Halloween: The Game review: great details, heavy performance and a confusing score system

Halloween: The Game came out on 8 September, and I have spent enough nights in Haddonfield since then to put it plainly: this game loves Carpenter's film more than it knows how to run on a PC. The details, the music and Michael himself are handled with rare care. Next to that sit a soft, noisy image that looks far better on the official screenshots than in the game itself, faces that look like avatars from a store, and an RTX 5080 that gets flattened at max settings in 1440p.

It was made by IllFonic, the studio behind Friday the 13th: The Game, and co-published by Gun Interactive, the same Gun that released The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 2023. It passed a million players in its first week. Yet Steam rates it Mixed at 67 percent, and the player count has fallen almost fourfold from its peak. Here is why, section by section.

Out on 8 September, 53 days before Halloween

On Steam it costs $39.99, with the Digital Deluxe upgrade another $19.99. Early access opened on 4 September and the full launch followed on the 8th, on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series at once, with crossplay between them.

Which brings me to my biggest question for the publisher. The game is called Halloween, the whole thing takes place on the night of 31 October 1978, and it launched in early September, before anyone had bought a pumpkin. Had it come out a week before the holiday, it would have landed in every "what to play this Halloween" list, every spooky stream and every horror roundup. Instead, by 31 October it will be two months old with its peak well behind it. I think that is a big missed chance.

IllFonic has not said why. My guess is GTA 6. Rockstar is holding its 19 November date, and October will be all trailers and pre-orders for it. Still, there are almost three weeks between Halloween and GTA, and to me that window was worth the risk.

I do not trust the marketing videos, so here is the game in gameranx's look at it, without the studio's editing:

A six-chapter story: find, stalk, kill

There is a story mode, and the idea behind it is great: for the first time you see that night through Michael's eyes. Six chapters start with the escape from Smith's Grove, show where the coveralls, the mask and the knife came from, go through Phelps Garage and end with Laurie Strode. Some scenes recreate shots from the film one to one.

The trouble is that every chapter boils down to the same loop. Find the victims, stalk them, kill them. The houses and streets change, the job does not. Chapters have side challenges and collectibles, but to me it plays more like a long tutorial for multiplayer than a campaign, and Shacknews says much the same.

Within that loop there is plenty of variety. You can creep in through the shadows, kill the lights in a house and wait, or just walk in with the knife. Michael has a lot of executions, and some of them use whatever is around: a fridge, a phone cord, a tombstone.

This is what the story mode looks like in a regular player's recording, no commentary:

What Michael learned since Dead by Daylight

Before this game most players knew Michael from Dead by Daylight, where he is The Shape: first-person view, stalking fills his Evil Within meter, and at tier three he downs a survivor in one hit. On 19 January 2026 the Halloween chapter left the Dead by Daylight store because the licence was moving to the new game. If you bought it before then, you still have him. More on that in our guide to every Dead by Daylight killer.

In Halloween: The Game, Michael can do a lot more:

And this is Michael in multiplayer from a regular player, no marketing polish:

The score system: Michael gets arrested and still wins

I did not get the point of it for quite a while, not until I had stared at enough end screens and Steam threads.

A match in Halloween does not end with a simple "everyone died" or "everyone got out". The score decides it. Michael earns points for every resident he kills, for the Special Targets on the list he gets at the start, and for how he kills: a long stalk before an execution is worth a lot more than popping out of a shadow with a knife. Civilians earn points for every resident they save. At the end the totals are compared, and that is where the odd results come from. Players on the Steam forums report that Michael can finish a match in handcuffs and still win on points, and that if he misses two of three Special Targets, a perfect hunt on everyone else will not save him.

The intent is clear enough: reward playing it like the film, slow and quiet, instead of chasing whoever is nearest. But nobody explains the numbers, and a match that felt like a win ends as a loss. IllFonic noticed too. Patch 1.0.3 on 22 September made Special Targets worth less and saved or killed residents worth more, so that each of them would feel important to the final score. Part of the community gave up and invented its own rules, a point per resident and half a point per player.

