The Haunted Hoard: Once Upon a Time on Halloween (Switch)
While this review of Once Upon a Time on Halloween will be on the game’s Switch release, around the same time, it was also released for the iiRcade and feels a little more at home on that ill-fated system. An attempt to turn a classic arcade cabinet into a home game system, it looked like an arcade machine but was meant to be a platform for downloadable releases, but had Once Upon a Time on Halloween been an exclusive for it, it would have gone down with it when the iiRcade declared bankruptcy rather quickly after release. Once Upon a Time on Halloween does feel like it tried to make the past mix with the present too in a way, the game meant to evoke 1920s black and white cartoons yet its run and gun elements clearly draw inspiration from the 2017 game Cuphead. Sadly, the idea doesn’t feel like it extends much further than aping what it’s seen elsewhere, meaning the iiRcade wasn’t the only thing weighed down by a messy mix of old and new.
Once Upon a Time on Halloween opens with a wonderfully strange line, “In 1920, a pact was made between humans and pumpkins.” This pact requires pumpkins to rise up on Halloween night to defend humanity from the forces of evil as thanks for raising and protecting the vegetable during the other days of the year. Strangely, navigating this tiny bit of story has you choosing between the options “Confession” or “Sorry”, Sorry sending you back to the main menu while Confession gives you a tip on how to play and a thanks to the creator’s inspirations. Once you select “I’m Ready” as a more reasonable new menu option though, your find yourself playing as one of those pumpkins, it manifesting some arms and legs as well as some big shoes and white gloves for its night spent defending humanity. The game is presented as if you’re viewing it on an old-fashioned black and white T.V. and has peppy Halloween music in the background to make it a bit more playful, although if you go in expecting solely a Cuphead-inspired run-and-gun, you’ll be rather surprised as the action kicks off as that’s not the only game that inspired it.
The first stage in Once Upon a Time on Halloween actually mirrors the 1984 arcade game Tapper. Enemies will appear from the right side of the screen, and rather than using the skull firing fingers he uses in later stages, the pumpkin aims to repel them by launching drinks at them instead. You need to be standing in the right place to properly fill up your jugs with whatever substance is inside the cauldrons, and if the enemies get in too close, they can either harm the pumpkin or the bells at the end of the lane that will damage you all the same. Later stages will take on this drink flinging format as well, introducing faster enemies as well as alternating lanes where the danger appears from either the left or the right rather than all from one side. Your goal in these stages is to get the candies enemies drop when they’re nailed by your drinks, the candy rolling along so you sometimes need to balance defending one lane while making time to grab the candy from something you beat previously. The unfortunate problem is the game makes this too easy, so once you understand a stage, you really shouldn’t ever take damage. You can technically walk into the lanes to grab candy, but if you just press up and down to move lanes, you’ll not only be able to instantly find yourself next to the cauldron ready to launch a drink, but there’s almost always going to be enough time to swiftly grab a candy and hop back to hurling a jug at some monster. Even at its hardest it is almost too fair, and even if it wasn’t, there’s no penalty for not grabbing a candy so a slow and steady approach could clear these stages safely instead.
Once Upon a Time on Halloween does have unique boss fights to break up the drink serving stages though, and these give you some reactive action that isn’t so easily conquered. A giant gravestone or a skeleton piano will give you trouble as they unleash attacks that require quick dodging to avoid, although bosses also can spend some time doing nothing too dangerous where you can more freely fire upon them with your skull-shooting index finger. Some of these can be figured out a bit easily and cleared without much trouble when you know their tricks, but others like that piano can get you into a squeeze that still keeps some pressure present during the experience. There are only five bosses in total, and while I don’t want to hammer it in too hard, the Cuphead inspiration is perhaps too strong across them. The first boss, a gravestone, is a mild rework of Goopy LeGrande’s gravestone phase, and one fight is clearly inspired by the Glumstone the Giant fight since both take place in a stomach, have you shoot up at something that’s moving back and forth, and you must use a set of small platforms to avoid falling in the stomach acid. They’re less difficult and complex than a Cuphead boss, these fights fairly short and usually featuring only two dangers to juggle, but their straightforward designs likely are meant to help with one of the more curious design choices in Once Upon a Time on Halloween.
