Halloween! Time of fright and fun, of trick-or-treating, telling spooky stories, and spooky costume parties. It’s one of the most fun days in the calendar. Which makes it super weird that so few games decided to commit their entire theme to Halloween. There’s real potential there.
With that in mind, we’ve prepared a short list of games which either are ABOUT Halloween or do something clearly related. We’ve included two special events, because a Halloween fest in an online or online-friendly game is a common thing, so it’s a good idea to shout out at least two examples.
That said, let’s take a look at…
| Game | Release | Genre | Developer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Pumpkin Jack | 2020-10-23 | Adventure | Nicolas Meyssonnier |
 | Viscera Cleanup Detail - House of Horror | 2015-10-29 | Indie | RuneStorm |
 | Costume Quest | 2011-10-14 | Adventure | Double Fine Productions |
 | Costume Quest 2 | 2014-10-07 | Adventure | Double Fine Productions |
 | Dead By Daylight The Halloween Chapter | 2016-10-25 | Horror | Behaviour Digital Inc. |
 | Monster Hunter World | 2018-08-09 | Action | CAPCOM |
 | Destiny 2 The Witch Queen Deluxe Edition | 2022-02-22 | Shooter, RPG | Bungie |
 | Batman Arkham Knight | 2015-06-23 | Adventure | Rocksteady Studios |
Halloween Forever
| Release date: | 2016-10-25 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Imaginary Monsters |
Here’s a sweet little game about a pumpkin-headed dude jumping around and vomiting candy corn. And it’s pretty dang great!
Your character, Pumpkin Man, has been brought to life by some occult forces. Now he’s on a quest to find out what his destiny is, all across three spooky worlds filled to the brim with dangers and all sorts of horrific enemies who can be defeated using the aforementioned candy corn.
Halloween Forever is a lovely homage to the 8-bit era. The graphics are great and the gameplay super fun, so be sure to check this little gem out. You shouldn’t regret it!
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Pumpkin Jack
| Release date: | 2020-10-23 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Nicolas Meyssonnier |
If you want to play as a pumpkin-headed dude, but retro visuals are not your thing, try Pumpkin Jack, a 3D platformer with great, modern graphics. Still, it’s a spooky title in its own charming way.
As the titular character, Jack, the Mythical Pumpkin Lord, your task is to help the forces of Evil defeat the Good. Still, the game is pretty much a classic 3D platformer at heart, but it features challenging combat and lots of puzzles based on physics and other things, such as burning stuff using your fiery head.
Each level boasts a unique atmosphere and plenty of challenges, so you shouldn’t get bored. You also get to play as an evil dude, so if you feel inclined to do something bad, try Pumpkin Jack. Don’t do anything stupid outside of the game, heheh.
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Trick & Treat
| Release date: | 2016-09-26 |
| Genre: | Indie |
| Developer: | Rabbiton |
And now for something completely different: a cutesy adventure game where you explore a haunted mansion. And it’s free to play!
You play as Amelia, a maid of a young witch named Charlotte. The duo goes trick-or-treating and while on their errand for candy they end up in the abovementioned haunted mansion where they get separated. Now completely on her own, Amelia needs to uncover the secrets of this spooky residence and reunite with Charlotte.
It’s a lovely little game that’ll take you around 90 minutes to complete. The puzzles you have to solve aren’t very difficult, either, so it should be a relaxing experience, even if a bit on the spooky side. Give it a shot, especially now that it’s a free-to-play title.
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Batman: Arkham Knight
| Release date: | 2015-06-23 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Rocksteady Studios |
You didn’t expect this one here, did you? But yeah, Batman: Arkham Knight is a Halloween-themed game. After all, Scarecrow, one of Batsy’s greatest enemies, decided to unleash his fear toxin on October 31. This plan resulted in a mass evacuation of the entire city of Gotham, with Bruce Wayne having to clean up all this mess, as usual.
Expect all sorts of spooky hallucinations throughout the game. There’s also a PlayStation 4-exclusive DLC, “Scarecrow Nightmare,” which features Gotham transformed into a horrifying place where the fearmongering supervillain rules supreme through his undead army.
There’s even a Halloween-themed Easter egg featuring Man-Bat. In order to access it, you need to complete the “Creature of the Night” Most Wanted mission and then change your PC or console’s system date to October 31, 2015. We will leave the rest to you.
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Haunt the House: Terrortown
| Release date: | 06-14-2014 |
| Genre: | Puzzle, action |
| Developer: | SFB Games |
Don’t be fooled by its pretty spooky title that suggests a hardcore horror game. No, this one is a cutesy action-puzzler where your goal is to scare some folks, that’s all. Still, there is a second goal for you to achieve that goes far beyond just some simple jump scares…
Your job in Haunt the House: Terrortown is to scare the inhabitants of the titular town and force them to leave. You do that by possessing various objects and using their special powers to frighten the folks. What’s interesting about the game that pretty much every character here has a personality of their own. There’s also a very nice musical score to accompany your adventures, played by live session musicians.
