This is a thread for people to post reviews of Halloweeny games made in Clickteam's tools and to provide retrospectives providing behind-the-scenes of games that people have themselves made or helped make. It can be a text-based review, illustrated, or even video if you like!
Please also post a copy of reviews to the games entry on The Daily Click or Kliktopia as appropriate where possible. Also, provide a link to where the game can be found.
I'll start things off, first with a retrospective then with some partially recycled reviews of some particularly great Halloween games I've played over the years (with a focus on the positives of why people should check out these games).
Retrospective: Swipe-o'-Lantern
Author description: "Swipe your mouse to launch your pumpkin across the screen to collect as many candies as you can before the timer runs out. Hit anything too hard: YOU EXPLODE! Hit the bomb that looks like an orb: YOU EXPLODE! Run out of time: YOU EXPLODE! Hint: For a long life, please try to avoid exploding."
I made this game for the Fusionween 2024 Game Jam hosted by Toby Davis, which had no theme other than Halloween.
Having no specific theme I decided to focus on re-using my swiping mechanic from an unfinished game I had made. That game used it for a 2D platformer, but I wanted to try it for a more top-down style. This resulted in me thinking of tying it into Halloween through a piņata mechanic which gave the player candy when they hit the objects. Doing just this seemed too easy, so I also made one of the objects a bomb which you did NOT want to hit as well as killing the player if they hit things too hard.
I then tied it together using my hi-score system and added in some feedback to players when they lost inspired by Behead Reanimated. I also added the ability to get more time which gave people some strategy in choosing between getting more time and using the time they had to get more points - I spent quite a lot of time on how much time to give. Some day I hope to make this a mobile game given it uses a swiping mechanic.
I'm not sure if I got the difficulty right as I mostly did the play-testing myself and by the end I had gotten quite good at using the right level of force. If I were to make the game again I would probably have an easy mode and a hard mode as many people seemed to find it a bit tricky.
As someone who usually spends way too long working on games and never finishing them, it was great to have an incentive to actually get a game out there and the competition was a great conduit for this.
Author description:: "It's Halloween eve's. You need to give candy to kids as always but you know something will come through the darkness."
I really like the look and feel to this game, which feels very spooky while also being a rather creative homage to Five Nights at Freddy's.
There is so much to like about this game. The menu screen is top notch and fits in well with the theme of the game. The story and instructions are nicely integrated into the game. The graphics and audio are well done (the voice effects reminded me of Stray and it really fits) and the stats at the end were handy. The challenges add to the game's re-playability. Definitely the spookiest game in the contest - nice work!
Author description: "This game does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing you to... behead yourself. In this bone-rattling adventure, you play as a headless skeleton, dubbed 'The Fleshless' by the nefarious vampire lord/terrible punster Dragh Kyllah. Forever confined to his idle frames, Dragh Kyllah is envious of the Fleshless' ability to have different animations. You must combat the salty bloodsucker's countless minions, including zombies, bats, goblins, and ghosts, and eventually, the man himself. But you also come prepared, albeit against your will, as various objects are hexed to become your surrogate head/weapon..."
There is a lot to love about this game. It oozes creativity, from its fun sense of humour (in its name, sound effects, storyline and even how it hangs a lantern on why the antagonist is not animated) to the variety of the enemies and weapons and how they interact. The level design is fairly plain, but the variety in platform positions and methods of getting between the platform make a virtue out of the simplicity, which makes good use of the different vertical spaces for different elements of the gameplay.
The enemies and the whole premise is very Halloweeny, and it certainly has boss battles galore with its main antagonist. It does a good job of layering up the elements as you replay it, helping keep the player engaged. No individual element is overly complicated, but when it all gets added together it makes for a game which can be quite challenging at the higher levels. There's a fair bit of trial and error in learning the best strategies, with the tips shown when you die helping you master the game.
The music, chosen by the author from the back catalogue of a music group he is is part of, works very well and adds to the theme - see https://overheaven.bandcamp.com/ for Over Heaven Production. The homemade graphics and sometimes homemade sound effects also fit with the feel of the game. There is plenty of replay value, from the increasing selection of weapons to the need to continue to adapt your approach to match the game getting harder. It is good that you can resume from where you left off or replay earlier elements as it can allow for the game to be completed over multiple sessions and replayed at your chosen difficulty.
If the author hadn't told me himself I would never have guessed this was his first platform game. His six years of developing other games really paid off to make it quite the genre debut.
In conclusion, this is a very solid and imaginative game with polished gameplay that benefits from clear attention to detail. It succeeds in realising its vision and, perhaps most importantly, I found it really fun to (re-)play. An A+ submission, I give it a 9/10.
