Halloween: The Game | First Impressions

When I first launched home in the game, I had a very specific idea of what that moment was supposed to feel like. I really thought that I would launch it, disappear into Huntingfield, find the miners have really taken all in. And that isn't really what happened. Looking at their backstories, I spent way too long choosing a civilian to play as, and within about 20 minutes, thanks to Michael Myers and she was trying to murder me. Which, honestly, that was probably the better introduction to what the game actually is. Because I'm gonna spend several days with Hollywood. I've played public matches, I've played private matches, I've played as Michael and the civilians, I've explored Hampton Field, I've murdered an alarming number of police officers in Hamptonfield, and then I have played Michael Story. And I feel like I can finally start entering the question that I've had for myself since this game is a mountain, which is what does it actually feel like to play a Halloween game? We'll get into the balance feature, the minimum, all that later in the series. But right now, what I want to talk about is the experience of finally stepping into Halloween game. These are my first impressions of Halloween the game. Spooky season greetings and salutations, and welcome to Hacker Slash. If you're joining us again, welcome back. And if this is your first time listening, welcome to the party. My name is Chris, I'm your friendly neighborhood slasher enthusiast, and if you've missed our predictions episode for this game, let me just take a second to establish and remind you exactly where I'm coming from here. Because this is not my review of Halloween the game. It would be ridiculous for me, woefully unqualified, to review a live multiplayer game less than a week after getting access to it. But what I can give you is a snapshot. This is what the game feels like to me right now during launch week, while everybody is still learning how the hell any of this works. And I actually think that's worth documenting because six weeks from now, we're gonna know the maps, we're gonna know the best routes, people are going to understand the perks and the builds and how to counter each other. There will inevitably be some widely known and adopted strategy for how to play Michael best, and I'm sure the community will discover 17 ways to play this game that Ilphonic never even intended. But you only get to be new to Haddonfield once. So that's the version that I want to capture today. I also want to repeat something I said in our predictions episode, which is I am approaching this as a massive Halloween fan who sometimes plays video games. I am not pretending to be a professional game critic. If you want frame rate analysis and detailed coding discussions, there are vastly more qualified people to give you that, and you can find that very easily. But what I can tell you is whether something felt responsive to me as a Halloween fan. I can tell you whether I got lost. I can tell you whether a mechanic made sense without somebody having to explain it to me. I can absolutely tell you whether something feels like Halloween. Now, there are two really big questions that are looming over this game right now. One, is this a good video game? Two, is it a good adaptation of Halloween? And those answers may not be the same. So that's the lens that I'm using. Now, my first night was playing during early access on September 4th. Binx joined me first. Later, my co-host Paris joined in when we went into the public matchmaking. And we deliberately started with a private match because neither Binx nor I knew what the hell we were doing, and we wanted to explore without immediately getting obliterated by someone who'd already spent hours learning Michael Myers. And hilariously, in our very first match, it immediately assigned Binx to Michael. There was no tutorial, there was no practice around. The game does have that set up for you, so you can figure that out. But in our in our circumstance, it was very much welcome to Haddonfield, Binx is the shape now. Figure it out, you're gonna get wrecked. And that actually became one of my favorite things about that first night. Now, the first thing that I do really want to talk about is simply what this game looks and feels like when you boot it up, because before I understood a single mechanic, Halloween the game got something extremely important very right. It feels confident about its identity. Even sitting in the menus, you're immediately being sold this specific interpretation of 1978. There's a subtle filmic quality to the image, the lighting has a slightly hazy texture, the presentation isn't screaming neon Halloween decorations at you, it feels very grounded. And even then, when you get to the character selection screen, now this is where Binks and I lost an embarrassing amount of time because I expected the attention to really go towards Lori Strode and Michael Myers, but instead I found myself reading about Eric Dunn being a mediocre man. I learned that Alexis works for Strode Realty and immediately decided that the entire plot of Halloween is now her fault, because why did Lori have