Halloween charts a distinct course in horror multiplayer games

Among horror's elite, Michael Myers stands as perhaps the ultimate icon. When he first appeared in 1978, this slasher helped spark a wave of similar movie monsters that would shape the horror landscape for the next decade and beyond.

Halloween: The Game shows a deep understanding of his special place in that lineage, and IllFonic has translated his unique brand of relentless menace into a video game experience I can't get enough of.

Halloween: The Game is a 4v1 asymmetrical horror title from a studio that has built its reputation on exactly this kind of project. From Friday the 13th and Predator: Hunting Grounds to Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, IllFonic has spent the past decade becoming synonymous with the genre—yet it has never made the same game twice. That holds true here as well, since one of Halloween's greatest strengths is that it plays unlike anything else, whether from this team or others working in the same space. The studio didn't just reskin something familiar and slap a blue jumpsuit on it. This is the real deal.

While 4v1 setups have been done before—most famously in the genre's reigning champion, Dead by Daylight—Halloween introduces a unique twist through NPCs. Across the various maps of Haddonfield, Illinois, residents go about their daily routines, and it's up to the team of four player-controlled survivors to warn them about the threat Myers poses, protect them, and ultimately escort them off the map or keep them hidden until the round's timer runs out.

I love this fresh approach to the genre for two major reasons. First, it shifts the spotlight away from the human survivors. In a game like Dead by Daylight, losing one or two people 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 scoring system—like Killer Klowns' before it—isn't built on a binary pass/fail. You could die during a round, but if your team helped several residents escape to safety, you may have won the round anyway. It feels like there's less pressure 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.

Halloween is certainly IllFonic's best-looking game yet.

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 chatted on the phone or casually 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.

Yes, Laurie Strode is playable and sometimes even an NPC—and, as an added plot twist, she might even die first.

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.

Each map envelops you in the place and time of the original film.

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.

Though the launch-day patch may provide a cleaner experience than I had, I'd be surprised if Halloween is entirely free of the issues I ran into.

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.

Source: GameSpot