Savage Halloween

I have a soft spot for the small pixel games that arrive quietly, ask nothing of you, and then refuse to leave your head. Savage Halloween from solo-ish Brazilian studio 2ndBoss is exactly that kind of game. It is a side-scrolling run-and-gun in the Contra lineage, built in a lovingly rough 8-bit aesthetic, and the fact that it quietly sits at 93% positive on Steam while most of the internet has never heard of it is frankly a small injustice. You pick one of three playable monsters to crash the party and shut down an eternal Halloween rave: James, a grumpy undead farmer with a shotgun and a bad attitude; Lulu, a werewolf with beefy health stats and an identity crisis; and Dominika, the Dark Lord's daughter who just wants to get home and watch TV. Each character has different stats across health, speed, and jump power, and Dominika's double-jump and hover ability in particular change how you approach platforming sections. Beyond their stat spread, each one also carries a unique special attack, which adds a light layer of character strategy on top of what is otherwise a straightforward shooter. You fire in 8 directions, hold a lock-movement button to aim diagonally without walking off a ledge, and collect bizarre secondary ammo from crates scattered through levels: bat spread-shots, frog rounds that slide along the floor, boomerang ghosts that ricochet through groups, and exploding chickens that are absolutely the correct tool for boss encounters. The 7 levels are where the game earns its handcraft badge. Most run-and-guns are happy to give you corridor after corridor with a palette swap. Savage Halloween keeps interrupting itself. A shmup section here, a witch-broom riding segment there, a sequence involving hitching a ride on a penguin's back that has no right to be as enjoyable as it is. Each level contains around six stages, and the fifth of each tends to be the wildcard. The spritework in the backgrounds is genuinely lovely, and the boss designs are big, detailed, and memorably weird: a one-eyed cyclops Big Daddy, a flying genie named Garlic who drops projectiles from altitude, a were-jaguar boxer who turns the jungle stage into a boxing ring. That said, bosses are the game's most discussed fault. The challenge spikes hard, and the smaller enemies summoned mid-fight can create situations that feel punishing rather than skillful. The saving grace is a forgiving checkpoint system: dying in a boss fight does not reset you to the stage start, and getting a Game Over only sends you back to the beginning of the level. The soundtrack deserves its own sentence. Composed by Jose Roberto Chapolim, it leans into high-tempo electronic chiptune that sounds more like a rave DJ set than a Halloween horror score, which is entirely the point given the story. It is bizarre and infectious in equal measure. The sound sits somewhere between NES pulse-wave nostalgia and something you would hear on a dancefloor at 2am, and it works far better than it should. A single playthrough runs about 90 minutes, but the three-character structure plus a harder difficulty mode push the total experience toward that 4.5-hour average reported by players who do a proper run with each character. This is not a game trying to compete with Blazing Chrome or the polished end of the retro-revival market. It is a budget title that knows exactly what it is: a compact, joyful, slightly absurd love letter to NES-era action games, built by a small team with genuine craft and a very good sense of humor. Play it with a friend on the couch if you can. Two guns against the eternal Halloween rave is better than one.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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