to drop those keys off if Mr. Strode had someone who could have done that for him? I also discovered that Richard is apparently Haddonfield's resident rich party boy. And of course, I naturally looked back at Marcus and said, Yeah, that's my guy with a red bandana, I'm playing as him. Because one of the challenges of adapting the original Halloween into a multiplayer game is that this movie doesn't exactly give you a gigantic ensemble. You have Lori, Annie, Linda, Bob, but that's not enough to build this kind of game around. So suddenly we're meeting people who presumably existed somewhere in Haddonfield on October 31st, 1978, while the movie was happening. Now, I don't know yet if I think all those characters successfully feel like people who belong in that world. That's a conversation I want to say for when we're specifically diving into the civilians in a later episode. But as an immediate first impression, I wanted to know who they were, and I really liked that Binx and I were even reacting to them differently upon starting the game. She immediately gravitated toward Rachel and Alexis. I immediately flocked over to Marcus. She evaluated their stats and traits. I read their biographies and tried to figure out how these people even fit into Haddenfilter to begin with. She's playing a video game, but I'm interrogating a Halloween adaptation. Now the other thing I noticed very quickly is that the characters aren't just skins. They have different attributes, different traits, different starting options. Rachel can hear Michael breathing and detect shape jump at close range. Richard actually benefits from being intoxicated. Marcus immediately appealed to me because of his general playstyle. And that was the first moment where I realized that eventually choosing a character is gonna have to be about more than aesthetics. But right now, I have been choosing based on vibes, vibes alone, and I'm not apologizing for it. Of course, there comes a time where you actually have to enter the maps. And that was the moment that I was waiting for most. Our first map was Orange Grove Estates because that's where the Doyle and Wallace houses are. And within minutes, I was running around saying things like, wait, no, is this? Surely it can't be. Oh, it is. I walked into the kitchen and I immediately recognized it was the Wallace house. That happened repeatedly. It's where the game's environmental work started winning me over because there was a difference between recreating a recognizable movie location and then making it feel like geographically it's convincing as part of an actual town. And the movie only needs to show us what was inside the frame. So it only had to worry about a very narrow lane of focus. But a game, this game, has to answer all the questions in its orbit. What's behind the house? Where does that street actually go? What's around the corner? How far does the Wallace house feel from the Doyle House when you're physically moving between them and not just watching Lori cross a street with Michael a long distance away? Suddenly, locations that I've known as shots are becoming spaces where I'm fighting to survive. And that is probably the single coolest thing that I've experienced playing this game. Now we get to the thing that I was most nervous about because I'm not somebody who naturally gravitates towards playing killer in an asymmetrical horror game. Now I've played Dead by Daylight, I enjoy Dead by Daylight, but I have also never felt competent playing killer in Dead by Daylight. And in our predictions episode, I even said I don't have interest in playing him a multiplayer, specifically because I'm not gonna be good at it. But naturally on night one, we're just doing it. I eventually got a turn at Michael, and my immediate thought was, oh, this is gonna go terribly. But then the damnedest thing happened. I found that I understood him. Not everything, not even close. I was absolutely button mashing in some portions, but the basic fantasy of being Michael made sense to me almost immediately. You walk, you stalk, you disappear, you reappear somewhere you shouldn't actually be. You pressure people into making bad decisions, and then when somebody makes the wrong decision, you capitalize on it. The first time I used Shape Jump and realized that the game wanted me to move through Haddonfield a specific way, it clicked. Michael shouldn't be sprinting after people. He's never been about that in the movies. He should be appearing. The movie constantly cheats in his geography with him. Lori looks away, looks back, he's gone, somebody runs from him, turns a corner, somehow he's somewhere else. Shape jump turns editing language into a gameplay mechanic that actually feels really clever in practice. And it made playing him feel shockingly, shockingly intuitive to me. During that first Michael match, I actually said on stream that it I'd basically never been able to really kill anybody in Dead by Daylight. And then suddenly there I was, stacking bodies. Now, some of that, of course, is because the game gives Michaels NPCs. Yeah, I get it. I'm not pretending to be great at this, but I do think that is an incredibly important design decision