The Haunted Hoard: Halloween (PC)

Halloween, also known as Halloween 3D or Halloween: The New Nightmare, is a first-person shooter with a pretty decent idea for making its levels more involved than just blasting your way through whatever stands in your path. Your main goal in each stage is to collect letters to spell the word HALLOWEEN, meaning levels can be built around exploring in different directions and there can even be some clever hiding spots to make the task a bit more involved.

It’s just a shame this concept is one of the few things this game does right at all as it plays like an absolute mess.

Halloween does almost give you a good first impression when you start a new save file. While there’s a typo right in the opening text that explains how the game is played, the level select is handled in a somewhat nifty way. You find yourself standing in front of a towering creepy cathedral on a stormy night, and while the first level is right at the front door, others will appear in different locations like on the roof or a high parapet. The main game features nine levels, one for each of the letters in the word HALLOWEEN, and there are even two secret levels to find off to the side albeit ones with almost no substance as they’re gimmicks rather than true challenges. However, while finding ways to climb the cathedral is at first a cute way to handle a stage select, it becomes very unwieldy as the game goes on. Not only are there going to be two Level Ls and two Level Es you need to keep straight to avoid entering the wrong stage, but every time you exit a level you’re back on the ground in front of the cathedral. There is no way to retry a level immediately with some being a bit of a chore to reach, and what’s worse, the game’s design almost requires you to replay most levels to actually clear them.

While collecting all the letters in a level of Halloween is the main goal, it’s also not the only goal. The first-person shooting isn’t merely a means of survival, it’s also a secondary goal you have to clear to unlock the next stage. Each level has you needing to kill a certain amount of a few different monster types, which doesn’t sound too bad on the surface until you start to encounter the game’s enemies. Whether it’s the orcish Depla with their spiky arms they fire at you, the Morbak spiders that can scale walls, the Zebats who get stuck to walls and can only fly up and down after they do so, the fairly decent Zemummies, or the Subzerats that look like a lumpy sack fighting with itself rather than a rat, barely any of them seem to fight you as intended. Far too often the enemies in Halloween seem programmed to want to be right on top of you regardless of what battle style would suit their abilities. A Depla will come running towards you, and while you try to aim your weapons to fight it, it will constantly be walking in and out of your body, meaning you’re spinning around just trying to see where it is. Luckily you only take damage in occasional bursts as you’re practically fused with spiders that are sitting on your head or Subzerats whose bodies move with little logical reasoning, but you must remember that killing a certain amount of specific monsters is outright required to clear levels, and all levels have a constantly ticking timer that threatens you with immediate failure should it reach zero.

The monsters can be a further complicating factor even when they’re not trying to stand inside you. Sometimes they’ll slide across the wall and then disappear from existence, meaning in smaller levels with only a certain amount of a monster type, you might now be short one. Or at least, that’s what can happen unless you find enough distance from their spawn point. Monsters will reappear after you’ve moved far away enough whether you killed them or they blinked out of existence after failing to move around the area properly. This actually ends up being the most effective means of meeting your monster quotas in a good deal of levels. Find yourself a reliable spawn point and rack up some Morbak kills rather than trying to kill ones in proper combat later. Why contend with Deplas who have a chance of disappearing when there are rooms nearby you can farm them for easy kills? Normally the threat they pose to you would be a reason to kill whatever you face, but they move in such sporadic ways and struggle to put up a proper fight it’s not too hard to rush past ones you don’t wish to fight.

Your weapons in Halloween are reset with each level, meaning you only have a bloody mace to smack foes with at first, not that melee has much of a hope of working reliably when you’re practically fusing with anything close enough to hit.  You can get the oddly named arbalett,  a crossbow that is likely meant to be called the word “arbalest” as it seems to be a typo whether it’s aiming for English or a word like arbalet or arbalette from other languages. It’s a simple arrow firing tool likely to be your best shot until you find the blunderbuss, although that goes under the actually accurate French name of tromblon. A bomb gun rounds out your arsenal a touch, but gunfights are, as mentioned, not much of a contest for survival so much as you trying to hit enemies that aren’t moving in reasonable ways. Even if you were to die, you will have to put up with a generic monster voice insulting you, but you will be able to respawn at the level start with all your weapons and progress for that attempt still in tact. In fact, Halloween has some mercy, in that you don’t need to clear every level goal in one attempt. If you clear out the required number for a monster type, you don’t need to do so again, although the counter does reset on level failure if you didn’t hit your quota fully. If you find every letter in the word Halloween, you similarly can ignore that goal on the next attempt. Some levels would definitely be agonizing if not for this fact, although on Hard mode where the timer is reduced from an accommodating 300 to 180, it might still be quite hard to use respawn exploits, especially if you don’t make some smart adjustments to game brightness for the large maze-like levels that can sometimes practically be black screens otherwise. Easy’s 900 seconds and far fewer enemies to kill practically strips out any challenge though, although any deaths were likely to come from falling into lava rather than the enemies anyway.

