We voces have a particular affinity for Halloween. Perhaps it’s the costumes and creativity that gets introduced into the community when people start wearing costumes. It could also be the themes of death and mortality that American culture tends to avoid like a taboo — unless it’s all about skeletons and the undead.
Video games, however, have never shrunk from the topic. In fact, it’s front and center of a lot of our favorite genres — many of which includes zombies.
That said, the aesthetics of Halloween include a riot of striking colors that mix well with black and gloom. Such as the brilliant warmth of a light cast from a jack’o’lantern or the translucent glow of “spirit energy” surrounding enemies (red, green, blue, purple, the colors can be from anywhere on the spectrum).
A few of the games I’m playing have started to show their Halloween colors.
For example, Borderlands 3 launched us into Heck — a terrible dimensional space filled with skull ghosts and horrors, also pumpkins and skulls.
Many games start to decorate themselves with pumpkins, witches, skulls and random skeletons on this holiday.
Even Warframe launched a new Tactical Alert that involves keeping a special lantern lit in order to keep the darkness away. The Halloween festival is the Fall harvest, it also takes place near the Fall Solstice, where the days have stopped lengthening and have begun to dwindle, darkness will soon dominate and winter will fall.
You might say the slowly drifting Orokin derelicts in deep space are already creepy enough, empty tombs of a long-forgotten war, now consumed by the Infested — but add a few pumpkins and it lights the whole place up!
Even Starcrawlers from Juggernaut Games is getting in on the holiday. They’ve added an appropriately huge, orange harvest moon and bats. I think I forgot to mention bats are also a major part of the Halloween aesthetic, although we can see them pretty much all year, these furred flying creatures carry with them the spirit of the spook for many Americans.
The MMO landscape also gets in on this whole culture as well. I spend a lot of time in games and I always enjoy the different holiday setups. So when it comes to Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft, I often put on gear that matches the festivities.
MMO games in particular give people an opportunity to dress up and “cosplay” their characters in costumes.
I like candy! …but I’m I feel some mild trepidation about this.
The newly launched Astellia Online is also getting in on the festivities. In fact, this game is so recently on the market, that the Halloween event — in which candy ghosts have appeared to collect bad candy — started during the game’s beta before it was released to the public.
The Forgotten Realms set MMO Neverwinter Online from Cryptic Studios is also doing Halloween this year with the Masquerade of Liars. This is a very interesting take on the costuming part of Halloween, as it presents the idea of costumes and masks as a part of a change in presentation — of “lying” about who you are, but it also comes with candy and gifts.
Halloween also comes with its own spine chilling music and themes that Americans have derived from the movie industry. Hollywood put a lot of work into codifying things like Frankenstein’s monster (Adam), Bram Stoker’s Dracula, werewolves and witches (not so much mummies anymore, oddly).
You have made it this far: Tell us, have you been enjoying the onset of Halloween in gaming? What’s your favorite spooky thing happening in gaming now?
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