Plenty of things are terrifying about a man in a boiler suit creeping up behind you, but it’s hard to be scared of Halloween: The Game’s Michael Myers when he strolls around the neighborhood with all the urgency of a retiree on a golf course. Admittedly, my early experience with the latest asymmetrical survival horror based on a famous movie came without the obligatory day one patch, so everything I’ve seen so far comes with that giant, flashing caveat. But after several hours, my immediate reaction is that this just isn’t ready. I would barely think it’s ready if it were labeled asan early access game, which it’s not. Clumsy, buggy, and often frustrating, Halloween: The Game seems in need of considerable polish and bug squishing.

Developer Illfonic is, of course, almost synonymous with asymmetrical horror at this point, if not quite able to break the stranglehold Behaviour Interactive has with Dead by Daylight. In keeping with the traditions of the genre, you either play on your own as the killer, Michael Myers, and rampage through the town, or you work with up to three other humans and a handful of AI companions to loot items and keep yourself alive long enough to find, open, and escape the streets of Haddonfield on Halloween night in 1978.

Because of Illfonic’s back catalog, I came in with high expectations, and knowing Halloween creator John Carpenter was also involved sent them soaring even further. You’d think, with the best part of a decade’s learning and all that asym trial and error behind it, Halloween: The Game would be the most polished of all Illfonic’s games. But — so far at least — that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

Animations are broken or missing completely. I’ve had hard crashes that sent me back to my PS5 dash, averaging at least one an hour. Combat is beyond janky — several times now, I’ve stabbed a player and had my weapon phase right through them. Often the sound gets messed up, so when I open a door to my left, I hear it to my right, which is hugely irritating given sound is vital to a stealth horror game. And on two occasions, a quick time event bugged out and trapped me in a broken animation, giving Myers all the time in the world to step up right behind me. That was just as much fun and not-at-all-frustrating as it sounds.

The NPC AI is also hysterically stupid. Once, playing as Myers, I (loudly) busted through a front door and found all three remaining NPCs in the same room, still standing at the same window. I had executed two before the remaining one decided it was time to make a run for it.

It’s galling because there are some excellent ideas here. I had a great time with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s spin on asymmetrical horror back in 2023, but within days it was clear no one wanted to play as Leatherface because it was so much easier — and considerably more fun — to clock up XP and escape as a survivor.

In Halloween: The Game, however, Illfonic seems to have really worked to balance the odds between killer and civilian, and Myers is a blast to play. Even though he never, ever runs, making it next to impossible to take out a player if they’ve seen you, his special abilities — snuffing out all the lights in the immediate area; jumping from shadow to shadow; detecting nearby players — help mitigate that deeply unsatisfactory walking speed, especially if you nail the timing. Plus, the execution mechanic is a neat shortcut if you manage to get close enough to… well, execute it. The death animations, if often out of sync, are brilliantly brutal, too, particularly if you manage to catch a civilian, by a window or next to an electric oven. (I’m sure there’s more still to discover!)

Best of all, this isn’t just four humans against one killer. As Myers, your job is to wipe the map clean of all survivors, human and NPC alike. As a civilian, you need to creep around the deliciously 70s-inspired maps — everything, from the cars to the decor to the rotary phones, is on point here, not to mention the fashion! — quietly warning NPCs and instructing them to either hide, follow you, or escape.

There are plenty of items to gather as you creep through residential homes, including offensive weapons, defensive tools, and a host of goodies to bolster the odds of getting out of there unscathed. You’ll never be able to take Myers out completely — just like the movies, this is a dude who does not know how to take the hint and die — but you can temporarily immobilize him with the right timing and the right equipment.

That said, why do we have to sit and watch Myers finish killing off idiot NPCs if all the human players are already dead? You’re given QTEs when spectating — I hate them; there are too many, they’re too boring, and I swear there’s occasionally an input delay — but it’s so tedious, especially as the maps are pretty chunky and make hunting down one last survivor time-consuming.

And it just doesn’t perform well. Even beyond the poor AI and broken QTEs, I experienced numerous crashes, rubberbanding, and framerate drops for no discernible reason. Characters sometimes walked three feet off the ground. Interacting with items is completely hit-or-miss — half the time you can pick stuff up or remove a chain with a bolt cutter; half the time you cannot. Oh, and sometimes you can open a door, step through it, lock it, and then find yourself back outside the front, unable to get back in.

Like I said, I need to play on the launch patch before finalizing my thoughts — but, generally speaking, a day one update is rarely a miracle fix for all of a review build’s issues. Still, I’ll be back once I’ve spent some time on the live servers with both the single and multiplayer modes (so far the former has completely underwhelmed me — again, mostly due to idiotic NPCs). I’d also like to better understand how the card perk system works and experiment with all the civilians’ passive abilities. For now, though, it’s difficult to recommend Halloween: The Game to anyone other than a horror fan with a Michael Myers shrine in their home (now that’s a scary thought) or those with deep, deep affection for asymmetrical games.