Dr. K's Waiting Room

Quick Facts:
Despite being one of the most influential horror films of all time, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) has seen surprisingly little representation in videogames. Conversely, Sam Raimi’s controversial Evil Dead films (1981 to present) spawned ten videogames before the acclaimed television series merged with the Halloween franchise in this throwback release. Produced in tandem and designed to pay homage to both franchises and seemingly as a platform to showcase future works, both games were bolstered by additional downloadable content (DLC) and largely impressed.

Gameplay and Power-Ups:
RetroRealms is a throwback to the classic 8- and 16-bit era, bringing two of horror’s unlikeliest franchises together for the first time. It’s certainly an odd fit, placing elements from the Evil Dead franchise into the largely grounded Halloween series rather than, say, Friday the 13^th (Various, 1980 to present), but it works surprisingly well. It probably helps that both franchises are technically separated, with the collection presenting them as two cabinets in a long-abandoned arcade, though they share enemies, playable characters, and controls. No matter which game you play, you can pick between two characters (Michael Myers/The Shape and Ashley “Ash” Williams), with two more available via DLC. Non-intrusive in-game tutorials and signposts explain the mechanics and controls, which you can review from the pause menu. Every character shares the same controls, though they have different attributes and abilities to help them stand out. So, while every character attacks with X, charges a strong attack by holding X, and jumps with A, their charged move differs. Ash, for example, unloads with his “boomstick” while Myers performs a dashing stab with his trademark kitchen knife. Characters automatically clamber over ledges and can hop down by pressing down and A on certain flooring, and all progress upwards with a wall jump. You can attack upwards and in mid-air, even bouncing off them similar to the 8-bit classic DuckTales (Capcom, 1989). As you dispatch enemies, you’ll grab collectibles for cash. After clearing a World, you visit the shop to purchase upgrades and additional moves, allowing you to boost your maximum health, add combos to your attacks, and unlock fancier attacks. This adds a spinning slash to Ash’s arsenal to send heads rolling, sees him crash down on enemies with his robotic hand by pressing the Left Bumper in mid-air, and flinging his chainsaw arm upwards to extend his jump.

Similarly, Myers unlocks a standing spin to decapitate enemies, slams on them from above with LB, or performs an upwards slash with the Right Bumper to reach higher ground escape bottomless pits. Pressing down and A when stationary performs a dash to fit in narrow vents, with characters becoming temporarily invincible as a bonus. Players also press B to enter the “Shadow Realm”, a Hellish dimension where Deadites roam, lava burns, and monstrous boils cover every surface. This lasts as long as your meter, which automatically refills, and you must switch between the two realms to reach hidden areas or progress further as some walls and platforms are intangible in different realms. You must be careful, though, as shifting realms can place you inside walls, which sets you back and costs you some health. Defeated enemies may drop partial or full refills for your health or meter and you’re granted unlimited lives, but only a single checkpoint per stage as each stage is split into two levels. You’ll also come across non-playable characters who gift you a sub-weapon, thrown with Y (though you can only hold one at a time). Ash attacks with his chainsaw and shotgun, gaining extra weapons by smashing coloured crates. These see him hurl the Kandarian dagger, toss a flaming lantern to set enemies and vicious roots alight, fire a nail gun to stun enemies, or chuck an axe. Killing innocent bystanders grants Myers similar sub-weapons, with him tossing a pitchfork or a hammer, though he also utilises a boomerang-like sickle and bolas. Each sub-weapon costs a different amount of ammo to use, which you find in crates or by slaughtering enemies, and the axe and hammer even bounce to hit multiple enemies. Both games include propane tanks to hit to take out groups of enemies and weighted pallets to release, which crush those beneath, and fire hydrants to blast enemies with a water jet. Some enemy attacks, particularly exploding gas canisters, also kill enemies and you instantly explode them into a shower of gore if you realm shift where they’re standing.

While you mostly slaughter Deadites and escaped mental patients (and random bystanders as Myers), you’ll switch between realms more as each game progresses. This largely comes to an apex in the final World, where players wander the Deadite dimension, with previous stages mostly offering some tricky platforming challenges. Both Ash and Myers must jump to moving and temporary platforms, with some exploding beneath you and others carrying you across spike pits or bottomless drops. Vertical and horizontal wind currents push you to higher ground or carry you across larger gaps, though they also hinder you if you push against them. You’ll crash through windows, cutting through trailer homes and dilapidated cabins, leap to rickety towers, floodlights, and construction towers to progress, and uncover hidden paths by realm shifting to snag hidden goodies. Ash fights through an S-Mart Value Store, Myers clears out his family home, and both dodge and jump to falling chandeliers. Ash fights through the haunted forest, avoiding acidic water and being set upon by redneck zombies, while Myers cuts through Haddonfield, crossing huge bottomless pits caused by roadworks. Toxic gunk, acidic water, and fireballs are regular hazards but seem more prominent in Ash vs. Evil Dead, where fireballs often mess up your jumps. While rampaging through Phelps Garage, Myers slips about on oily ground that bursts into flames when enemies toss petrol canisters from the background, hazards that dog Ash as he fights through Elks Grove. Players also jump to conveyor belts, either being carried along by them, gingerly wall jumping or being carried up vertical belts, or even using them as moving platforms. Crushing hazards spell instant death in the Overlord’s castle, and you’ll be dodging spike pits and spiked walls, either by using platforms or riding wind currents, gnashing your teeth when your jumps are a single pixel off and drop you down a pit.