Funnily enough, there is one more element on your side, and it does not seem to be an intentional one. There are three power-up potions in the game, almost all of them required in some way. The red Power Jump potion is your only way to reach certain heights, with many letters, areas, and weapon pick-ups requiring you to take a swig and spring up high, although you’ll have to grab another should you miss. Luckily, all pick-ups also reappear after a time so you won’t often be trapped save a few poorly thought out pits with no way to exit or die if the enemies blink out of existence. The purple Falcon View is of dubious necessity, it making invisible platforms visible, but almost any time there are invisible platforms, they’re right next to the potion and the path is fairly obvious. There aren’t any interesting secrets, it mostly just shows you sometimes there are breaks in the obvious path to leap over, although at one point the game does at least make the staircase it reveals feel a little hidden. The green Matrix Mode potion might end up being your best friend though. Its intention is to slow down all the monsters in the game for a time to make them easy killing, and this can be incredibly useful already since it prevents the monsters from engaging in terrible glitchy movement for a spell. What makes Matrix Mode really special though is the seemingly accidental side effect of completely resetting a level’s timer. Carry a Matrix Mode potion with you, and you can make a 300 second level double in length, and what’s more, the potion will reappear after you’ve picked it up, meaning you shouldn’t really run out of time in the levels that do feature it. At the same time, this means the optimal way to play those levels will be to find the potion quickly, pick off monsters like they were fish in a barrel, and then take your time looking around for the Halloween letters for an easy stage that failed to pack the punch you’d be looking for in a first-person shooter.

It is definitely a shame that Halloween ended up in such a state since some stage design did show promise. If this was solely about collecting the letters, the game does know how to vary up how they’re hidden, not every level the most imaginative but now and then you’ll see a little platforming challenge or a creative hiding spot like needing to take a Power Jump potion to a chimney so you can jump up through it. The music can sometimes be effective and is of a much higher quality than anything else in the game despite the hits being counterbalanced by some truly annoying tunes. What makes Halloween truly unfortunate though is the version I played is the last one after what seems to be a few attempts to rectify the issues. Released originally as shareware where you could play a few levels then buy the full game or just buy it on CD in its entirety from the start, I have seen versions of Halloween with different colored letters and different symbols for things like health and even the timer. Many years after its 2002 release though, it would be available free in its entirety on developer Jadeware’s website, although that site itself would eventually go down when Jadeware seemingly went defunct. While I played the last version that had been made available, contemporary reviews around the original’s release sadly show that even before some visual elements changed, most enemies still behaved in the same way, meaning the true issues weren’t being addressed. Considering the game’s final level even told me I won after time ran out despite not having cleared any goals on that attempt, it seems Halloween never even fixed some of its most basic issues.

THE VERDICT: Halloween is a pretty hopeless mess. Its timer is the only real danger, the monsters you face spending more time trying to stand right on top of you than putting up a good fight and most of your objectives are better off achieved through tricks and exploits due to glitches and limitations. Why try to fight fair when enemies can blink out of existence? Just grab Matrix Mode potions for easy pickings and timer trickery, because if you do try to play the game as intended, it will only be tedious and your efforts stymied by poor programming. The Halloween letters were almost hidden well, but there’s no joy in exploring Halloween’s levels when so little feels like it is working as intended.

And so, I give Halloween for PC…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Halloween ended up avoiding being absolutely obnoxious thanks mostly to elements that don’t feel intentional at all. Being able to clear level objectives across multiple runs makes them more feasible in the levels where there aren’t too many exploits, but having Matrix Mode to lean on can erase some of the tedium in the more labyrinthine stages. Enemies respawning with ease makes hunting down enough to meet quotas feasible instead of a chore that could be ruined by their occasional disappearances. There are a lot of elements that technically exist to make it possible to see the end of Halloween, whether you actually earned it or the game just shows you the end because its code isn’t triggering it properly. However, whether you enjoyed any of the ride there is another question. The letters aren’t always hidden with much thought and even some of the better hiding spots don’t demand much out of you, especially since death is not a true danger thanks to the free respawns. It’s rare when an enemy truly obstructs your progress, the only reason you ever really need to stop and fight one is because it’s one you need for the kill tallies. The timer ends up feeling like it exists purely because they couldn’t get the monsters to actually put up a meaningful fight, the game needing some way to provide some form of failure. Lava is the only other real killer, and since sometimes you do need to wade into it or could slip into it easily, forcing a level failure for touching it wouldn’t work either. That clock is the only thing making this more than a leisurely tour of stone halls filled with monsters who behave in odd and erratic ways depending on whether their programming is feeling accommodating.

Halloween’s generic name, bad coding, poorly executed concepts, and general unassuming nature mean it’s the kind of game that could very well fade into history without many taking notice. I had to dig around for certain details, but it’s also not really fascinating as some sort of unknown awful game. It’s just a messy little Halloween shooter that didn’t try too hard and was seemingly put out for purchase when the creators lost interest in trying to fix their mistakes. Even tweaks after its initial launch still didn’t change much with an odd focus on incidental things over major issues. Halloween could have been something worth paying attention too, if only the people coding the game took the time to actually make it truly function rather than it being a game where you’re better off circumventing the intended design.