Halloween Cleverly Carves Its Own Path Through Horror Multiplayer - GameSpot

Among horror royalty, there is perhaps no greater icon than Michael Myers. First appearing in 1978, the slasher helped ignite a trend of similar movie monsters that defined the next decade and beyond of the horror landscape.

Halloween: The Game displays a keen understanding of his special place in that lineage, and IllFonic has brought his unique sense of unrelenting menace to video games in a way I can’t get enough of.

Halloween: The Game is a 4v1 asymmetrical horror game from a team that has established its brand on similar projects. From Friday the 13th and Predator: Hunting Grounds to Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, IllFonic has spent the last decade becoming synonymous with this genre, and yet it’s never made the same game twice. That’s true again here, as one of Halloween’s best attributes is that it plays quite unlike any other, be it from this team or the others also making games in this realm. The studio didn’t reskin something we’ve seen before in a blue jumpsuit. This is the real deal.

Though games of this sort have used a 4v1 setup before, most famously in the genre’s king of the hill, Dead by Daylight, Halloween adds a unique wrinkle in the form of NPCs. Across the various maps of Haddonfield, Illinois, residents go about their day-to-day lives, and it’s up to the team of four player-controlled survivors to warn them of the threat Myers poses, protect them, and eventually escort them off the map or hide them until the round’s timer expires.

I love this new approach to the genre for two big reasons. For one, it dims the spotlight on the human survivors. In a game of Dead by Daylight, for example, one or two people dying early will likely doom the entire round. But in Halloween, your group of four is joined by a handful of other potential survivors, and the game’s scoring system, like Killer Klowns’ before it, is not built on a binary pass/fail. You could die in a round, but if your team helps a handful of residents flee to safety, you may have won the round anyway. It feels like less pressure is on your shoulders.

Fundamentally, this gives the entire game a feel unlike anything that’s come before it. You’re not just trying to escape or wait out the timer to win, as you did in Friday the 13th. You actively need to outrun and outsmart Michael Myers, creatively using the limited time you have before he appears in stabbing range. Staying stealthy, locking doors behind you, and pre-planning an exit strategy–like jumping out a window when he’s swarmed the house you’re in–are vital.

But there’s another big reason this novel setup works so well: It authentically captures the spirit of the movies, particularly that timeless first one from 1978. This is especially true when you’re playing as Michael himself. His key ability, the Shape Jump, allows him to quickly and invisibly float around the map, reappearing anywhere so long as it’s dark and no survivor is too near, mimicking his way of almost supernaturally being where you least expect him.

But simply spawning on survivors to quickly gut them only awards the killer a measly score for his gory efforts. Instead, you’re encouraged by the scoring system to stalk your prey, watching from a distance, building up your stalking meter, before ultimately moving in for the kill. The higher your stalking meter, the more environmental kills you can unlock, too, which don’t just add even more score, but also sell the horror-movie vibe–Michael isn’t merely slashing everyone with his butcher knife. He’s throwing them through TVs, into fireplaces, or leaving them propped up on fences like twisted lawn decorations.

After a kill, you’re also encouraged to admire your work, staring at it in the same first-person view you use to stalk people in order to build up a Bloodthirst meter that makes Michael more powerful for subsequent kills.

This loop of stalking and killing residents, both user-controlled and NPCs, gives Halloween its special ingredient. I found myself role-playing as Michael in ways I didn’t see coming, peeking out from bushes just enough to stealthily build my stalking meter on unsuspecting victims, practically recreating some of the film’s most memorable imagery. Staring into people’s living rooms as they gabbed on the phone or leisurely watched TV was so immersive, I’d even creep myself out at times. It felt like I was playing a home-invasion simulator. It was unsettling, but true to the film.

With a lot of games in this space, the community is often obsessed with playing as the killer, and that’ll likely happen here, too. But playing Halloween as a survivor has been my most enjoyable experience on that side of the asymmetry since Friday the 13th. The objective of getting people out alive is fresh, but even when it’s your neck Michael is breathing down, it’s well-balanced. After a few matches as Michael, I thought he was overpowered, but as I played more and people came to understand how to operate as survivors, it became clearer that those survivors have a lot of strength in numbers.