Presentation:
RetroRealms offers a fun, if somewhat sparse, hub world that expands as you clear Worlds. It’s a fun little 3D background to the retro stylings of both games. Neither game includes voice acting beyond anguished screams or monstrous roars, so dialogue is conveyed entirely through text. The story changes depending on who you play as, with Myers being comically silent and Ash providing snappy retorts. Ash vs. Evil Dead mostly pulls from the show’s first season, with him battling through Mossy Haven Trailer Park and even encountering Vivian Johnson, tangling with Eligos in Books from Beyond, and returning to the haunted cabin to confront Ruby Knowby, all while hacking and slashing through hordes of Deadites. Likewise, Halloween is a purely sprite-based, arcade-style adventure, featuring a chip tune rendition of the iconic theme tune and minor idle poses for the Shape, where he yanks down his mask, breathes deeply, and cocks his head inquisitively. While Myers has a larger hit box than Ash and is noticeably slower and clunkier, it’s to be expected of the Shape, who lumbers about slaughtering orderlies and Deadites alike. Blood splatters, heads roll, and bodies litter the backgrounds, with many enemies respawning once you move slightly off camera to either hinder you by sapping your health and knocking you down pits or help you by allowing you to “farm” resources. The realm gimmick is fun, essentially giving every World two skins, with the Nightmare Realm being a dimension of pure suffering and chaos. While you only spend a brief time here, it’s enough to see gaping maws, pillars of viscera and blood, rivers of lava, and hordes of Deadites lurking in the background. The Deadites are much stronger and more aggressive here, with the standard enemies constantly resurrecting, and it can be tricky discerning where you can go since everything’s so twisted and awful. It’s impressive, however, especially in the Overlord’s challenging castle. While the games run smoothly for the most part, I did experience some odd moments where the music cut out and an annoying glitch where Ruby stopped summoning demons, so I had to reset the game.

After crashing through trailer park homes in Mossy Haven, splattering blood over the gaudy garden furniture and flamingo ornaments, Ash returns to the creepy woods, with the bridge, crooked trees, and even skewered bodies visible in the raging background. While his time in the iconic cabin is brief, all the weird, haunted furnishings appear and Ash’s severed hand crawls in the foreground. Deadites also tear apart military personnel and vehicles on the streets of Elks Grove. Players venture into the rusted, dilapidated Sunny Meadows Asylum, where scrawled renditions of the Necronomicon line the walls, before fighting through the wrecked laundry room and fending off vicious little Mini Ash’s. Similarly, Halloween begins in Smith’s Grove Sanatorium and sees Michael hack through guards and inmates as patients flee across the rainswept fields. Myers then rampages through a garage and junkyard before terrorising Haddonfield. A storm rages in most backgrounds, trick-or-treaters can be seen in the streets, and you’ll cut down the trespassers in Michael’s childhood home. Myers then ventures into a creepy cemetery and crematorium, passing crypts and catacombs, and wades through disgusting sewers and dilapidated tunnels. It perfectly captures the visual aesthetic of the original movie, right down to including sprite recreations of Michael’s first kill and his sister’s tombstone. When each character reaches the Overload’s castle, they’re greeted by a desolate, gothic, Hellish landscape and battle through a fully stocked dungeon, including Iron Maidens, chains, and propane tanks to clear out Deadite hordes. Huge, ominous structures, hooked chains, and gruesome bloody imagery are everywhere in this hellscape, which includes basically every previous hazard and stage gimmick. This means you’ll ride conveyor belts past crushing hazards, wall jump between and precariously hop to those same hazards, and dodge flames, acid water, and fireballs galore to reach the Overlord’s throne room.

