Halloween: The Game Screenshot
Image: IllFonic & Gun Interactive

Dead by Daylight still may be the undying king of asymmetrical multiplayer murder-games, but if you're going to tag in anyone else to challenge that throne, it should be IllFonic. Coming from the developers behind the (sadly delisted) Friday the 13th, as well as Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, Predator: Hunting Grounds and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, Halloween: The Game (out today, after a week of head start for those with the Deluxe version) looks like it's doing enough different to stand out from the slasher crowd.

While many multiplayer horror games (including some by IllFonic themselves) are little more than hide-and-seek dressed up in edgy clothing, Halloween really goes to great lengths to capture the feel of an old slasher horror movie. Myers is out to kill a whole bunch of people, including named NPC townsfolk. As such, survival is only one objective, with players scrambling to try and save as many NPC townsfolk as possible from the killer stalking them, and ideally calling the police for support.

It also banks on the idea that while very dangerous, Michael Myers is an ambiguously supernatural threat, with a great resistance to damage and known for spooky things happening around him, but he's not going to be seen doing anything explicitly magical. He's just a very tough, very driven guy with a knife.

While the game does let the Myers player trigger those spooky happenings on demand (like having lights short out in his vicinity), I do love that the game replicates his uncanny ability to appear in the worst of places by letting him blink out of existence and rapidly relocate so long as there are no witnesses. This offsets his naturally slow movement speed (slower than any of his victims) and gives the Myers player the chance to really surprise people by being seemingly around every corner at once. While he's only really able to stalk from a distance when outdoors, the moment tight corners are involved, he WILL be there.

Interestingly, while the main focus of the game is multiplayer, IllFonic seems to want to get people up to speed and familiar with casual psycho-murder, so there's a single-player campaign as well. While not massive (only a couple of hours long, effectively a long-form, movie-length tutorial), it has players exclusively playing as Michael Myers, breaking out of a mental hospital and slowly stalking his way around town, gorily murdering his way through the townsfolk. Of course, higher scores are awarded for more dramatic environmental kills, performed through multi-button QTEs, and some of the kill animations are downright grisly.

While there are plenty of reports of jank and rough edges from early adopters (and I've seen some in early streams of the game, such as Michael sticking his arms through fully intact doors), initial response to the game has been mostly positive, and it sounds like there's nothing inherently wrong with the game that can't be patched out given time. Here's hoping that IllFonic gets the opportunity, and that the game doesn't end up delisted due to expiring licenses, as happened with Friday the 13th. The studio has built a reputation for making solid 7/10 multiplayer games. Here's hoping this one can be buffed out enough to make it an 8.

Halloween: The Game is out now for a hefty £35.75/$40, with the Deluxe Edition now only adding a handful of mostly cosmetic characters to play as, plus a couple extra skins for Myers himself. The main reason to get the Deluxe Edition - a week-long head start over those with the regular version - is no longer available.