Fittingly for a game meant for the iiRcade, Once Upon a Time on Halloween takes a note from old arcade games where the idea was you’re meant to get as far as you can on just one life. Our pumpkin protagonist at least takes seven hits to put down for good, although there are no opportunities for healing and no option to continue should you fall. You must go from the very first drink flinging stage all the way to the final boss in a singular run if you wish to finish it, although there is an option to instead forego that final fight and try to get a huge high score albeit one likely earned through repetition of something you’ll have done plenty of working up to that ending. Once Upon a Time on Halloween has 10 stages in total and they mostly alternate between the Trapper imitations and Cuphead imitations, although one pair of levels starts with you first hopping and shooting in a little cauldron cart before using a flying machine for the boss after, but this shakeup is sadly also something you’ll easily clear once you understand it meaning that it joins drink serving as something that isn’t exciting to be asked to repeat to try and reach new content.
Once Upon a Time on Halloween thus ends up repetitive by design, not too much of it requiring honing your skills or needing quick reflexes because most of them will stop harming you after that initial learning period spent in the level. Needing to trudge back through the early easy levels adds nothing to the experience, although at least bosses like that gravestone and skeletal piano are the types that can threaten you just enough so it’s not all actions you can repeat with mindless robotic precision. The ending is quite disappointing too, the final boss not all too different from the first one and it makes the finale feel sudden since it wasn’t a proper climax. It would still be disappointing if you were allowed to continue after a Game Over and having to work a bit harder to earn it doesn’t help, although it does at least give you the small sense of gratification that comes from actually pushing through and reaching that ending despite the setbacks that lead to a fair bit of monotony.
THE VERDICT: Seasonally appropriate spooky sights and a nostalgic monochrome cartoon art style make Once Upon a Time on Halloween look more energetic than it is. The drink flinging stages are far too easy to master to the point they’ll give you no problem after you figure out their designs and the bosses don’t pack enough oomph to be an exciting counterbalance to those tepid stages. Once Upon a Time on Halloween on the whole is very short and sparse on content too, and getting through it all must be done in one life despite few levels being engaging on even your second run through the game. Tame stages means you can at least likely clear it without too many repeated attempts, the slight satisfaction that comes from actually clearing the game mostly just arising from knowing you won’t have to play it again.
And so, I give Once Upon a Time on Halloween for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. At first when you’re still seeing new things and figuring out what a boss does, Once Upon a Time on Halloween at least has a little to hold your interest, even when it’s lifting ideas from more successful games. There’s some curiosity involved in seeing the Halloween spin on things and how the next stage will be represented in its cartoon style. It’s not the best carrot on a stick, you realize there’s often not too much to even the most dangerous bosses or situations, and the real clincher on making this an outright bad game is how hollow things are once you realize how they work. The jug throwing sections just aren’t hectic or challenging at all, always playing a bit too fair so you can easily pop over and attack anything before it reaches a bell and you can grab candies at your leisure. Some more aggressive enemies, or perhaps even a penalty for letting a candy slip by, could maybe push things into a more tense and challenging direction, these levels really needing something so you won’t just realize how they work and then never endanger yourself again. The bosses certainly could use additional attacks or evolving tricks to spice them up too, only one boss really featuring two phases and the life bar for bosses rarely even displaying how much damage you’re dealing properly. The arcade focus on needing to clear everything in a single life probably did lead to how tame most levels are, players at least not likely to resent the repetition too much but not for the right reasons.
Once Upon a Time on Halloween may not have gone down with the iiRcade, but it likely shared that optimistic hope that its familiar ideas could still lead to some success. When Once Upon a Time on Halloween isn’t nearly taking directly from other games though, it’s often because it has dialed them back in some less effective way. Overall it is more tepid than terrible, but even though it’s not too demanding, people looking for a simple Halloween game should still keep away unless they want to have a monotonous All Hallow’s Eve.