Banding together to arm NPCs, escorting them to escape routes, and disrupting Michael’s restless pursuit with flashlights, firecrackers, guns, and melee weapons are best done with your friends nearby. If you’re grabbed, you can pry yourself free rather easily with a pocket knife, or with more effort using a quick-time event that lets you escape his clutches if you’re fast enough. When Michael closes the distance, it’s possible and could even be likely that you down him with a gang attack. Though he can’t seemingly be killed like Jason once could, when he’s downed, his Bloodthirst meter takes a major hit, before he sits up like The Undertaker (okay, to be fair, The Undertaker stole that move from him), and continues his pursuit.

Little moments like that will be rarer, but in between, the period-specific cars, kitchens, garages, and TV shows soak you in the time and place of the film, while the front porches lined with jack-o’-lanterns, as vibes-rich as they already are, feel destined to be even more appreciated every October. I love the fall season, and that’s partly because I love horror so much. It feels so good to live in the world of the film, faithfully brought to life in every would-be-quaint home turned into a crime scene, aglow in the lights of both pumpkins and police cars.

It’s not only the NPCs that make Halloween stand out from the pack of asymmetrical horror multiplayer games. There’s also a single-player campaign, though it’s not the draw here. Across six missions and only about two hours total for a single playthrough, you’ll play entirely as Michael Myers, re-enacting some of the movie’s scenes while also adding to the canon. The premise is that you’re playing as him, starting with his escape from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium and up through Halloween Eve, essentially filling a gap in time when we otherwise don’t see what he’s up to.

It functions more than anything as a tutorial. With various icons on the screen, cooldown abilities, and lots of mechanics to manage, from killing the electricity, phone lines, or, of course, the many people around town, the campaign does its job at teaching you the basics, though it should be noted there’s no survivor equivalent. For that side of the game, you really just learn by doing. I didn’t mind that since it meant things like repairing getaway cars, calling the cops, or unlocking the emergency bunker weren’t so clearly understood, heightening the horror of my earliest rounds.

The campaign also has more to do than just see each mission once, as it includes a set of challenges to complete that award items such as player banners, clothing, and other cosmetics for its several survivor characters and Michael himself. I had more fun with the campaign when chasing these rewards than I did on the first pass when I was playing it simply for its own sake. The solo mode isn’t much to get excited about on its own.

Halloween also continues a long trend for IllFonic games, and it’s one I wish all other games of this sort would copy: You lose nothing for playing in private matches. You enjoy the same XP rates; you can unlock all the same rewards; there’s nothing gated behind matchmaking versus playing in a private lobby. Though it’s easy to load into a multiplayer game with your friends anyway, I know firsthand that sometimes you want to keep it more casual or private in a game for just you and your buddies. I can see why other games, particularly the ultra-competitive Dead by Daylight, aren’t as willing to tear down that barrier, but IllFonic has never punished players for playing in private matches, even if they choose to never step foot into a public lobby, and I love that.

I had a ton of fun with Halloween, so much, in fact, that I was willing to forgive what was a messy experience during many rounds. Bugs in the game ranged from cosmetic blemishes, like misaligned kill animations and floating police cars appearing on the map, to more serious issues, like players losing the ability to move or frame-rate slowdowns.

Lots of these issues were cleaned up over time; I’ve been playing the game for a few weeks now and have seen several patches come through. Still, with more planned patches on the way, my expectation is early adopters will experience some janky aspects of their own, even if they may be less common or different than the ones I named here. If there’s one consistent mark against this studio, it’s a lack of polish out of the gate.

These issues slightly tempered my enjoyment of Halloween, though I’m generally not easily frustrated by bugs if the core experience is good enough. If you tend to be more bothered by them, you may want to see how the broader community reacts in the early days after launch. For me, though, I had so much fun and only didn’t play more than my 20+ hours because it’s hard to coordinate multiplayer sessions when only a few people in the world are playing before launch.

People often like to stack up every asymmetrical horror game to Dead by Daylight. I’ve never felt that makes sense. Games like Halloween aren’t trying to replace that genre titan; they’re seeking to live alongside it. To do that, they need a distinct and exciting gameplay loop and to capture the tone of their source material. Halloween achieves both of these things, giving players a vibes-heavy experience befitting the timeless film while also offering a unique hook that keeps the game from feeling like a rehash of the many horror multiplayer games that came before it. Games like Halloween don’t make me think the landscape is oversaturated. It makes me excited to see what teams that love horror the way IllFonic does will do next, because here, with Halloween, they nailed it.

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