Halloween’s first paid DLC is coming on October 27 in the form of a new skin for the game’s killer, Michael Myers, and it’s pulling from a source you might not expect: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. A free update on the same day will also add a fifth map, The Tower Farm, inspired by a location in the same film.
It may seem odd to jump to the fifth movie for the game’s first DLC, but it’s not the only piece of new content coming that day. There’s also a second skin coming for Big Mike, borrowing from his look in the legacy sequel Halloween (2018). Each skin will run you $10.
Survivor mains also have new things to look forward to, including two new characters, Michelle and Eugene, as well as Civilian Costumes Pack 1, which includes 14 outfits–one for each survivor character–and 42 colorings, or “tints.” The new survivors will also go for $10, though that’s for the pair, not for each of them, while the new styles and colors will be–you guessed it–$10 for the set. This content drop is the first of several coming to the game in its first year, development studio Illfonic said.
With 13 movies in the series, there’s still plenty of ground to cover for Halloween, which makes kicking off its post-launch roadmap with Halloween 5 such an interesting choice. The appropriately autumnal farm map is more open than the game’s earlier maps, making it harder to break line of sight from Haddonfield’s boogeyman. I suppose that moody setting was too picturesque to pass up as an update just days before October 31.
As much as I love the 1978 original, I’m not particularly fond of most of the Halloween sequels, though Halloween H20 is probably dearest to me; I fondly recall seeing it on the big screen as a horror-obsessed nine-year-old, so I look forward to seeing that one reflected in the game down the line.
In any event, I don’t think the sequels’ quality ought to keep the development team from bringing them into the game like this. Illfonic’s game should be a museum to all things Halloween, and watching it become that over the next few years is an exciting prospect. I hope the licensing deal extends to the series’ more oddball entries, like Rob Zombie’s reboot duology and Halloween 3–the one movie in the series that doesn’t involve Michael Myers. If the game follows the roadmap I’ve built in my mind, we’ll see every version of The Shape on the character select screen one day.
In GameSpot’s Halloween review, I wrote that it gives players “a vibes-heavy experience befitting the timeless film, while also offering a unique hook that keeps the game from feeling like a rehash of the many horror multiplayer games that came before it.”
