The 1990s were a grand time for edutainment games on PC, with JumpStart being a major franchises of the time. Whether for school or personal use, JumpStart games were full of fun and educational activities and populated with colorful characters who helped the player out. It was a nice, bright, colorful way for kids to learn new age-appropriate concepts.
However, the JumpStart library features one exception to this standard: JumpStart 4th Grade: Haunted Island. Released in 1996 and rereleased the following two years, Haunted Island used the same core formula that JumpStart games aimed at third to sixth graders did, featuring an underlying story to encourage players to return. In this case, the story featured a lighter, softer version of survival horror.
In Haunted Island, players are a fourth-grade student who missed a day of school. However, they soon learn that absence was for the best, as the substitute teacher Ms. Grunkle was actually a witch who turned the other students into monsters and took them to the titular Haunted Island. To turn them back, players need to remind their classmates of their humanity by retrieving items that belonged to each of them. They'll also need to find 25 skeleton keys and Ms. Grunkle's magic wand to confront her. This requires playing various mini-games that test the player's knowledge of subjects like math, English and history.
Haunted Island's aesthetic has been compared to the work of Tim Burton, and it does seem to take some aesthetic inspiration from The Nightmare Before Christmas. For example, Ms. Grunkle's house bears a passing resemblance to Jack Skellington's, and the island is monochromatic with bursts of color at points of interest. It's also populated by spooky characters and, on the surface, seems no more innocuous than the previous games.
Once you start playing, however, it becomes clear that Haunted Island is more creepy than charming. The monochromatic art makes it easy to get lost while wandering the mazelike island and the even more mazelike Labyrinth -- a place you go if the candle representing your health gets extinguished. The music adds to the tension while wandering this world full of tortured faces visible in tree bark and the tormented echoes of characters from previous JumpStart games. Early on in the game, there's even an abandoned version of the town from JumpStart Pre-K.
The characters players encounter in Haunted Island add to the lingering terror. Madame Pomreeda might be helpful, but that doesn't make her any less terrifying. Flap, who helps you get your classmates back, is one of Ms. Grunkle's previous victims according to supplementary material. Plus, Ms. Grunkle is not above swooping down on you at any time to remind you that you're only able to progress because she enjoys watching you squirm.
Still, of all the characters that terrorized the players, Repsac is the most dreaded. Like Ms. Grunkle, he can come up on you anywhere, including the Labyrinth. However, unlike Ms. Grunkle, Repsac asks riddles which, if failed, will cause the player to lose health. Losing too much will cause the player to be sent to the Labyrinth, where they'll have to find the Fountain of Health to restore their candle and get out. The rereleases of the game included a map to teleport to places, which many players used just to avoid Repsac.
JumpStart 4th Grade: Haunted Island didn't just have a spooky aesthetic -- it was basically a horror game. With a first-person viewpoint, dim lighting, a dreary environment and a villain that's basically an eldritch fae horror set on tormenting them for fun, this is basically a non-violent, gore-less horror game that wouldn't look too out of place next to some Resident Evil titles. The use of then-new 3D art only added to the game's off-putting feel.
It's perhaps because of this that the game is so hard to come by nowadays. Outside of emulators or CD-ROM copies from the '90s, the game is no longer available. After two rereleases that significantly reduced the difficulty, Haunted Island was removed from the JumpStart roster and replaced with Sapphire Falls -- likely the result of negative feedback from parents of terrified children. While this makes sense considering the game's target audience was children between the ages of eight and ten, it still seems like a shame that a title that was many '90s kid's first experience with survival-horror games is lost to time.