Soapbox options allow our particular person writers and contributors to voice their opinions on scorching subjects and random stuff they have been chewing over. Today, Ethan chateaus himself within the creepiest place within the Pokémon world…
Ah, Lavender Town — the place the place the journeys of outdated Pokémon finish and the nightmares of younger trainers are born. This gothic locale from the unique Game Boy titles has transcended its franchise into an iconic piece of popular culture in its personal proper, and it’s not onerous to see why. Between its downbeat aesthetic, its surprisingly ahead exploration of mortality, and its plethora of related web legends, Lavender Town completely deserves its repute as certainly one of essentially the most memorably spooky locations in gaming.
Okay, we’ve received the niceties out of the way in which. For all of that notoriety, Lavender Town is way from the scariest place Pokémon Trainers can go to — neither is it the place that tormented my desires as a toddler. For that, one should enterprise all the way in which to the Eterna Forest in Sinnoh. There, deep within the woods, lies an deserted mansion often known as the Old Chateau.
Featured in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, Platinum, and their Switch remakes, the Old Chateau instantly distinguishes itself from Lavender Town in a single notable division. Unlike the Kantonian settlement, the Old Chateau is a very non-compulsory space that your common participant can be forgiven for lacking on a breezy playthrough. It lurks within the shadows off the crushed path of the Eterna Forest and requires the Cut HM, which means that you could deliberately backtrack and encounter it after your first time by way of the world.
As a younger Pokémon participant with no prior information of the Gen 4 video games, restricted web entry, and a longing for journey, I used to be thrilled after I found the Old Chateau for the primary time. Of course, that intrigue shortly become abject horror after I realized simply what precisely I had discovered.
From its exterior, the Old Chateau seems like an unassuming if slightly gloomy manor. However, upon entrance, the soundtrack wastes barely a millisecond in informing you that you’ve made an enormous mistake in coming right here. The constructing’s theme is a warped, disjointed melody that invokes a robust feeling of unpleasantness, with wavering tones and unsettling moans sprinkled all through. It was this music that signaled one thing necessary to my eight-year-old self: the place Lavender Town is somber, the Old Chateau is downright sinister.
Inside the dilapidated mansion, you possibly can discover plenty of rooms unfold throughout two flooring. The Old Chateau’s structure and aesthetic aren’t something too out of the unusual, nevertheless it solely takes slightly little bit of exploring to grasp that one thing isn’t fairly proper. Observing a statue within the lobby, it feels prefer it’s evident proper at you. In one of many bedrooms, you might be watched by a classical portray with glowing crimson eyes that abruptly disappear while you look immediately at it. In one more room, an old school TV blares static with what the sport identifies as an “oddly malevolent really feel.”
These little particulars are creepy sufficient on their very own, however the complete lack of interactable NPCs or fellow Trainers makes exploring fairly the daunting process. You are fully alone as you plunge into the depths of this derelict locale — at the least, that’s what you may consider at first.
Perhaps essentially the most notorious facet of the Old Chateau is that Ghost-type Pokémon aren’t the one phantoms it homes. Exploring numerous components of the home may end up in sightings of honest-to-goodness human specters. In one of many bedrooms, there’s an opportunity you’ll witness slightly woman standing within the adjoining room, who wordlessly glides out into the hallway and out of sight. An analogous encounter can happen within the eating room, the place you may even see an outdated man hover towards the kitchen, just for him to vanish if adopted.
These supernatural episodes are transient and quiet, however they have been greater than sufficient to make me hot-foot it again outdoors after I first noticed them. Perhaps much more unnerving than these encounters is the truth that they occur fully at random — there’s no option to definitively set off them, and a participant who’s none the wiser to their existence has a stable shot of by no means encountering them in any respect.
I used to be terrified by the Old Chateau as a child. That’s to be anticipated — it’s a spot expressly crafted to scare the pants off of unsuspecting gamers. But I believe the way in which that this particular location caught in my thoughts has a lot to do with its thriller.
As spooky as it could be, I perceive Lavender Town. I perceive why the vengeful spirit of Marowak haunts Pokémon Tower. The Old Chateau provides no such explanations for its numerous phenomena. The identities of phantoms who roam its halls are unknown. In truth, the Old Chateau is seldom talked about anyplace else within the sport. It exists in an odd little bubble, fully faraway from the whole lot else. That ambiguity serves as the right slate for the creativeness to run wild.
Left with few clues, gamers have tried to glean particulars concerning the mansion and its ghostly inhabitants by way of skinny threads of environmental storytelling. One widespread idea is that the unknown little woman fell deathly in poor health, and the outdated man unsuccessfully tried to treatment her ailment — therefore the telltale Antidote that may be discovered within the kitchen’s waste bin. Then, there’s the matter of Rotom, a Pokémon residing within the mansion’s TV who seemingly bears ties to each the historical past of the Old Chateau and Team Galactic Commander Charon, as implied by a number of in-game paperwork and journals. These bits of hypothesis signify the tip of the iceberg, and fan dialogue provides the Old Chateau a fair darker edge.
As a lot as I like the Old Chateau and all of the creepy lore surrounding it, I have to admit that the scare issue of visiting the place has dulled a bit for me. I’m not the impressionable child I as soon as was, and I’m conversant in the manor’s structure and methods.
Still, I couldn’t assist however get a number of goosebumps whereas amassing footage for this text as I re-entered the mansion and heard that chilling OST for the umpteenth time. As I revisited rooms I assumed have been oh-so-familiar, my coronary heart dropped the identical means it did years earlier than after I heard a sinister giggle earlier than getting into one of many bedrooms — a contemporary contact added within the Switch remakes.
Even a childhood and alter later, the Old Chateau nonetheless finds methods to get below the pores and skin.