Enemies and Bosses:
Ash’s primary enemy are those possessed by the Necronomicon, meaning he must cut down zombified trailer park trash, civilians, and lumberjacks. Most just wander about, but the ghoulish females and other variants spit phlegm and some of the possessed Value Store employees take a couple of hits to put down. Others, like the red-clothed employees and mad scientists carrying Ash puppets, explode after you deal damage, flinging you across the screen if you’re close. Ravenous little Mini Ash’s and killer dolls cling to you, stunting your jump and keeping you from attacking unless you shake them off. Michael Myers, meanwhile, cuts down guards, crazed inmates, construction workers, cops, and groundskeepers. While the inmates simply run around, security guards and other enemies toss projectiles that leave a flaming hazard on the ground, which can be aggravating. Mechanics and vagrants burst from doors and the background to charge you (which I found surprisingly difficult), gravediggers shovel up dirt, and injured bystanders crawl along the ground to whittle down your health. Naturally, players must also tangle with a host of monstrous Deadites, with projectile-firing eyeballs being a constant headache, respawing flying eyeballs screwing up your jumps, and zombie-like Deadite grunts springing to life after being put down. While the more troublesome Deadite variants are limited to the Nightmare Realm for most of the game, they do seep into the main game as you progress, with vicious spider-like Deadites charging across the ground, weird little cherubs screwing up your controls, bulbous mounds of fatty flesh sending you flying, and these weird phallic monsters spitting acid. You must also avoid flaming hazards, spike pits and walls, fireballs, acidic water, and bottomless pits, which become doubly troubling when platforms explode beneath you…or you forget to keep an eye on your meter.

At the end of each World, Ash battles a demonic entity conjured by the malicious Deadite Overlord. First, Ash’s neighbour Vivian is transformed into a gangly grotesque that scuttles about, leaving herself wide open to your pogo attack, before tricking you by hiding behind hanging sheets. When back in the cabin, players battle not Ruby Knowby, but the swarms of ghoulish Deadites she summons into the basement. Clear out each wave to damage her, taking advantage of the restorative cocktails when they appear, if necessary. After battling through Elks Grove, Ash faces a rematch against Eligos, a terrifying little demon who constantly teleports about the bookstore and tosses energy orbs. After a few hits, it returns to the store’s inner sanctum, speeding up and keeping you on your toes with spiralling lightning bolts. In the asylum, players face Evil Ash, an exact duplicate of Ash who uses the same moves and sub-weapons alongside a ground pound that can be tough to avoid. Though Evil Ash stops to laugh at you, he’s fast and hits hard, so it can be tricky to put him down. Similarly, the surprise battle against Ash’s possessed 973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale can be challenging as there’s no checkpoint before it and it takes up a lot of screen space. The axe is essential here, as is your dodge roll, and memorising the pattern of the tyres it fires. The Overlord forces you to battle the gigantic demon Kandar, who fills the background, spews fire, and slams the ground with its massive fists, causing flaming debris to fall. You must toss axes or use Ash’s chainsaw uppercut to hit the demon’s giant face, taking care to avoid as much damage as possible as the Overlord interrupts halfway through to finish the job! This sees you hopping to moving platforms over a giant pit, slashing and striking the grotesque eyeballs on the Overlord’s Kaiju-sized body and avoiding the orbs he fires, which can be tricky if you miss-time your jumps or enter the fight with low health.

The Overlord also conjures a few fitting challenges for the maniacal Michael Myers. First, he pits Myers against the hulking Mister F, a deranged mental patient who stamps around outside the asylum, headbutting you, stomping the pavement tiles in a shockwave, and calling in the crazies to rush the screen. It’s best to keep your distance with your sub-weapons, then dash in with Myers’ charge attack, as Mister F has a large hit box. Next, the Overlord furnishes Phelps Junior with a demonic vehicle that switches between firing spikes, drilling into the ground to lure you in, rolling along with a giant wheel, and producing a shockwave with a huge weight. Regardless of the configuration, the charged jumping strike is your best bet as the vehicle can only be damaged by hitting the main cab. World 3 offers a battle against Michael’s archenemies, Doctor Samuel Loomis and Laurie Strode, with both throwing Molotov cocktails and a spread of knitting needles, respectively. While it can be tough avoiding these as Myers is so big, it’s best to focus on one enemy at a time, launching your projectile to stun or attack the other when you can. After fighting through World 4’s cemetery, Myers is finally reunited with his sister, Judith, now a gigantic, monstrous Deadite banshee who’s a fun homage to Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1988). Accordingly, you hop to platforms as she chases you, avoiding dropping down the pit and her flame pillars, then use platforms to toss projectiles and slash at the ghoul, switching to different platforms when she sets them alight and avoiding her large flame attack. Before you battle the Overlord, he forces Myers to face a shadowy reflection of himself. Shadow Myers teleports, slashes, tosses pitchforks, and proves a troublesome foe, doubly so as you’re left to face the Overlord with whatever health you have left and must fight Shadow Myers again if you die. However, if you simply stand still, Shadow Myers will explode, making the Overlord much easier. The demonic entity floats about raining fireballs, conjuring pillars of energy, swirling fireballs about the screen, and disappearing into the darkness, but your Darkness Rising and hammer sub-weapon will make short work of him.