because yeah, you can be learning, you can be terrible, you can lose track of every human player in the match, and there are still people in Haddonville for you to stalk and kill. You still get to be Michael Myers, and that prevents the killer fantasy from completely collapsing just because you're inexperienced. Now, the civilian side admittedly took longer for me to really understand. At first, I approached it like a traditional survival horror objective. How do I get out? Gotta find supplies. Try to call the police, find a radio, find an escape, don't die. It all seems pretty straightforward, except that's not really what the game is asking you to do. And eventually I gave in to what Elphonic has told us from the very beginning. You're supposed to save Haddenfield. The NPCs are not set decoration, they're actually part of your objective. You warn them, you escort them, you get them to safety. And you can escape personally and still have done a pretty terrible job and score very few points. And once I understood that, the entire match structure made way more sense. There's actually even a moment that first night where I escaped and then immediately realized that I had left someone behind. And I thought, oh damn, look at this game really teaching me what I consider success. And then it gets even stranger because dying isn't necessarily the end for you, and escaping isn't the end. You can actually come back through a reinforcement system. You actually sit in a menu playing mini-games that actually give some support to your players who are still in the match. You can even give perks away to another active spectating players that you're watching. And then you can return as Dr. Loomis. Later, I was a police officer, and my relationship with the match has changed entirely. Of course, a natural question on everyone's mind is is Michael still scary in a video game? Yeah. Yeah, he is, and it surprised me because I have spent an absurd portion of my life looking at Michael Myers. I host a horror movie podcast, I have him tattooed on my arm. I watch the movies endlessly. I know what he looks like. I know he's coming. And yet the first time I saw the hospital gown moving towards me in a public match, immediately, hell nah. The game understands that seeing Michael is the scare. He doesn't need elaborate animation. Sometimes you're just running across a yard and he's just there. There was a moment where Binx turned her camera towards me when she was playing as Michael. I heard the musical sting from Carpenter Score and I flipped out. And then there are moments, of course, where another human is controlling him and you don't know what he's going to do. And okay, yeah, sure. Binx was Michael in my private match. I was still nervous when I saw her, but when we got into public and I had no idea who was behind that mask, it changed everything considerably. Because at one point I got grabbed talking to an NPC and I was dead almost immediately. And listen, many gamers might look at this and say, skill issue. They might say, Oh, that person's a hacker. Oh, this game is unplayable. Oh my god, he's too unbeatable. My reaction as a Halloween fan is, oh yeah, fair. Michael Myers would kill me. I can't argue with it. Now the piece I'm still chewing on is communication. Because our first night was hilarious. Binx and I were laughing. Paris and I were laughing. I was driving around Haddonfield on a bike speaking nonsense. Someone was nearby, screaming because Michael was around. And of course, then I got to watch Binx murder an unreasonable number of people. It was an absolute blast. But Halloween isn't exactly a party movie. So I'm curious how much the social layer eventually changes the horror. Does familiarity turn Hadenfield into a playground? Do coordinated teams make Michael less frightening the way that they do in Dead by Daylight? Does the great Michael player restore that tension? I don't know. And for now, my first impression is pretty simple. Playing with friends is really, really fun. And the question I'll be tracking is whether it remains scary once everyone knows what they're doing. Now we're getting to the part of the game that I was probably most curious about personally, which is Michael story. And I have to tell you, this thing is phenomenal. When Ilphonic first explained that the story mode was essentially going to function as a tutorial, I wasn't bothered by that concept. It made a lot of sense to me. If you're gonna teach me how to play Michael Myers, what better way to do so than by walking me through the events of Halloween? What I wasn't expecting though was how elegantly they would build the tutorial into the narrative of the game. Because you begin at Smith's Grove. You are Michael, you're escaping, you're injected with Thorazine. And so now the game has an actual story reason for taking away all these abilities that you're eventually going to have. You're not just looking at a tutorial screen saying, press this button to stalk and stab. Michael has been diminished. And as you escape Smith's Grove and make your way toward Haddonfield, you're essentially rebuilding him. You're learning his abilities as Michael is regaining