Two more kinds of points add to the confusion. Match experience is split across four tracks (profile, Killer, Civilian and weapon) and unlocks characters, abilities and cosmetics. Perk Points are a currency you spend rolling for perk cards, lottery style, where a bigger stake buys better odds. So if it feels like this game has too many points, it does.

Controls: lots of options, not much comfort

The controls are clumsy, and you feel it from the first minutes. Michael is heavy, which suits him, but the civilians move just as stiffly and the animations jerk around. There are a lot of abilities and actions, and in a tense moment your fingers get tangled between grab, attack and a jump into the shadows.

The studio has owned up to part of it. Patch 1.0.2 fixed interaction prompts that kept disappearing, 1.0.3 fixed abilities stuck on cooldown. The same 1.0.3 reworked struggling out of grabs and by accident made it nearly impossible at Bloodthirst tier three, while players who did break free took fall damage. Patch 1.0.4 fixed that four days later, and everyone got 10,000 Perk Points by way of apology.

Details and music: this is where it nails the film

This part makes me want to hug the game. Haddonfield is built with huge attention to small things: the Myers house, Phelps Garage, autumn leaves on the lawns, seventies cars, warm light in the windows. Laurie, Annie, Lynda and Bob were redesigned together with Malek Akkad, the series producer, and there are ten playable civilians at launch.

The music is very well chosen. Carpenter's main theme kicks in exactly when it should, and a few piano notes are scarier than Michael around the corner. Shacknews says the same, and here I fully agree with the reviewer.

Characters next to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: the hyperreal bet did not pay off

And here comes the big "but". The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was made by a different studio, Sumo Digital, but published by the same Gun, and its characters still look better. Everyone there has a face of their own: uneven skin, wrinkles, dirt under the nails, a personality you read at a glance. Hands in the picture above looks like someone you would not want to share a bar with.

Halloween went for hyperrealism and ended up with something like store-bought avatars. Smooth skin, regular features, the same expression on everyone. Laurie here looks neither like Jamie Lee Curtis nor like anyone in particular, just a pleasant woman from a sweater ad. Officially the characters were "reimagined". To my taste they were reimagined into facelessness.

The women show the same gap. Virginia from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is dressed plainly, but she has a build, a posture and an age. Annie from Halloween is pretty, and that is it.

And these are the official renders, the best the studio could show. In the game itself the faces are nowhere near these pictures, and the character models look awful up close. I would call it a bait and switch: on the official screenshots and renders the game is beautiful, in reality it is blurry and noisy, and the characters look like different people.

Funnily enough, the one face the developers hid on purpose is Michael's. In the story and in the Smith's Grove patient look, before he has the mask, his features are covered by camera blur. That is faithful to the film: Carpenter hides Michael's face almost the whole time, and you only see him unmasked as an adult for a couple of seconds at the end, when Laurie pulls the mask off. Next to the other faces, it also looks like a smart move: at least here there is nothing to be disappointed by.

Chromatic aberration, lens distortion and grain: off only in a config file

The post-processing is turned all the way up. Chromatic aberration splits the edges of the frame into red and blue, lens distortion bends the image towards the corners, and film grain sits on top so it looks like the 1978 movie. I get the idea, but in dark scenes the grain sometimes really does stop you making out who is standing at the end of the hallway. You can even see the colour fringing on the official Steam screenshots, including the one above.

The whole game is also very blurry. The menu has motion blur, ray tracing, a choice of upscaler and post-process quality, but no separate toggles for aberration, distortion or grain. Complaints about that started on the Steam forums on the first day of early access.

You switch them off in a config file. Open %LOCALAPPDATA%\Ravage\Saved\Config\Windows in Explorer, create or open Engine.ini there and add this at the end:

[SystemSettings]
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
r.Tonemapper.Quality=0
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=0

The first line removes the aberration, the others the grain. These are standard variables of Unreal Engine 5, which the game runs on, and they are what players on Steam recommend. Set the file to read-only after saving, or the game may overwrite it. The rest of the post-processing, lens distortion included, gets much weaker with Post-Process Quality set to Low.

