Thank you Celeritas Games for providing us with a review code!

Oh Halloween, how you’ve been contorted and morphed from its original meaning by the claws of commercialism. What was once a religious celebration dedicated to remembering and respecting the departed has now become a blend of so many things. An excuse for kids to rot their teeth out, a ”reason” for adults to party and get drunk—and for everyone to dress in ways they would normally not. Sinister Halloween continues the path that Halloween pursued.

Your unnamed character gets out of the house to go to a house party, picking up his girlfriend and her little brother along the way. As the trio continues onward, they realize that something isn’t right. The atmosphere takes a very dark turn as it turns out the supernatural is real after all and the small town is invaded by werewolves and ghosts. Now the three must find a way to survive. The story is very light so outside of a few collectibles that hint towards where the supernatural creatures came from, it won’t delve deeper than that.

Sinister Halloween progresses in a fairly linear fashion for its main campaign (or as the game spells it, “compaign”). In the starting town, there are spooky side locations that you can partake in such as visiting a haunted forest, a mansion, a barn, and a slaughterhouse. However, the main story will have you go through an abandoned house, cemetery, and a manor. All of these locations are practically staples in any horror media. In the town, you can also commit acts of vandalism such as shooting out house windows.

There are two modes that Sinister Halloween can be played in; PC mode and VR mode. There are some varying differences between the two besides the methods of control. In PC mode, the game controls like a typical first-person shooter with the same controls that nearly every FPS has. In VR mode, there are the VR control methods such as reaching out to grab items and manually equipping weapons. For some reason, PC mode has regenerating health like most modern shooters whereas in VR mode, health is more like old-school shooters. Unfortunately, this makes the consumable snacks in PC mode completely useless. With how the user interface is designed, Sinister Halloween leans more towards a VR experience.

As you’re going through the various attractions, the atmosphere sets in nicely. Many areas are dark and hard to see through and in most cases you will only have a flashlight to help you navigate through. Despite the linear progression of stages, it can be pretty easy to get lost within them. Where this would be a bad thing in many types of games, I feel it works in Sinister Halloween’s favor, given the setting. The visuals although not graphically that impressive, are decently immersive due to the realistic art style. Sound direction is also solid with the eerie sounds going through your eardrums as well as the roars and screams of the monsters.

Now when it comes to voice acting, it is a very YMMV (your mileage may vary) experience. It is very cheesy and amateurish, with all the characters being done by a handful of people at most. The delivery is very B-movie-like and this can be extremely aggravating for some. It can also be tone-deaf at times as many characters have stock lines that they say. Even after knowing that people are dying and you’re shooting monsters, the girlfriend character can still be singing “We want candy!” at intervals. In fact, the entire Sinister Halloween journey can be described as “B-movie.” There are only a few enemies in the game and they all act pretty similarly. Every human female in the game uses the same base model. Its paper-thin budget was stretched as much as possible—and with that comes a lot of jank. I'm pretty sure in one level I saw the little brother character get killed, but in the next level, he’s perfectly fine.

Even though Sinister Halloween controls fine, the interactions aren’t so fine. I came across many glitches, some small and some leading to soft locks. Many soft locks have to do with how the enemy pathfinding interacts with the terrain and how the respawn system works. In most games, a checkpoint system works by reverting to a last save point with everything reset to a specific position. Not Sinister Halloween though! When you respawn, you spawn in a predetermined area but the enemies are left in the same spot they killed you in or somewhere very close by. This can sometimes mean they block the only method of escape and if you didn’t happen to pick up a weapon, that means you’re in an unwinnable condition. The only way to exit is to back out to the main menu or restart the level. In an ironic sense, enemies are actually very easy to dispatch. Outside of the final boss, no enemy takes more than two shots to kill.

Weapons are overpowered due to what I previously mentioned and also having infinite ammo, at least in PC mode. In VR mode you just have a lot of it. It becomes a kind of funhouse where you walk around and blow away all the monsters that stand in your path. Your three weapons (despite the controls have enough slots for eight) are a torch, a pistol and a shotgun. Technically there are four, with the last one being a holy cross but it is a passive weapon that only allows you to shoot ghosts. PC mode has the pump-action shotgun become semi-automatic but has to be reloaded one shell at a time. The torch swings slowly and is fairly unreliable. In VR mode, the torch is hilariously overpowered because you can simply hold the torch out and watch enemies crumple to the floor.

There’s a lot of moral warnings to be mindful of. First of all, Sinister Halloween is as violent as any grindhouse film. When the player character gets hurt, blood splatters on the border around the screen. Severed heads and bodies can be seen all over the levels with accompanying puddles and pools of blood. Language is kinda strange as the only two things I noticed was that the F word is used at least once in the slaughter house level and God’s name is used in vain at least once too. In terms of sexual content, there are some moments of partial nudity but privates and sensitive areas are not seen. The female characters are all dressed in revealing costumes such devils and witches, cheerleaders, and a maid costume, with one of the maid costumes saying “milky maids” on the back. The supernatural is all over with werewolves, mummies, ghosts, and spirits causing bodies and objects to float.

Looking at Sinister Halloween, it objectively is not a good game in both modes. The jank is layered on like a frosting on cake. Plenty of bugs that can lead to soft locks are present all over. The shooting is very generic and the voice acting will not win awards anytime soon. And yet, my two and a half hours were very enjoyable as it manages to capture the spirit of Halloween—at least the commercial side of it. The absurdity of certain situations also captures that B-movie schlock that some love. You gotta have a high tolerance for low-budget stuff if you want to get into this and I just happen to love those ridiculous bad-good media. Outside of the main campaign, there is a survival mode which are revamped levels of the campaign ones, and a DLC titled Asylum, which is a 30-minute experience about saving a girl trapped in an asylum. If you can get past a large number of morality concerns and can deal with cheese, I’d give Sinister Halloween a shot as it’s fairly cheap. For most people, there are likely better Halloween and VR experiences out there.