his abilities. And that's such a smart way to solve the tutorial problem because it doesn't feel like the game has stopped so somebody can explain the controls to me. The tutorial is just part of the story. And from there, you're essentially reliving Halloween. Now that's probably where my expectations were the absolute highest. If you're gonna tell me that I'm playing through October 31st, 1978, I'm gonna notice things. And I tell you, there are sequences in here that are remarkably faithful. There are moments that are essentially shot-for-shot recreations. And there are moments where Ilphonic makes small adjustments to accommodate the fact that you're playing a video game instead of watching a movie. And so far, those changes haven't bothered me. They don't feel disruptive, they do feel like adaptations. Because the game has a fascinating problem to solve. John Carpenter and Deborah Hill only showed us part of Michael's night. We know where he appears, we know when he sees Lori, we know when certain characters encounter him, but there are enormous stretches of time where Michael simply isn't on the screen. So what was he doing? Where was he? How did he get from point A to point B? A video game can't cut away from Michael for 20 minutes and go follow Lori Strode because we've been there, we've done that. Now you're Michael. So Michael's story gets to fill in those gaps. And that's where I think this becomes more interesting than just recreating scenes from the movie. Because the game starts introducing you to people who weren't in the film. We have Rachel, Tanya, Jennifer, Marcus and his grandmother, Thomas and his dad, mediocre Eric and Nichols Hardware. And here's where something happened that I genuinely wasn't expecting. I felt bad killing some of these people. Which is ridiculous because that's literally what I'm here to do. I'm Michael Myers. These are my targets. I'm actively pursuing them. But meanwhile, I was thinking, oh wait, no, I like you. I want to play as you in multiplayer. Now, some of these characters are genuinely lovable, and that's a great problem for a Halloween game to create because suddenly Hattonfield feels populated by people who existed outside of the edges of Carpenter Story. And story mode has to really answer a nerdy continuity question that I absolutely love. If all these people were murdered on Halloween night, why don't we see their bodies in the movie? That's the danger of tweaking a canon event. And the game actually makes you account for that. There are kills that happen around locations that eventually become important in the movie. So after killing somebody, sometimes your job isn't finished. You have to hide the body. Because Lori can't walk into this location later and discover some completely different murder victim who wasn't there in the movie. Neither can Sheriff Brackett when he's investigating the hardware store. That is such a fun little piece of adaptation logic. The game, and by its extension, no phonic, is really saying, yeah, knock yourself out, go wild, add to the events of Halloween, but clean up after yourself because the movie still has to happen. I love that. Now, one criticism I've seen of Michael's story is that it's short. That's fair. If you go into these chapters and just blaze through the objectives, you're probably gonna get through them pretty quickly. But I also think that is the least interesting way that you could possibly play this game. Because once I stopped treating the objective as the game and started treating Michael as the game, the experience changed completely. Walk. Explore, go into the houses, look around, stalk people, watch them, figure out where they're going, take your time, then attack, play Michael Myers, be the shape. And when I started doing that, I got considerably more value out of it. And there's this interesting tension there because the game is giving you an objective, and your instinct as someone who plays video games might be okay, go do the objective. But my instinct as someone who has spent my entire life watching Halloween is Michael wouldn't just go do that. Michael would stand outside the house for an uncomfortable amount of time. Michael would watch, Michael would follow somebody, Michael would wait. And bizarrely, the game rewards me emotionally for doing that, even when it isn't necessarily the fastest way to finish the chapter. And that's where I found the longevity because I'm still playing it. I have spent hours in Michael's story and I'm not finished. That part of that is absolutely a skill issue. I'm not pretending otherwise. There are things that I've had to attempt and re-attempt, but the difference is it's working for me, and I actually find that fun. Because there is enough challenge in the progression and replay that I don't I don't feel like I've watched a three-hour interactive movie and now I'm finished with it. I'm solving something instead. There's a little puzzle happening there inside of my brain. What route should I take? What order should I do this in? How do I get through this section even more efficiently? What did I miss? And that just scratches my brain the right way. It's approachable enough that