Halloween: The Game review-in-progress — buggy, janky, and not ready at launch

Halloween: The Game launched without its day-one patch, and the reviewer's early hours on PS5 paint a rough picture: hard crashes averaging once an hour, broken or missing animations, weapons phasing through players during combat, and audio that plays from the wrong direction — a serious problem in a stealth horror game where sound is everything.

Developer Illfonic — the studio behind Friday the 13th: The Game and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — built the game around the classic asymmetrical formula: one player controls Michael Myers hunting through Haddonfield on Halloween night 1978, while up to three human players plus AI companions scavenge items and try to escape. Myers never runs, but his kit compensates with abilities like cutting all nearby lights, shadow-jumping, and detecting players through walls. The reviewer calls him a blast to play, and notes that Illfonic appears to have done real work balancing killer versus survivor — a problem that plagued The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where playing Leatherface quickly became the less popular option. The execution mechanic also gets a positive mention as a satisfying close-range payoff.

The NPC AI undercuts a lot of that goodwill, though. In one instance, playing as Myers, the reviewer broke loudly through a front door and found all three remaining NPCs standing motionless at the same window — and executed two of them before the third thought to move. Quick-time events have bugged out and frozen the reviewer in broken animations, handing Myers a free kill. The gap between the game's genuine ideas and its current technical state is the central frustration: Illfonic has nearly a decade of asymmetrical horror experience and had Halloween creator John Carpenter involved, which set expectations high.

The review is explicitly flagged as a work-in-progress pending the day-one patch, so the final verdict is still open. But the reviewer is blunt: as it stands, Halloween: The Game barely clears the bar for early access, let alone a full release.