oppressive music. And then there's an ending that can be either Nightmare Fuel or quite weird.
• Ms. Fanservice: Specimen 13 appears as an attractive woman from behind, wearing only a towel, and her face looks nice as well. Once her true face is revealed, however, this is utterly averted.
• Multiple Endings: All three parts of the game have alternate endings, depending on the choices the player makes during the game.
• Musical Spoiler: Nearly all enemies have a music theme. If it stops, the specimen has likewise stopped the chase. An annoying bug can sometimes cause the theme not to play during the chase with some of them, which makes it harder to determine when it's safe.
• Never Sleep Again: The Apocalyptic Log in the restaurant details a worker who witnessed strange occurrences at their job. After eating the meat there, they had dreams of being chased in a Pocket Dimension by a demon. Naturally this demon turns out to be Specimen 11 and the player can experience this when they are killed by it.
• New Game+: Karamari Hospital has a few extras that appear only after completing it once. Notably, there is a sword one can take in the office where the medallion is placed.
• Nightmare Face: Specimens 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12's host, and 13 have one. The deer in Specimen 8's domain also have one when approached, as well as later instances of Specimen 1.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • If the game detects that the Endless Mode's save file has been tampered with, it displays a message and deletes the save file. Clicking OK closes the game and opens a video (which is now private).
  • If the game detects that the room number has been changed via external program such as a memory editor, Specimen 9 will be sent after the player.
  • There is also a Joke Ending if the jump scares and Specimens are turned off.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Most of the rooms are completely devoid of enemies, occasionally featuring the benign Specimen 1. In fact, in the first 59 rooms of the game, this and a save room are literally all there is to the game aside from the random notes. In the beginning, this works to ease the player into the game and assume it'll be a completely silly/cute horror parody, inverting this trope. After meeting Specimen 2 and confirming that there are totally real threats in this game, the trope is played entirely straight.
  • There are a set of notes that can be found in Endless Mode from a young child who wanders off to the mansion, believing that a party is being held there. The notes end with something coming to presumably kill the child.
• Offing the Offspring: The fourth arcade machine reveals that Spooky died from an Accidental Murder on Halloween, when the person she was scaring suffered from PTSD and shot her in self-defense. The Dollhouse DLC reveals it was her father that shot her, and then he blamed it on someone else.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The game has two: Spooky, who has more of a cartoony design, and Specimen 4, who is inspired by Japanese horror. According to the good ending, experiencing a tragic death is a key component in making someone a ghost.
• Perverse Puppet: Specimen 6. As long as he's being watched, he can't move aside from turning his head to look at you, but like the Weeping Angels or SCP-173, he moves very quickly when not being watched, and will attack.
• Pocket Dimension: Specimen 11 transports its victims to a large meaty hallway with no exits, before appearing at the end and finishing them off.
• Posthumous Character: Most of the note writers, true to form.
• Press X to Die: Applied before all 1000 rooms were available to be played. When the final room of the current version was reached, the game showed a message that said the subsequent rooms still need to be finished. Players could then press Enter to start playing an Endless Game, or press Backspace to die.
• Psychological Horror: While a couple of sections from the main game had this, Karamari Hospital focuses on this instead of jump scares.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The real Specimen 10 is all but stated to be this, as its main form looks like a person whose been covered legs up in a goo. The Apocalyptic Log of Room 610 also explains that a scientist there had something on them that kept growing despite how hard they tried to get it off. Also, its death screen highly implies that it takes control of victims' bodies and eliminates their consciousness.
• Running Gag: Specimen 1's various ineffectual jump scares and the Romantic Victim referring to a desire for things to be "romantic" in his notes count early on, though the latter is found dead after the notes dry up, and the jump scares become more scary as the rooms pass by.
• Scare Chord: One of many possible ones plays every time an instance of Specimen 1 pops up. There's many different ones to keep it fresh.
• School Setting Simulation: Specimen 4's area takes the form of an abandoned Japanese schoolhouse, where the player encounters shadowy figures of children and learns of a malevolent entity that devours tardy students. Upon trying to leave, Specimen 4 gives chase and tries to eat the player.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • In room 250, Spooky greets and rewards the player with a present: an empty box that says, "Look Behind You." Doing so causes multiple cardboard cutouts to appear. It's harmless, but startling.
  • If one is foolish enough to go down the endless hallway, they eventually get stuck when it gets too narrow, and have to wait for Specimen 9 to get them.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Averted in Endless Mode by disabling the ability to quit the game during a chase. Furthermore, in the HD version, if one tries to Rage Quit to the windows screen, their save file will be automatically deleted and is treated as a death.
• Script Breaking: In-universe, after room 500. Once the player comes back to the room where one would normally encounter Specimen 2, picking up the note that would normally trigger its pursuit causes an error in the house, creating an emergency exit door that puts the player back to room 512.
• Sequel Hook: Karamari Hospital ends with one. After leaving the hospital, Spooky mentions that there is still more to these secret rooms and advises the protagonist to continue exploring.