Performance: RX 9070 XT and RTX 5080 cannot handle max settings at 1440p

This is the part that hurts most. The graphics are average, yet it runs as if Cyberpunk with path tracing were on screen. I ran it on two cards, a Radeon RX 9070 XT and a GeForce RTX 5080, at 1440p on the highest preset. Both get flattened: without an upscaler and frame generation it is not comfortable to play. Gun's previous game, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, showed nothing like this on the same cards, and it did not look any worse.

And it is not just me. In his settings video PlanetMadnessTV shows an RTX 5080 dropping to 40 fps and works through what to do about it:

TechPowerUp, ComputerBase and PC Games Hardware have not published independent tests yet, so I am not giving exact frame rates here. Others see the same picture, though. Valve has rated the game Unsupported on Steam Deck, citing graphics performance. IllFonic itself acknowledged performance problems and crashes on some PC configurations on 17 September.

Players complained that the game dropped frames whenever Dr. Loomis spawned, and crashed outright on weaker systems. In patch 1.0.4 the studio found the culprit: Loomis's hair. That got fixed, and Xbox Series S lost its mode toggle and got locked to 30 fps along the way.

The official requirements on Steam:

The studio lists neither VRAM nor upscaler, and after my time on an RTX 5080 the promise of 4K at 30 fps on any RTX 30 series card looks very bold. If the game stutters for you, start with Post-Process Quality and shadows, and check your system against our guide to optimizing Windows 11 for gaming.

Online: a million players in a week and 67% on Steam

The launch was loud. Half a million players within hours of release and over a million by 12 September, according to IllFonic, across all platforms. On Steam concurrent players peaked at 26,907. Right now, on Sunday morning UTC, there are about three thousand, and the peak over the last 24 hours was 7,338.

Not everyone has left for good: the game is also on PS5 and Xbox, and Steam only shows PC. But the mood in the community is mixed. Plenty of people came over from Dead by Daylight, and half the arguments are about balance. Civilians complain about Reality Tear, after which they get stunned and finished off with no chance to respond. Michael players complain that everyone carries a pocket knife. Some point out that Michael is better off ignoring the human players entirely and killing residents, since that is where the points are. And the residents themselves often behave like mannequins.

Steam has 15,181 reviews with 67 percent positive, rated Mixed. On Metacritic the PC version has 71 from ten critic reviews, PS5 65 from fourteen, Xbox 60 from four. Metacritic users give it 7.7 and often call it better than Friday the 13th.

The studio shipped four patches in three weeks, which is a good sign. With friends it is a lot of fun, with strangers it depends on your luck, and that is exactly what Shacknews wrote too.

Who should buy it now and who should wait

If you love the 1978 film and played Friday the 13th, you can pick it up, though I would wait for a sale: I have not seen this much care for the source in a slasher game in a long time, and playing Michael with his shadows, light tricks and car really is fun. If you are on an RTX 4060-class card and do not fancy editing config files, I would wait a couple of patches. An image like this is not worth giving up that many frames for.

Our verdict

5

Gameplay and variety 5

Atmosphere and music 8

Graphics 4

Performance 3

Controls 4

Online 6

Good Stuff Real care for the details of the 1978 film Carpenter's music lands exactly when it should Lots of executions and powers for Michael The story told through Michael's eyes

Bad Stuff Official screenshots and renders look far better than the game RX 9070 XT and RTX 5080 cannot hold max settings at 1440p Blurry, noisy image, grain and aberration with no menu toggle Awful character models that lose to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre No living town, residents act like mannequins Clumsy controls A confusing score system

Summary

A game that treats the film with care, with a good Michael and good music, sunk by heavy performance, a blurry image, awful character models and marketing that promised very different graphics. Film fans can pick it up on sale, everyone else should wait for patches.

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