Author description: "It's the Halloween season once again, and little Billy is going trick-or-treating. After going through house to house for candy, he stumbles upon a mysterious house with an old man living there. He tells Billy about these magical candies known as the 4 Mystical Candies and that with every single one you eat, you get granted one wish. Meanwhile, a scientist kid named Franken heard the news that Billy got a hold of the 4 Mystical Candies, so he sends four of his monster minions (which are based off classic monster movies) into the neighborhood in search of Billy. While Billy was walking through the neighborhood park, Franken's monsters came out of nowhere, gave Billy a good scare, and take the candy from him. With his state of the art Turf Dart Gun, it's up to Billy to go after those monsters and recover the 4 Mystical Candies. Are you up for the task?"
A fun start with the story that gets the most out of BigAl's trademark cartoony style, and the later cut scenes are also fun. Both the story and character names have a sense of creative fun that match the art style. It very much fulfils the bill of having Halloween boss battles, and each boss manages to be reasonably unique, often with movements and attacks that theme in nicely with the monster and thus makes sense. The reward you get when you defeat the boss adds a nice reward, and gives people a reason to replay a boss fight. The controls were clear and the interface was easy to use. The use of an overworld map and shop made it easy to choose levels and to level up using a fitting old school interface.
It is a 7/10 due to its inconsistent difficulty curve and lack of 'fairness', but has the potential to be elevated to an 8/10.
Author description: "The three witches have forgotten to take their medicine. Your task is to give it to them and cure their mental instability before they destroy the world."
The gameplay is well thought through with a good amount of signposting for what is going to happen to impact the world and it builds up both the weapons and the threats in a gradual manner to prevent the player from getting overwhelmed. This means the game is about situational awareness rather than simply luck or fast reaction times, although the procedural generation does sometimes mean you are at the mercy of the randomness of the game, waiting around for a while with nothing obvious to do to progress the game (especially in the first level before you get more of the weapons which provide more options). I like how you simply lose life when you touch water instead of it being instadeath. In some cases the level seemed to get harder the longer it went on, and so it seemed easier to die and start again. Fun graphics, gameplay and music combine to make a nice little game and the fact it was made in only 72 hours is impressive.
Hey, the name's JackorJohn7. I made the game "Creepy Tower" for the DC Boss Jam in 2023 and updated it a year later. I'll be going over the development of the game and also give out a little retrospective.
The concept of a Halloween game for the "Crazy" series actually predated the announcement of the 2023 game jam by about a month. Originally, the game would take place in a small neighborhood with a witch tower right next to it. You'd be able to explore the neighborhood to find treats and interact with characters new and old. There also would have been a tower you'd be able to enter, where you could fight a witch boss. So basically, the game was going to play like the Easter level from the first Crazy Towers game. I don't remember why I didn't go with this idea, but it probably would've taken longer to make given all of the assets I'd have to draw for it.
As with any game, many ideas for what could be in it are thrown around, but a lot never come to fruition. Creepy Tower is no exception to this; I had many ideas for material to be included, but for one reason or another, they never happened. One idea early on was for there to be some sort of Frankenstein's monster Bill boss. It was planned to show up in a phase of the Wanklin fight, where it'd just walk and jump around. They were a very early idea; I made no assets for them. A few playable character ideas I threw around were the pumpkin salesman, a normal Bill, and "scary man." Pumpkin Salesman is being saved for a future game, along with the bill. "Scary guy" was an interesting case; my idea for them was to be a parody of Sonic.exe, but as a bill. Speaking of bills, they were going to be wearing ghost sheets, but I didn't feel like drawing and animating a whole new sprite sheet at the time, so candy-corn recolors it was. Speaking again of sprites, the phantom had a different design at first! Didn't go with it though; thought the second design worked better. I thought of having Phantom as a playable character and a hard mode where he'd constantly terrorize you in new ways during the level! But I won't be getting into the specifics of that right now; I should probably talk about the actual game now.
The title screen is one aspect I'm quite proud of. The rain and occasional lightning strike set a lonely atmosphere, perfect for a spooky game! And having the actual screen transition directly to the opening cutscene helped me save on time! As for the mansion level itself, I'd say it is a pretty decent tech demo of the kind of level structure I want to do more in future Crazy games. The pacing is a little wonky now that I'm looking back at it. The guard bills and boxes slow things down a bit, since you have to charge your big shot for a few seconds. They're probably not going to show up in any other crazy games in the future. There was a section right after the hallway with every bill type that REALLY messed up the pacing, since you'd have to wait a long time for a platform to go down and up. I had to rework it in the 2024 update. I had worries that the phantom would feel intrusive, but it isn't too bad, thankfully. For being the main boss, Wanklin's fight feels a little underwhelming. I wish I had given him a few more attacks and better visual clarity on his chainsaw dash. The secret boss, though? That's a pretty good fight, but I also should've made it a little bit harder. Wanted to have multiple secret characters in here, since they added in repeatability and because who doesn't love being rewarded for doing things you wouldn't do normally? Tammie was a little problematic in the first few versions, as her backflip was fun but too overpowered. Also, don't ask why I made her blue.