Additional Features:
There are fourteen Achievements in the base game for RetroRealms, twenty-three in both Ash vs. Evil Dead and Halloween, and a further seven in each game’s DLC, for a total of seventy-four Achievements! You’ll get Achievements for simply loading the game, trying to exit the arcade, viewing the credits, watching the developer videos, buying a souvenir, or viewing a diorama. Achievements pop when you clear each World, use each character’s charge attack 100 times, using each sub-weapon in different ways, pogo off enemies, and kill a certain number of enemies, or visit the Nightmare Realm 300 times. Additional Achievements pop if you finish a stage without your weapons in any way, quickly defeating bosses or Worlds, and for finding every collectible. Each World has three pages of the Necronomicon or three jack-o’-lanterns to find that are tallied for this Achievement, though you’ll also find tickets to purchase souvenirs in the hub world. You can compare your times and scores against others using the online leaderboards (though there’s no online play here) and get some fun collector’s cards and all the DLC if you buy the physical version, which adds Laurie and Kelly Maxwell as playable characters. Each has similar Achievements tied to them (use sub-weapons, clear Worlds, be active for 300 minutes, etc), alters the dialogue and the story (Laurie’s trying to rescue Tommy Doyle from the Overlord, for example), and has different attributes and sub-weapons. Kelly attacks with a meat cleaver, giving her a shorter reach than Ash, but makes up for it with a machine gun as her charged move, which can be fired in multiple directions, and using a rocket launcher in place of an uppercut. Laurie attacks with knitting needles, firing them in a spread as her charged attack, has a handy double jump and a ground dash, and is smaller, faster, but weaker than Myers. Both have similar sub-weapons to each other and compared to the main game, though they have unique items that let them slow down enemies for a short time and Kelly gets a flaming shield to protect her.

Final Thoughts:
I was excited for RetroRealms when I first heard of it as I’m a sucker for retro throwback titles, especially hack-and-slash games, and a big fan of both franchises. While it is really weird seeing these two worlds collide, I got over it pretty quickly and found it amusing seeing Michael Myers basically ignore everything the Overlord says and go on a rampage! It was super fun revisiting locations from Ash vs. Evil Dead but, as I haven’t watched the show for a while, it was World 2 that stuck with me the most as you return to the infamous forest and enter the iconic haunted cabin, a location sadly underutilised here. The star of the show, for me, was Halloween, since the franchise has far less videogame adaptations compared to Evil Dead. Halloween does a fantastic job of adapting the first film into this surreal narrative, recreating key locations and even splicing in elements from other films, such as a mechanic resembling “Big Joe” Grizzly from the 2007 remake (though there’s sadly no reality TV stars in the Myers house). While platforming can be clunky and challenging due to Myers’ size, it was extremely satisfying hacking heads off and slicing through innocents and Deadites alike. The bosses were very fun, particularly the battle against Dr. Loomis and Laurie and Shadow Myers, being just the right level of challenge. While it’s frustrating taking damage, being knocked down a pit, or trapping yourself in a wall, it’s all very much in the spirit of old school games like the Castlevania (Konami/Various, 1986 to present), Mega Man (Capcom/Various, 1987 to present), and Metroid (Various, 1986 to present) videogames. I really enjoyed the realm-shifting gimmick, to the point where I kind of wish the games included a hard or alternative mode where you primarily play in the Nightmare Realm, and the gruesome imagery and bloody effects. The sprite work and environments are all fantastically well realised, especially in Halloween, and the gameplay was tight and responsive, with the games providing just enough challenge to keep you going without being too frustrating. I’d love to see more franchises added to the RetroRealms arcade but, as is, these were really fun, bite-sized offerings that brought a smile to my face.

My Rating:

Great Stuff

Which of the two games included in the RetroRealms arcade was your favourite? Were you surprised to see these two franchises mashed together like this? Did you enjoy cutting Deadites up as Ash? Did you also struggle to fight his Oldsmobile? What did you think to the sprite reaction of Halloween? Did you enjoy the fight against Dr. Loomis and Laurie? Did you ever find all the collectibles and purchase every souvenir? Which horror franchise would you like to see remade in this way? What horror-theme videogames are you playing this Halloween? Whatever your thoughts on these games, drop a comment below, check out my other horror content, and donate to my Ko-Fi to suggest more Evil Dead and Halloween reviews.