The Haunted Hoard: King of Halloween (PC)

Back when I took a look at King Key Games’s visual novel King of Texas, I found a game that was trying to deliver erotic content with a dash of humor and interactivity, but it failed at both parts and ended up making the process of playing it more tedious than it should be. King of Halloween thankfully trims away some of the fat like the minigames while leaning a bit deeper into the humor without it being quite as shallow, and interestingly enough, it decides to add political machinations to a game that most people would just view as a delivery system for a handful of images of naked women.

 

King of Halloween has you playing as the new mayor of Halloween City, and you are none other than the famous Doctor Frankenstein himself. Taking place right as you take office, your witch assistant Selma helps ease you into the role while the former mayor Draculina makes sure to immediately insert some lascivious behavior and naughty language just to make sure you don’t think you picked up a political sim by mistake. While the vampire Draculina can’t be romanced in any manner, your mayoral duties introduce you to three women who represent different districts of Halloween City, the councilwomen all attractive takes on typical Halloween creatures. Abigail, like Selma, is a witch, which basically means these two anime-styled women just happen to be wearing pointy hats and the appropriate fashion. Wendy is a werewolf, which manifests visually as paw gloves and ears that conveniently disappear during the erotic scenes, and Nefertiti is nominally a mummy when she’s essentially just an attractive young lady with a few strips of cloth draped over her to barely cover the important areas. It’s not going for the monster girl appeal clearly, but King Key Games still makes sure that when you do get the specially done art of the girls naked, it’s of a higher quality and more detailed than the usual anime aesthetic.

While many adult visual novels are a framework for getting to the mature material, there is a surprising degree of thought put into your role as the mayor. In a fun reference it seems the city is hemorrhaging money due to a project by a man named Lovecraft to build a sea wall just in case old gods show up, and one of your main goals is to prevent city hall from going bankrupt by speaking with the three councilwomen and trying to get them onboard with the plan. Nefertiti sees it as a financial drain but since her district is so business-minded, she wants a bit of quid pro quo for agreeing to take it down. Abigail’s district has many of its witches employed on the wall so she doesn’t want all the talent stripped of high paying work, and Wendy fears that removing the financial burden of the wall will lead to more industrial development that will harm the natural area she oversees. Getting everyone on board for the plan isn’t easy… but it’s also not necessarily too difficult. King of Halloween is already built for multiple playthroughs, there being 9 distinct endings to pursue, so after you have a good picture of the wants of the ladies and their sometimes more personal or fickle requests, the political angle gives way to easily promising the characters what they want to hear. This will help with ending seeking, but it also robs much of the intrigue and makes it feel like some of the setup was wasted, the player spending plenty of time reading to understand the characters and situation only for a lot of it to boil down to sexual favors.

 

Thankfully, King of Halloween has most of the expected visual novel accoutrements. You can skip previously read text, although the game’s not perfect at detecting it always, and you can make save points at any time, meaning you can set them up at junctions so you can pick the different paths more easily. Since a few of the endings are literally just picking a different answer to the same question and then getting a quick barely changed summary of the outcome, this helps with completion-minded players. Most of the endings are bad endings that don’t go a very interesting route save a quick wrap-up, and some of the better ones are even negative in some manner, so it’s hard to say there’s a real best ending unless you were just interested in getting in bed with a certain character. There are no voices or animation sadly, fairly static stills of the girls accompanied by the textboxes until a more detailed image rarely pops up for the highlight moments, but as said, effort was at least put into those more important pieces of art. The choice system is sadly not complex enough to match the idea of political debate while perhaps also a bit off-putting to people only interested in the mature content, but that’s hardly the only case of muddled attempts to appeal to different people.

Humor is given a big focus on King of Halloween, and quite a bit of it is character humor. At first, the bickering councilwomen using insults appropriate to the monsters they represent is cute, and some people like Abigail and her promiscuity have one strong character trait characters bring up. However, this keeps happening again and again, the barbs not being too creative and often even retreads despite being the one of the few sources of humor before you enter the bedroom. Draculina being a rather poor mayor has more mileage at least, but then when you get to the game’s selling point, it seems to carry over King of Texas’s problem with making an intimate moment feel like a teenager is writing it. Ridiculous euphemisms contrast the quality art while being pretty unimaginative again. It would be pretty easy for anyone else to write a reproduction of the werewolf’s scene without any clue on which specific innuendos the game uses because it goes for the basics, and since the game isn’t taking it seriously, its hard to find it particularly titillating.  If a game is going to be built up around getting to these scenes, it shouldn’t then undermine them with corny jokes that kill the mood.

 

And strangely enough, it’s clear that on some level, King of Halloween understands that. Your mayoral assistant Selma is your fourth romance option in this game. While the other councilwomen sleep with you as political moves or just for fun and have the scenes play out like jokes, Selma has a small but cute romance built up as you interact during the political talks, and if you do eventually pick the right options to woo her, the game doesn’t suddenly start whipping out weird euphemisms. In fact, the lead in to intercourse is surprisingly natural, and it’s almost outright charming how Selma is slightly awkward and talking to you openly about her feelings. When the act begins, the wording focuses on sensation and emotion even though its describing acts similar to what you’ve done with the other girls, so it really ends up feeling like you’ve made a true relationship while also getting those sultry scenes the game was designed to deliver. The love story between Frankenstein and Selma isn’t so deep or moving that it’s worth the price of admission, but it’s decently done and charming because it’s not afraid to present a more intimate relationship that goes beyond dirty puns.

THE VERDICT: King of Halloween has some promising elements. The narrative paths splitting on how you make choices on political topics had potential before its simple nature becomes more apparent, and the romance path with Selma actually takes itself seriously and is sweeter for it. However, most of the game is quickly tired comedy, sexy scenes bogged down by juvenile writing, and a bit too much detail put in the underfed city politics instead of developing the girls into more interesting romance options. King of Halloween is a step above King of Texas certainly, but one decent route doesn’t make up for blandness of other paths or groan-worthy writing that taints what it bills as its appeals.

 

And so, I give King of Halloween for PC…

A BAD rating. If more of the game was like Selma’s ending then we’d have a more interesting package, but even Selma’s ending is technically a bad one since it involves the political angle being pushed aside, and the ones that do result in important city measures going through aren’t really the fulfilling paths. You may get to read some awkwardly written intercourse with a woman who looks like a regular anime girl once she’s undressed and see a handful of quality lewd art, but the framework doesn’t really make the effort put in worth it. The councilwomen are one note so you are meant to mostly fall for their bodies or single character trait, the political issues you can work on fixing are often counterproductive if you’re going for romantic endings, and the humor isn’t strong enough to carry it through its dryer moments. While not every positive ending needs to wrap up every political issue in a nice bow or be as saccharine sweet as your relationship with Selma, putting more legitimate attention to these would allow them to be at least on par with Selma’s path and then the game would be able to be more than a sexy game for the Halloween season.

 

King of Halloween certainly isn’t the top dog of this year’s Haunted Hoard even though it shows that King Key Games aren’t without hope. It still feels more likely they’ll rely on presenting poorly written visual novels with some decent adult material rather than going for something that has an appeal deeper than whatever word happens to be after “King of” this time around, but there could be hope for them if they tried. King of Halloween was a departure from their other themes, it had a world it built up, a potentially interesting angle for interaction, and one romance path that wasn’t fumbling through lame innuendos. It would have been nice if this could have been the game where they got everything in line, because if it had been funny, deep, and sexy, it could have been a sweet way to top off your Halloween celebrations.