I'm not intimidated by it, but there is enough challenge that I'm not just sleepwalking through the entire movie. And then of course there's the part that I don't think I was prepared for. There are moments in Michael's story where you remember that faithfully recreating Michael Myers means recreating all of Michael Myers. And there are parts of his character that are not fun. There are things he does that you're not exactly sitting around wishing you could personally reenact. And the game doesn't completely run away from that. Sometimes it approaches those moments with a little bit of cheekiness, but it does remain remarkably faithful. And that creates a very strange relationship with a movie that I've known forever. Because I've spent, again, my whole life watching Michael. And now suddenly I'm standing behind his eyes, reliving the events in the film from his perspective. And even more interestingly, I'm experiencing his memories. I'm seeing how this version of Michael remembers the night that he killed Judith. And that's where the whole thing starts becoming more interesting than a playable Greatest Hits compilation. Because now we're getting something the movie deliberately refused to give us, which is just Michael's perspective, not just his POV. Not necessarily an explanation, for sure. And I don't want one. I don't need the game to tell me why Michael Myers is evil. But perspective is different than explanation. Seeing this night through his eyes, experiencing the fragments of memory that exist inside of him, filling in the hours that Carpenter left off the screen, that is the part that is fascinating to me. And there have been moments playing Michael's story where I've gotten absolute chills. So if you're asking me right now what my favorite part of Halloween the game is, it's probably this. Now, of course, my Multiplayer is where I expect to spend the most time long term. But Michael's story is where I have felt the strongest connection to Halloween. It's faithful without feeling imprisoned by the movie. It teaches you how to play without feeling like homework. It expands Haddenfield without immediately making those additions feel intrusive. It gives the original characters enough personality that I'm annoyed with myself for having to even murder them. And most importantly, it understands the fantasy that's at the center of the entire game. For the first time, I get to step behind Michael's eyes and relive the night he came home. So far, that's every bit as cool as I hoped it would be. Of course, while I've been learning the game, Elphonic has also been learning what happens when thousands of players get their hands on it, and it has been a whoo busy launch. There are three things worth touching on that you're probably going to hear about. One, the running animations, the closet controversy, and then of course the bugs. Now, the running animations drew criticism pretty quickly, and I understand why. In a game where you spend a lot of time running from Michael Myers, anything that looks slightly off becomes very noticeable. And there's the added insult to injury where we are shared a clip of Alexis running ahead of the game's release, and the running animation looked incredible, the hair physics looked flawless, it looked really smooth. But hey, it's also the kind of thing that I expect will evolve. We're at the very beginning of a live game, players are discovering problems, we're breaking systems, we're giving developers a mountain of feedback, and the game we're playing today probably won't be exactly the game we're playing three months from now. Which is part of why I think it's important to document it now. Then, of course, there's closet gate. The game launched with a two-person power-up where two civilians could enter a closet, complete a short mini-game, and then receive a stronger together buff. Now the slasher movie joke is obvious, and conceptually, I understand what they were going for, and I think it's actually really fun. The problem though was that the game didn't sufficiently restrict who could participate, and that created combinations that should have never been possible. That became a controversy almost immediately, and Ilphonic removed the feature. They described that it was a significant oversight that should have been caught before the launch, and they also responded quickly once the problem became clear. That's something that I'm gonna watch throughout this series. Mistakes are gonna happen, we know that. Nothing's gonna be perfect. But what matters is how Ilphonic continues to communicate, respond, fix them, and learn from them. And finally, we have the bugs. I've encountered some, I think I've been pretty lucky. The worst I've had was at the end of one match, Michael lost his suit and his skin, all his flesh, and it was just Michael Myers' mask and muscle. It was the strangest thing. There have also been weird doors, interactions that don't register correctly, characters that are behaving strangely. There are definitely moments where things aren't working as intended. But my personal experience so far has been much closer to that was weird, then this game is unplayable. Other players have