That's all I wanted to say for now. Sorry if some of my wording sounds weird; I'm not the best when it comes to putting my thoughts into words, but I hope you all have a Happy Halloween!!!!!
Thanks for sharing your story of creating Creepy Tower, which is available to download from: https://create-games.com/download.asp?id=9440 - I did note that I enjoyed the weather and sound effects on the opening screen in my comments on the game so your efforts on that certainly paid off!
Alone In The Park by Ottoman (Horror/Adventure) reviewed by anonymous - Rating: 69%
Extract from review: "South Park meets Resident Evil in a good but very flawed game.... Visually this game is very appealing... Alone in the Park is a good game, unfortunately one with many glitches".
Scream In South Park by Subwoofer (Adventure/Miscellaneous) reviewed by Junkman - Rating: 86%
Extract from review: "A psycho disguised killer is in the loose on South Park, threatening to kill the kids. Help them outsmart the killer into a variety of different gameplay types... This is one of the most influential games that have graced the South Park Gaming community and it's quite easy to see why. It has got the makings of a great game and it's really fun to play. It's a 1999 game, but it still is as strong as it used to be in the past. If the name Subwoofer only recalls you a piece of stereo equipment, download this game and you'll see why many people kept quoting Subwoofer amongst their favourite game maker in the older days. It's well worth your time."
Fine Nights at Freddy's is a breakout success of a Halloween game, and its author Scott Cawthon also created Bogart 1 and 2 which are both listed at https://kliktopia.org/halloween.html as Halloween games
So, what did Scott think of other Click horror games? We can find it out through some of his reviews under the name Hill Gigas. He wrote many reviews at https://www.create-games.com/profile.asp?id=17283 but here are the games which can be downloaded today...
Hasslevania: The Quest for Shuteye by Del Duio reviewed by Hill Gigas - Overall: 8/10
Extract from review: "You are treated to a great intro, and even VOICE ACTING, which I thought was great (for a klik game). You don't hear voice acting much in klik games, so this was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the presentation, it really created a good feel for the game... Overall, I think this is a fun and ambitous platformer. It has great graphics, great sound, and a fun theme. It's worth the time to download, and will provide some fun moments. The play control will require some patience on your part, so be prepared to try the first area several times. But underneath all of that is a pretty solid and fun game that should keep you entertained for a while."
Zenek Zombie by lamberski reviewed by Hill Gigas - Overall: 8/10
Extract from review: "Zenek Zombie is a very interesting platforming title that can provide several good hours of solid platforming action. You control Zenek, a zombie who's wife is kidnapped by a dark... zombie(?) on a spaceship of some sort. Zenek is then granted the power to shoot a sparkling ball of energy once every 3 seconds. Zeneks mission? Walk to the right, kill what you please, and make sure to touch floppy disk checkpoints along the way! ...I really enjoyed playing Zenek Zombie. It has fun dialog, a very interesting main character, and levels that are both fun and easy to navigate. This is a well made and fun platformer that will give you a new respect for zombies, and a new hatred for water. Recommended."
Roly Poly Pumpkin: And the Totem of Mystery reviewed by Hill Gigas - Overall: 7/10
Extract from review: "Roly Roly Pumpkin is a short but cute little game about a rolling pumpkin on a mission to collect totem parts. Don't ask too many questions about plot, this game isn't much of a "game", it's more of an interactive artwork showcase. The author admits this himself.... Overall, this is a neat and attractive little game that may be overly simple for most players. This isn't so much a game as it is an interactive graphics portfolio, and it takes only a few minutes to get the full tour. Is it worth the download? I think it is, because the engine is well done and there are a lot of clever ideas implemented here, just don't expect much more than that."
Halloween House by contra reviewed by Hill Gigas - Overall: 7/10
Extract from review: "So here is another Halloween themed game with an interesting graphic style to it. Halloween House is all about a boy looking for lost candy in his parents house while they are gone. It's trick or treat night, and if you don't have a piece of candy with you when a trick or treater knocks, you get tricked and it's game over for you! ...This was a very fun little game. Its only limited by its easy difficulty and short completion time. But its a great "little" adventure with fun graphics, good sounds, solid controls, and lots of fun touches that really make this game shine. Recommended for anyone with fifteen minutes to kill."
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Joshtek
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