Developer: Spoonbox Studio
Publisher: EastAsiaSoft, Ratalaika
Platform: PC, Switch (2), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Tested on: Switch 2
Halloween 1985 – Review
“Wait a minute!”, you say as you read the title of this review. “It’s neither Halloween nor 1985! This seems like an inappropriate game to review in early January! What gives?”. Well, dear reader, we’re going to make a bold claim here: forget Christmas or Easter, the Spooky Season is the best season! Officially, we’re filing this one as our first backlog review of 2026, but unofficially, we’re simply hopeful that Halloween 1985 can prove that it can be Halloween year-round.
Story
In true retro arcade fashion, Halloween 1985 adopts a “show, don’t tell” approach to set up its simple story. A short opening cutscene shows a group of halloween monsters, led by a vampire, walk up to a little pumpkin shop. They ransack it, stealing all the pumpkins and leaving the shop in a terrible state. The shop’s owner, the pumpkin-headed Pumpk-man, returns to see his livelihood destroyed. He sets out to reclaim his beloved pumpkins and to take revenge on the monsters. Little does he know who really is the mastermind behind this act of grand pumpkin larceny… but he’ll soon find out! There is a beauty to the simplicity and straightforwardness of Halloween 1985’s premise. The game gets the story out of the way quickly and mostly focuses on its arcade-style gameplay, but the clear and concise manner with which it ties everything together does just enough to frame the action.
Graphics
The monsters that make up Halloween 1985’s cast ooze personality but lack an identity of their own. That may sound like a contradiction at first, but try to picture a generic cartoon witch and what you’ll end up with in your mind will look strikingly close to the Witch here. The Vampire is a legally distinct generic vampire, and not Dracula either. The generic monsters make the instantly readable, but also instantly forgettable once you put down your controller. Despite this, the character sprites are as charming as it gets, just like the more detailed designs in the optional frame that you can use to fill up the black borders around the game’s 4:3 aspect ratio. To complete the retro look, there’s an optional CRT filter as well. The game’s visual simplicity results in a buttery smooth performance, with short load times and no issues.
Sound
Each of Halloween 1985’s monsters has its own theme music that plays as Pumpk-man invades their living space -rightfully so, we might add. The game’s soundtrack appropriately consists of 8-bit style chiptune music. This is further supplemented by simple but effective sound effects. There is no voice acting here, but this isn’t something we’d have expected either.
Gameplay
So far, we’ve covered the “Halloween” part of the game’s title, but what about the “1985” part? Well, that’s where the gameplay comes in. Admittedly, we weren’t around during the Golden Age of arcade games, as we weren’t even born yet in 1985. However, through a combination of pop culture osmosis and playing games with a similar vibe on our original Game Boy, we can tell you that Halloween 1985 nails the retro arcade feeling… or at least the image we’ve been cultivating in our head for 30 years. What you’re getting here is a platformer where every level is contained on a single screen. Taking control of Pumpk-man, you need to collect every pumpkin, while avoiding enemies, traps and obstacles themed to the stage boss. Unfortunately, our hero is woefully underpowered. He’s only armed with a very tight control scheme, allowing you to jump and move, but no way to fight back… at least not directly.
Indirectly though, each of the game’s six themed stages offers a way to deal with the stage boss. The game makes a point of telling you how to beat a boss before you start a level, although most of these ways are intuitive if you have basic knowledge of the monsters you’re dealing with. Opening window shutters to let in light defeats the Vampire, for example, and triggering a comedically oversized boxing glove proves to be an effective way to punch the evil Clown in the face. That said, we always thought that the only way to stop a Werewolf was a silver bullet, not poorly isolated electrical wiring. Shows what we know. Beating a stage boss is entirely optional, but it does give you a huge score boost.
That inevitably brings us to why you’d play Halloween 1985. As a retro arcade game, the entire point is to get the highest possible number on the game’s built-in leaderboard, which, sadly, isn’t online but local only. Sure, the game may take you through six distinctly themed stages -the Vampire’s mansion, Werewolf’s mine, Mummy’s pyramid, Clown’s Circus, Witch’s forest and finally Inferno, where you face off against the Devil himself- but with only 150 seconds to clear a stage, this isn’t exactly a long game, clocking in at around 15 minutes to beat. That inherent shortness isn’t a flaw though- it’s the entire point of this kind of game. Beyond the standard beginner mode, Halloween 1985 offers unlockable expert (2 rounds per level) and speed run modes, further encouraging you to chase that high score. This fits in with the philosophy of real-world arcade games, which were designed to be short and sweet and to earn as many coins as possible. Fortunately, that isn’t the case here, and you’ll only need to pay €4.99 once. As a result, Halloween 1985 is the perfect palette cleanser in between bigger games, although we found that the 15-minute runtime suddenly turned into hours as we kept trying to beat our own high score.
Conclusion
We were more than pleasantly surprised by Halloween 1985, and not just because of its spooky setting. The gameplay transported us back to a simpler time, when games like Boulder Dash or Hyper Lode Runner ruled the roost. Whether you’re an arcade aficionado looking to relive the golden days or if you’re simply looking for a good “in-between” title, look no further than Pumpk-man and his quest for pumpkin justice.
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