reported different experiences. Those reports matter 100%. But we're also, again, extremely early. So rather than cataloging every launch week bug, I'm more interested in seeing which problems get fixed, which ones persist, and what this game looks like as Ilphonic continues supporting it. So, where do I land? Right now I can tell you I'm having a really good time, and that is the most important thing I can tell you. I went into launch night nervous because I had already seen the discourse. I knew people were running into problems, I knew there were complaints, I knew this game was arriving with baggage, and then I played it for two hours and ended that first stream basically saying, Oh, I am obsessed with this game. And several days later, I haven't dramatically reversed course. I'm still thinking about it when I'm not playing. I'm still wanting to jump back into story mode, I'm still wanting to learn the maps, I'm still curious about characters, I'm still thinking about different ways to approach Michael. I want to keep playing. And for a live multiplayer game during its first week, that's probably the most valuable thing that it can accomplish. But I'm also new. The maps are new, Michael is new, the civilians are new, I haven't repeated these objectives 200 times, and novelty is absolutely part of what I'm responding to. So I'm not interested in turning launch week enthusiasm into a definitive review. I think though that there's a much more useful distinction. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned there are two schools of thoughts when it comes to this game. First, is it a good video game? And second, is it a good Halloween adaptation? Now, as for the Halloween adaptation right now, yeah, strongly yes, absolutely. There are choices I want to interrogate later, and there are liberties that were taken. There are things that multiplayer has to do that the movie obviously never would, but the care for this specific film is all over the game. It feels like a love letter from Elphonic. And Michael's story has probably done more than anything else to convince me of that. As for this being a good video game, right now I'm having enough fun to say yes. But that's the answer I trust myself less on. The question's actually whether the systems underneath that enjoyment can sustain the game once the novelty completely wears off. Which brings me to the thing that I'm watching more closely than anything else. Does this still feel exciting when Haddenfield stops being unfamiliar? Does Michael stay scary when I understand exactly what every sound means? Do the objectives deepen as players learn them or do they become chores? Do the original characters become people that players actually care about? Does the progression keep me interested? Does matchmaking remain healthy? Do new players continue arriving? Does Ilphonic keep giving the community reasons to come home? And most importantly, I'm still going to be opening this game a few months from now. I can't answer that in September. That's why we're doing an entire run. I want to see what happens when the honeymoon period ends. And I want to see what the community learns. I want to see what Ilphonic changes. I want to see which complaints disappear and which ones become impossible to ignore. Because there's a very different conversation to be had about a multiplayer horror game after three months than just after three days. So for now, I'm going to keep playing it. More importantly, you're going to be able to watch that process happen. We're going to continue streaming Halloween the game throughout this run. Over the next several episodes, we're going to take the pieces I've been able to only touch on today and give them the time they actually deserve. We're also going deeper into Michael's story and how it reconstructs the events of the original film. And we're going to spend an entire episode on multiplayer once we've had enough time to really understand what these matches actually become when everybody knows what they're doing. We're going to dig into the civilians, the original characters, the maps, playing as Michael, and eventually the larger question hanging over this entire experiment. What kind of Halloween game did Elphonica actually build? And will it last? And if you want to follow the series beyond the episodes we're releasing publicly, the full breakdowns of the upcoming episodes in this run will be available over on our Patreon. That's where you'll be able to see exactly where we're headed next, what we're planning to investigate in each episode, and the questions I'm going into Haddonfield trying to answer. So if you're following this game as obsessively as I am, that's the place to follow the entire roadmap as we work our way toward the final verdict in December. Because right now, I don't have a final verdict. I don't want one yet. Right now, I want to go back to Haddonfield, explore another house, finish another challenge, and I want to get better at playing Michael. And considering how long I've waited to be able to say that about a video game, that's a pretty damn good first impression. We'll see you next time, folks. And remember, rate never changes.