The game received three free expansions: Ghost Train, Mansion House and The North Pole. All in all, it’s a fun indie game with cutesy graphics and a funny take on the whole trick-or-treating thing.
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Costume Quest
| Release date: | 2011-10-14 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Double Fine Productions |
Costume Quest is a rare treat: a game that’s actually fully about Halloween, the fun parts of Halloween, to be specific. You’re playing as a kid whose evening took a dark turn, because your twin was kidnapped while you were trick-or-treating. Now you and the friends you meet along the way have to rescue your sibling, using the transformative power of Halloween costumes.
That’s right: through the magic of video games, when combat begins the characters turn into real version of costumes they are wearing, with appropriate abilities, of course. You’ll also go trick-or-treating to get currency (candy), costume parts, and potentially some info on your brother’s whereabouts. It’s a lovely title from the makers of cute and fun games: Double Fine Productions.
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Dead by Daylight: Halloween Chapter DLC
| Release date: | 2016-10-25 |
| Genre: | Horror |
| Developer: | Behaviour Digital Inc. |
For a change of atmosphere, how about the other kind of Halloween: the one with a horrifying, masked serial killer who seemingly cannot be killed? This is what one of the DLCs for a horror PvP game Dead by Daylight offers you. This expansion gives you three things: Michael Myers as a new killer, Laurie Strode as a new survivor, and Haddonfield as a new map. A full-on movie tribute DLC.
If you don’t know Dead by Daylight yet, the premise is simple and replayable. Four players play as survivors trying to escape from a lone player acting as the killer. Each character has unique perks and skills which can shift the odds in the team’s favor, and both killers and survivors have their own progression trees. It’s a tense, dark, exciting game, perfect for five friends looking for scares.
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Viscera Cleannup Detail – House of Horror
| Release date: | 2015-10-23 |
| Genre: | Indie |
| Developer: | RuneStorm |
Viscera Cleanup Detail is a game about exactly the thing the title promises. You and, potentially, a few of your friends play as professional cleaners of blood, alien viscera, and other unpleasant messes left after heroes are done killing everything. In the House of Horror expansion you’re instead going to clean what’s left after some people decided to become occult dabblers on Halloween.
This means a new location for your cleanup: a haunted house, as well as a whole bunch of thematically suitable challenges and occult goop to mop out of the creaking wooden floor. It isn’t a huge addition to the base game, but it’s fun to change locations for a bit, and the house of detailed and spooky without really having any conflict to speak of, unless you count inter-player beef.
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Monster Hunter: World – the Autumn Harvest Fest event
| Release date: | 2018-08-09 |
| Genre: | Action |
| Developer: | Capcom |
Although it isn’t a neat DLC or an overarching theme, Monster Hunter: World nevertheless finds a way to celebrate Halloween. It does so with its usual over-the-top style in an event called Autumn Harvest Fest and its special monster hunts and fights. It’s not just fighting for entertainment’s sake: the event hunts provide you with materials for new armor both for your hunter and their Palico.
Moreover, the Gathering Hub, Monster Hunter’s multiplayer and event lobby, is completely redecorated in a festive-spooky manner, while your handler and pet piggy are dressed for the occasion. As events usually go, it’s just in for a limited time, so get in on the fun right now, or you’ll miss out on cool Halloween stuff. The event will likely come back in the future, but what’s the point in waiting?
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Destiny 2 – the Festival of the Lost event
| Release date: | 2022-01-18 |
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Another event, this time in Bungie’s excellent MMOFPS, Destiny 2. The Halloween celebration in question is called the Festival of the Lost and it’s going to run unto November 2, 2021. The Festival comes with a lot of new stuff. There’s a temporary currency, Spectral Pages which you can cleanse through a new mode, Haunted Lost Sectors. Cleansed pages open a way to both lore and loot.
2021’s Festival of the Lost gives you a chance to get some new rifles, and the more Pages you’ve cashed in, the better your chances to find them. The best part is that the base Destiny 2 is free to play, you only pay for the expansions, of which there are several. They are all pretty cool, full of more story and tons of cool loot, so they are well worth the money if you like Destiny 2’s tight FPS gameplay.
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Something wicked this way comes
That’s the end of our list of Halloween-themed stuff in video games, but it doesn’t exhaust the topic. Especially where it comes to in-game events, there tend to be as many Halloween eventss as there are online games. Hopefully, something caught your attention and redefined your plans for the last days of October.