It’s October, and Halloween is just around the corner. What better way to celebrate the spookiest holiday of them all than to play a horror game? Halloween is an indie game based on the classic 1978 slasher flick of the same name.
In the game, you play as Sarah, a teenage girl who has a gig babysitting on Halloween night. As is tradition, the infamous Michael Myers shows up, and you begin your fight for survival.
I decided to get some firsthand experience playing Halloween. I’ve never really been a fan of the horror genre as I tend to get freaked out very easily. I’ve only seen a couple horror movies and watched a couple gameplay videos of games like Slender. I tried playing a trial of Bioshock once, and I couldn’t even get through ten minutes of the game. So this is going to be fun, I’m sure.
The game is available for free on the Pig Farmer Games website. It’s a .rar file, and I’m basically a moron when it comes to computer files, so it took me a while to figure out how to open it. The process involved downloading a program that did something to the file that made it playable. I won’t even pretend to understand how that worked. It did, and that’s all that matters to me.
First Impressions
It loaded up in windowed mode, and I left it like that so I’d be able to escape the game quickly when I inevitably became too terrified to continue. The game itself is very blocky. It reminds me of older versions of The Sims.
The controls were really difficult to grapple with at first. Then I switched the camera from its default of movie mode to 3rd person, and it became much easier. By turning on a radio in the dining room, I got to listen to a news report about the recently escaped Michael Myers. It was a nice break from searching for the lost remote that the little boy wants in order to watch television. I eventually found it, but then the creepiness started.
The phone rings, but there’s no answer. Then, brilliantly, Sarah invites a boy named Jack over and put the kid to bed. And so, I assume, begins the horror aspect. We get your basic horror movie setup: there’s a noise in the backyard, girl sends boy out to see what it was, girl hears boy scream, girl finds boy’s body pinned to the fence by a screwdriver. Then we get the split-screen perspective of both Sarah and Michael Myers as he chases your character toward the house. The door is locked, and I, being horrible at this kind of game, began freaking out. And then the killer got me. Game over!
This has certainly been an educational experience. I’ve learned that I need to stay very far away from horror games. Fans of the Halloween movies or horror games in general should check it out, though. It’s free, doesn’t take too long to download, and seems to have all those classic horror tropes.
