Halloween: The Game Review - A Great Michael Myers Stuck in a Thin Night

What it is

Halloween: The Game is IllFonic's latest licensed asymmetrical horror game. It came out on 8 September 2026 for PC (Steam and Epic), PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, co-published with Gun Interactive, with John Carpenter and producer Malek Akkad involved. Anyone who played Friday the 13th: The Game or Evil Dead: The Game knows the formula: one player is Michael Myers, four others are Haddonfield civilians trying to survive Halloween night, 1978. Matches run about 20 minutes, crossplay covers PC and consoles, and there's a short single-player story on the side.

Playing as The Shape

This is where the game earns its licence. Michael doesn't sprint, and he doesn't need to. Shape Jump lets him phase through doors and windows while he's in shadow - it's blocked in direct light or when a civilian is looking at him, and it runs on a cooldown - so the whole killer game becomes about reading lamps, porches and sightlines. Stalking a victim raises their fear and unlocks contextual kills (fridge doors, windows, phone cords) that are nasty in exactly the way the 1978 film is. For my first few hours as Michael I was genuinely grinning behind the mask.

Playing as a civilian

The survivor side is smarter than anything IllFonic has done before. Instead of just fixing a car, you're hunting for Special Targets - residents Michael also wants - and ordering regular NPCs to hide, follow you or call the police. Herding a panicked neighbour across a dark street while something breathes behind a hedge is the best tension the game produces. With the Police Reinforcements perk card equipped, a dead civilian can come back as an armed police officer, which keeps you in the match instead of staring at a spectator cam. The Standard Edition gives you 10 civilians, plus Perk Cards to build loadouts.

The problems

Three maps at launch - Haddonfield Heights, Haddonfield Town Center and Orange Grove Estates - and they're all suburban variations of the same night. After a dozen matches you know every route. NPC pathing is erratic, grab prompts fail, characters clip into doors; bugs turned up in almost every match I played. The minigames for getting back into a match get old fast. Progression is purely cosmetic, which is fair, but it's not much of a hook. The single-player campaign, following Michael from Smith's Grove back to Haddonfield, lasts two to three hours and plays like a well-dressed tutorial with collectibles.

Price and availability

The Standard Edition is 39.99 euros digitally. The pricier Digital Deluxe locks two extra civilians, Richard and Alexis, behind the upgrade - in a 40 euro multiplayer game, I don't love that. Physical copies for PS5 and Xbox arrive on 6 October, so in our region digital is the only way in until then.

Verdict

The best Michael Myers any game has delivered, and a survivor loop with genuine ideas, trapped in a launch that is too thin and too buggy for 39.99 euros. If you have four friends and love the film, buy it and play private matches. If you're going solo into matchmaking, wait for patches and more maps.

Score: 6/10

Image: Egon Eagle / CC BY-SA 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Myers_mask.jpg