The player takes on the role of Adams Adler, a newspaper reporter investigating a mansion for clues to the whereabouts of the eponymous Hauzer, a famed archeologist who has mysteriously disappeared.

Doctor Hauzer has stark graphical and gameplay similarities with early titles in the Infogrames survival horror series Alone in the Dark, which feature 3D polygonal characters and objects set against fixed, pre-rendered backgrounds.

The game garnered mostly favorable opinions regarding its gameplay and the player's ability to change camera views, though reviewers widely disapproved of its short length and slow frame rate.

All the game's environments and their elements are fully rendered in 3D with the default viewpoint being a third-person perspective at fixed camera angles that adjust according to the player's position in a room.

Having the home built over the excavation site, Hauzer and his two assistants unearthed a stone lithograph relating to the cherubim, biblical beings tasked by God with protecting the Garden of Eden.

Hauzer's increasing insanity caused him to sacrifice his assistants in the name of the cherubim and his final diary entry implies that members of law enforcement and university faculty would also potentially fall victim to his paranoia.

During the game's epilogue, Adler states he wishes not to publish his findings for fear the public would dismiss them as fiction and admits he himself was in disbelief that the events actually occurred.

The young designer, wanting to make a name for himself at the company, intensely researched the budding technology and experimented on higher-end personal computers capable of producing 3D programs at the time.

[2][3][4][16] Upon its release in Japan, Doctor Hauzer was evaluated by the staff of Weekly Famitsu alongside many other 3DO titles that immediately followed the console's launch in the region the month prior.

[1] Though Doctor Hauzer was never officially localized outside of Japan, it has earned critical commentary from several English and French language media outlets and accrued an overall average reception.

[5] Mark Patterson of Computer and Video Games was much more negative, recounting all aspects of Riverhillsoft's effort as blatant plagiarism of Alone in the Dark and proclaiming Doctor Hauzer as "a miserable copy.

While Famitsu felt the visual offerings on the 3DO were inferior to competing hardware in 1994, the staff recognized that the polygonal graphics and multiple camera perspectives in Doctor Hauzer helped to distinguish it.

"[19] Edge labeled the graphics "fantastic" and was impressed that the game world was constructed entirely using "superbly detailed texture-mapped polygons" that allowed for more camera viewpoints and an improvement over the look of Alone in the Dark.

[5][6][19] Patterson contrarily saw no value in changing to the first-person perspective and only recognized the top-down view as useful for checking a room's contents, also concluding that there were too few obstacles or action to qualify it as either an adventure or an arcade game.

Edge declared that working out puzzles and advancing in Doctor Hauzer does not last long enough and that having a larger house to explore or more characters with which to interact would make the game "an essential purchase."

[31] A 2016 issue of PC Gamer claimed, "If Jet Set Radio marked the hot, explosive puberty of cel-shaded graphics, then this 3DO game was its slithering birth.

"[22] Some sources have treated Doctor Hauzer as a notable step in the evolution of survival horror leading up to the landmark 1996 debut of Resident Evil by Capcom, which popularized and helped better define the genre.

"[28] The Escapist contributor Liz Finnegan wrote that, alongside contemporaries like Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower, and D, Doctor Hauzer helped establish many of the tropes and gameplay elements that paved the way for Resident Evil.

[4] Video game historian Carl Therrien of the Université de Montréal wrote that both Doctor Hauzer and Alone in the Dark "influenced the look and pacing of Resident Evil to a great extent.

"[32] In a 2013 Famitsu magazine interview, Silent Hill and Siren creator Keiichiro Toyama credited Doctor Hauzer for sparking his interest in developing horror games.