Plenty of things are terrifying about a man in a boiler suit creeping up behind you, but it’s hard to be scared of Halloween: The Game’s Michael Myers when he strolls around the neighborhood with all the urgency of a retiree on a golf course. Now, having gone through the solo campaign twice and spent many an hour watching a rando Michael Myers intentionally delay killing everyone in the lobby just to torture his spectators, my thoughts have shifted very little from my initial impressions. One of horror’s most iconic villains deserves so much more than this.
Ahead of its public release and a day-one patch, the asymmetrical horror of Halloween: The Game – buggy, broken, and hilariously unpolished – initially fell well short of expectations. In its defense, though, it’s improved by almost every available measure since the day-one patch. Some, if not all, animations have been smoothed out. There has been a marked decrease in game-breaking bugs and crashes. The mini-game QTEs are much more responsive… even if I still have to watch a weapon occasionally phase through an enemy for no discernible reason. The limited maps, cookie-cutter roster with very little differentiation between civilian characters, and repetitive gameplay loop, however, are just too rough and restrictive, and I find myself hemorrhaging enthusiasm within an hour or so.
Developer Illfonic is, of course, almost synonymous with asymmetrical horror at this point, if not quite able to break the stranglehold Behaviour Interactive has with Dead by Daylight. In keeping with the traditions of the genre, you either play on your own as the killer, Michael Myers, and rampage through the town, or you work with up to three other players and a handful of AI companions to loot items and keep yourself alive long enough to find and open the route to escape the streets of Haddonfield on Halloween night in 1978.
Because of Illfonic’s back catalog, I came in with high expectations, and knowing Halloween creator John Carpenter was also involved sent them soaring even further. You’d think, with the best part of a decade’s learning and all that asym experience behind it, Halloween: The Game would be the most polished of all Illfonic’s games. But that just doesn’t seem to be the case.
Spend just ten minutes with the solo campaign, for instance, and you’ll see immediately what I mean. It’s a great idea to drop a brief single-player mode into an asym game, offering not only a chance to explore Myers’ abilities and skillset outside a populated map, but also something to do while you wait for your squad to get online. The problem is, like much the rest of Halloween: The Game, it feels shallow, rushed, and, at times, unfinished. The six levels take 15-20 minutes each if you’re thorough (under ten if you’re not) and ostensibly give you a little context into who Michael is as a person, how he became what he is, and what the town of Haddonfield endured that Halloween night in 1978. But it’s clumsy, tedious, and doesn’t even offer much in a change of scenery. In fact, you’re exploring the same homes and maps you do in the multiplayer mode for most of these missions, making this more of a tutorial rather than a true single-player component.
In both modes, you’ll encounter the same issues, too. Characters are sometimes shown walking three feet off the ground, death animations can occur two feet away from where a body actually is, and sometimes you can open a door, step through it, lock it, and then glitch out to the front of the door again, unable to get back in.
The NPC behavior is hysterically stupid, too. Once, playing as Myers before the day-one patch, I (loudly) busted through a front door and found all three remaining NPCs in the same room, still standing at the same window. I had executed two before the remaining one decided it was time to make a run for it, and that’s the kind of thing you can expect to see over and over again, even playing the patched version.
It’s galling because there are some excellent ideas here. I had a great time with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s spin on asymmetrical horror back in 2023 (developed by Sumo Digital, not Illfonic), but within days it was clear no one wanted to play as Leatherface because it was so much easier – and considerably more fun – to clock up XP and escape as a survivor.
In Halloween: The Game, however, Illfonic seems to have really taken the time to balance the odds between killer and civilian, and Myers is a blast to play. Even though he (quite rightly) never, ever runs, making it next to impossible to take someone out if they’ve seen you, his special abilities help mitigate that deeply unsatisfactory walking speed. Especially if you nail the timing and capitalize on using the shadows in your favor, actions like snuffing out all the lights in the immediate area, jumping from shadow to shadow, and detecting nearby civilians all work really well. Plus, the execution mechanic is a neat shortcut if you manage to get close enough to… well, execute it. The death animations, if often out of sync, are brilliantly brutal, particularly if you manage to catch a civilian by a window, next to an electric oven or, I’m delighted to report, next to a lawn flamingo.
Best of all, this isn’t just four humans against one killer. As Myers, your job is to wipe the map clean of all survivors, human and NPC alike. As a civilian, you need to creep around the deliciously 70s-inspired maps with the familiar piano keys thudding in time alongside you, quietly warning NPCs and instructing them to either hide, follow you, or escape. Everything, from the cars to the decor to the rotary phones, is on point here; not to mention the fashion. Platform heels, bellbottom jeans, tank tops, and huge, winged bangs – plenty of things aren’t quite right in Halloween: The Game, but trust me: the style is not one of them!
There are plenty of items to gather as you creep through residential homes, including offensive weapons, defensive tools, and a host of goodies to bolster the odds of getting out unscathed, such as keys, bolt cutters, and intoxicants for… reasons. You’ll never be able to take Myers out completely; just like the movies, this is a dude who does not know how to take the hint and die. But you can temporarily immobilize him with the right timing and the right equipment. But why do we have to sit and watch Myers torture idiot NPCs if all the human characters are already dead?
Halloween: The Game just hasn’t evolved with the genre.
You’re given QTEs every few seconds to drop to survivors when spectating, and I hate them — they’re too boring and happen too frequently. However, hanging around waiting for someone else to either complete the mission or run out the clock is particularly irritating if you’re one of the first civilians to fall. Unless you fancy losing the scant XP earned, you’re forced to stay in and spectate a match for the next fifteen or so minutes (and I am absolutely convinced some of the Mikes I’ve encountered intentionally drag this out almost until the dying seconds).
Illfonic has tried to mitigate this by allowing fallen civilians to return as police officers, which adds a lovely wrinkle that’s admittedly better than spectating. But given Myers is unkillable and his Shape Jump is overpowered and essentially limitless, at times it feels like all the odds are stacked against the poor townsfolk of Haddonfield.