• Shaggy Dog Story: Whether the protagonist makes it to the end or dies on the way, their fate is the same in the end: they perish and become part of Spooky's army of the dead, or a Specimen. One would at least hope that making it all the way through and dispatching Specimen 9, which GL Labs had failed to take care of, would ensure a higher rank. However, one can survive if they turn off the Specimens and jump scares, but there is no point in playing the game that way other than for an achievement.
• Sinister Deer Skull: Specimen 8, a.k.a. Deer Lord, is a large creature with a deer skull for a head. Under its black robe are a rib cage and screaming human souls. If it kills the player, it recites a cryptic poem.
• Sinister Scythe: Specimen 12's host drags a massive scythe along the ground as he chases. He uses it to parry attacks from the player while outside Specimen 12.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Spooky's arcade games seem to exist solely to glorify her. One is a Foregone Victory, and another replaces the player's name with hers in the high scores.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • The themes for Specimens 4, 10 and 13 are respectively a cute music box tune, a rather somber piece, and a calm, atmospheric piece. None are the kind of music associated with being chased by a hostile monster.
  • Occasionally, the music for the Spooky Kart minigame is replaced with the theme of one of the Specimens.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Specimen 4, who is supposedly the ghost of a woman who lost her (possibly unborn) child.
• Stalked by the Bell: Spend at least 2 minutes in a single room (70 seconds in the HD Renovation), and Specimen 9 will appear and attack, but the player can avoid him if they exit the room quickly.
• Swallowed Whole: Specimen 4 does this to its victims.
• Take Over the World: Spooky's plan is to kill enough people in her mansion and force their ghosts to serve in her ghostly army. She then wants to use her army and her collected monsters in her mansion to take over the world.
• Tennis Boss: The only way to weaken the Final Boss and lower it so that it can be hit with the axe is to axe its fireballs back.
• Uncanny Valley: Invoked. Some of the Specimens don't look right. Specimen 5 has its stiff, jerky movements, and Specimen 6 has a grinning stare that occasionally turns into a frightening, menacing smile.
• Updated Re-release: Got one in late-December 2016. It changed the engine over to Unity, the Specimens have 3D models instead of just being 2D images, and there are much better lighting effects than before.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Specimen 6, since 1 is not hostile, and 2-5 are easy to get away from. Though originally being very easy to avoid due to being able to stare at him and wait for one's health to regenerate, he now randomly disappears if one looks at him too long, and strikes.
• Warmup Boss: Specimen 2, the first enemy to actively hunt the player. He's relatively slow and creates traps to slow down the player, a tactic that several of the specimens share.
• Wendigo: Specimen 8 resembles them, having a deer-like head with antlers and being in a prominently wooded area. Its design actually comes from folklore of the Wechuge, an Athabaskan legend that is very commonly mistaken for the Wendigo.
• Wham Episode: For the first 59 rooms, there are no threats unless the player idles, and the only "jump scares" are the benign Specimen 1, the cardboard cutouts. Then, come room 60, Specimen 2 appears, who has a menacing design, and goes after the player. After getting over the initial shock of the Bait-and-Switch, it's still pretty clearly a slow, weak enemy, but it nevertheless serves as a harbinger of the threats to come.
  • The CAT-DOS computer entries on the Specimens make it all but stated that Spooky and GL Labs, either intentionally or unintentionally, gathered these Specimens to make the house more deadly. These entries also reveal a little more backstory on each of the monsters.
  • The backstory of Spooky and one of the endings detail that this was all an effort to raise a ghost army in order to be taken seriously.
  • The final note in Karamari Hospital is seemingly from one of Spooky's parents. They mourn her and mention that she liked to scare people using costumes and fireworks, and her would-be victim that day suffered from PTSD, causing him to shoot her.
• Wham Line: Spooky delivers one in both endings.
• Wham Shot:
  • Putting the correct code into the otherwise broken arcade machine will activate a video that shows how Spooky died, followed by this line in text: "I just wanted to be taken seriously. I just wanted to scare people. But I don't blame them. At least I finally scared someone."
  • The Doll House DLC gives another one: During the sequence where the nightmare is destroyed, the player turns a corner, and automatically shoots Spooky.
• What the Hell, Player?: The death screen brought about by touching the furnace repeatedly first shows the text "YOU ARE A FOOL". The "You Fool" achievement is gotten by dying to the barbed wire, electric barrier, furnace or Self-Destruct Sequence.
• Workplace Horror: Alluded to in room 710, which is a strange burger joint. An employee who worked at one noted that customers suddenly became addicted to the beef, the managers became extremely violent towards anyone bringing outside food into the restaurant, and after having one of the burgers themselves, the employee too became addicted and finally quit after becoming plagued with nightmares about being chased by Specimen 11 in the restaurant.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Specimen 4 has a particular fondness for children, it seems. She was originally haunting a school and devouring children before she was brought to the mansion.
  • It's also somewhat implied that the main character is young, which can possibly put the other specimen under this scope. Spooky and the White Cat both refer to the protagonist as being little; and Specimen 8 calls the protagonist a child while chasing them.