The Haunted Hoard: HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 (PC)
October of 1985 was no doubt a special one for many kids in the U.S.A., the Nintendo Entertainment System providing a new and exciting return to quality video games after the market crashed a few years prior. Admittedly it wouldn’t be until September of the following year where it would receive a nationwide release, but there were likely a few kids like Donny Johnstown who couldn’t wait to get home from school each day to play their exciting new game machine. HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 is Donny’s surprisingly spooky story of an unexpected Halloween adventure in that year, and rather appropriately the game existed first as an unlicensed homebrew game for the NES. However, a PC release made it easier for anyone to get their hands on it and have a nostalgic Halloween experience.
Donny Johnstown wakes up on Halloween day and realizes a long night of playing NES games has left him late for school on the day he was hoping to take the girl he fancies to the dance, but being late for school might have been a stroke of good luck. When he shows up he finds everyone has been turned into zombies and other spooky monsters have begun to roam the halls, Donny now needing to fight his way home to escape the evil creatures that begin to spread to the nearby neighborhood and woods to boot. While meant to be a retro throwback in its design, there is actually a present story with quite a few scenes featuring Donny explaining his thoughts on his situation with old school slang, although the text scroll is quite slow and mostly just has him acknowledge what he did in the previous level and where he is heading next. It still gives the game a silly and light feel that can be sometimes needed after some of the tougher bosses and stages, and the rather cute ending does at least pull it away from mostly focusing on needless reiteration of what you’ve seen in the stage you just beat.
HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 is a sidescrolling platformer where good movement and timing your punches are key to survival. Donny has no visible health bar, but whenever he takes a hit, his skin will begin to shift in tone, getting greener and greener until the final hit turns him into a zombie. Candy corn can be collected to restore your health, but the enemies you are up against are fairly dangerous and must be treated with the proper degree of respect. Zombies are often not too much to worry about as they mindlessly move towards you for a taste of your simple punch combo, but mix them with other enemies and you need to start luring foes around and spacing out strikes to avoid being hurt. Ghosts can appear suddenly and fly in from unexpected angles, crows will patrol the upper reaches of the screen and plummet down once you’re below, and jack-o-lanterns wait to jump so they can hit you while you try to hop over. Learning how to handle each of the enemy types you consistently encounter ends up key to surviving the stages, and while HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 doesn’t have the widest range of unique monsters running around its stages, they are positioned well and remain pesky throughout because of it.
Careful forward progress ends up an involved and sometimes tense challenge, especially because precise platforming enters the mix. Donny will often find himself jumping over deadly drops that instantly take away a life if you miss the small landing spot. Moving platforms make timing a consideration as well, and often enemies are in the area ready to start moving once you’ve reached the right location, the player needing to be ready to strike or outmaneuver the danger while also working with some very limited ground to stand on. Your punches have very short range so you often need to be pretty close to a monster as well to hurt it and most take a few good wallops to put down so that gives times for others to get in position. The danger level is kept high and compelling without really straying into frustrating territory. Moments keep their focus clear, the emphasis on things like a big pack of enemies you need to manage or a pack of crows harassing you near open pits maintained so that you can be in the proper mindset for the current area even if you don’t know how it might manifest exactly.
Figuring out how to effectively move forward without being hurt too much is often key to completing the level, but deaths will crop up as part of that learning process. Serum Soda serves as extra lives and can be found floating around in the levels you traverse, the soda often positioned after a small platforming challenge so it doesn’t just come for free. Serum Soda will reappear after a death and checkpoints make the stage lengths manageable, but collecting the extra lives end up vitally important in overcoming some of the tougher sections and thus a more interesting layer is added to how you explore. You’ll always want to grab the sodas if you can and they are placed quite generously so oftentimes you can grab one or more after a checkpoint in a stage to build up a good reserve. You have a set amount of continues if you do run out of lives that are an appreciated but not as abundant cushion, and once you’re out you will have to restart the game. Thus, that danger of losing all your progress motivates the mix of trying to make level progress while keeping your health and extra lives topped off, the stage design finding a nice spot where it can be tough to beat a section but you’ll have some resources on hand to offset figuring it out.
The levels in HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 are more diverse than the monsters you face. When you head to the mall for example you’re not just walking about the open spaces. The mall’s theater has you walking in the dark until you pass in front of the projectors and later an area with shattered glass makes you watch your jump height so the broken windows don’t prick you as you deal with the zombies who aren’t bugged by it. The school takes you into classrooms with moving books to weave through, exterior areas can contain areas like a swampy cemetery or eerie abandoned playground, and while there are some simple forests or hills as well, you also get nifty moments like climbing the grain in a silo that show more creativity. The six levels are broken up into different sections well so they don’t feel sparse and the difficulty in clearing them makes them last, although the bosses can vary in quality. Some can be beaten with a simple trick that isn’t even that hard to figure out while others seem longer than their fight has interesting content to offer. It is a shame since the bosses do try to break from conventional Halloween creatures a bit, a Bigfoot topping off the forest stage and a pair of scarecrows ends up perhaps the most difficult fight of all with their quick movement and persistent supply of crow assistants. Your little punches aren’t the best for complex fights admittedly, but there are some that still made their battles work by focusing on dodging more.
THE VERDICT: HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 is a nice NES throwback that mixes its modern technical advantages with some enjoyable retro difficulty. Even simple enemies are legitimate dangers and taking the time to grab every health pick-up or extra life you can ends up key to finishing the adventure, the looming threat of running out of continues tangible but the opportunities to avoid it abundant enough you have the room to figure out how to clear the game’s six levels. Boss battle composition is a bit all over the map in terms of difficulty and design, but the regular stages mix up their presentation and layouts so that this enjoyable Halloween journey doesn’t run out of steam.
And so, I give HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 for PC…
A GOOD rating. The limits you are given in HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 are designed around well so that they enhance the challenge offered. Your punches don’t extend out far, but that means you have to approach your foes carefully, some like the crows hard to nail and likely to be the bane of some players for it. Their method of dive bombing when they’re above you adds more texture to how you progress though, the game having a good sense for when to apply some pressure and when to let the spacing on the platforms be the challenge itself. The punching isn’t meant to be a good combat system, it’s just your means of an attack in a game mostly focused on smart movement and it handles that well with its responsive controls and good hazard spacing. Dropping down pits for an instant death can be disheartening, but Serum Soda is smartly positioned to both encourage you to take some risks but it’s well within reach so it can offset the sting of a failure without making you complacent about your chances of survival. Keeping the level backgrounds varied helps cover up the fact that you will be dealing with the same small stable of monsters for most of the adventure, but the bosses being unexpected picks helps to make the fights a bit more interesting even if some can be cakewalks once you realize what’s going on. Toughening up the easy ones a bit and shortening a specific fight near toxic goo that feels longer than it has any reason to be could make for a more even spread, but HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 shines best in its simple but effective level navigation where you make progress at a good but careful pace.
HAUNTED: Halloween ’85 isn’t the kind of NES game you would play back in 1985, and that’s a good thing. It can do more impressive visuals because we understand the system better now than developers did then and it avoids artificial difficulty so that you know overcoming the obstacles ahead of you are a product of your skill and tactics rather than luck or pure memorization. It would certainly wow players if it had come out at the time, but instead, it captures some of the famous toughness of old video games but with reasonable accommodations and some nice aesthetic touches so it’s not a brick wall you throw yourself at until it works out in your favor. Whether it’s on original NES hardware or a PC, it’s still a nice way to spend a Halloween night even in ’22.