While headlines lit up earlier this year over the option to light up a joint in Halloween: The Game, the slasher adaptation just stumbled into a far spicier controversy. Launching last Friday in Early Access for Digital Deluxe Edition pre-orders, the game introduced a minigame honoring one of the horror genre’s most time-honored traditions: consensual, backseat romance. We’re talking about sex.
Closer Encounters in the Closet
When two civilian characters ended up hiding in a closet together, one could initiate an “ask out” prompt. If accepted, the pair engaged in a quick minigame to seal the deal. It felt like a classic homage to slasher tropes, until the feature yielded an absolute disaster of a side effect. However, while the minigame does feature noise, you don’t actually see the act.
Dr. Loomis Gets Kinky
The problem wasn’t the teenage horny-horror archetype, but rather who was partaking in it. Alongside the generic Haddonfield teens, Donald Pleasence’s iconic, weathered psychiatrist Dr. Loomis is also a playable character. It did not take long for a video to go viral over the weekend showing the good doctor himself ducking into a closet for a romantic rendezvous with a high schooler. Which should give you the “ick.”
Realizing that having the franchise’s sternest moral authority engaging in closet hookups was a step too far, developer Illfonic quietly scrubbed the “ask out” minigame from the build almost immediately.
The Official Word From the Developers
After a weekend of radio silence and endless viral clips, Illfonic officially addressed the removal Monday morning. According to the studio, the mechanic was never intended to cross paths with late-game additions:
“Players may have noticed that our latest hotfix removed the Two-Person Power-Up minigame. This was due to an unintended issue that allowed end game reinforcement characters to engage with the minigame, which was a major oversight on our part. We have more content and minigames coming in the near future but current focus is our attention on immediate game needs.”
Out Today
Whether the romantic mechanic gets re-engineered with strict age-and-character filters or remains permanently buried in the digital graveyard remains to be seen. Either way, Halloween: The Game opens its doors to the general public today, September 8.
Check out the gameplay recorded by gamer DStrike below for a glimpse of “the action.”
