Super Halloween Horror Show

Super Halloween Horror Show has an air of unabashed campy fun in its hybrid of superhero and horror motifs, and the game’s title and cover image reflect this. Given that, I was pleasantly surprised by the subtle sophistication of this limited-parser Petite Mort in which emotional vulnerability is your greatest strength.

You play as a young superhero-in-training with more enthusiasm than experience. When villains strike at the City Commissioner’s Halloween party, you are thrust into the role of defending innocents and saving the day. I was quickly won over by the player character’s earnestness; the bold, pithy prose; and the clever game mechanics, which revolve around the protagonist’s changing emotional state.

The moment the game begins, you must make two discoveries to proceed: (Spoiler - click to show)that your inventory will play a rather unconventional role, and that SHOW will become your go-to verb. With INVENTORY, SHOW, and the classic EXAMINE as your tools, you must gain entry to the Mansion and resolve a series of encounters with NPCs; including a fairly large cast of enemies and allies alike. I found that the puzzles hit a sweet spot of being complex enough to be satisfying and solvable without having to make wild leaps of logic.

Super Halloween Horror Show has quite a lot going on for a small-scale game, including NPCs and elements of the environment that change and an NPC that moves between locations in response to your actions. I’ve never authored a game in Inform myself, but implementing a (seemingly bug-free) parser of this complexity within the constraints posed by an LPM is very impressive to me.

This game is really ambitious for a Petite Mort game: many superhero characters, an expansive map, and actual game mechanics rather than individual parser rules. This is pretty hard to do!

And it manages to mostly pull it off. There are a few rough edges here and there (mostly with necessarily repeated text due to the short time frame and difficulty finding a path forward sometimes that several reviewers noted), so I would look forward to a post-comp release, because this already-good game deserves even more imo).

The game itself is about carrying concepts around as physical objects and gaining them and losing them in various situations. You have to carefully manipulate the order you get the concepts and learn the map to get it all to work. This reminded me of Delightful Wallpaper, a two part game where the second part involves taking concepts from people and placing them in others.

The writing is enthusiastic and creative, and the mechanic was enjoyable.