The Halloween Hack

"This is THE most descriptive, shocking, and most psychologically warping game you will ever play. You’re a bounty hunter who is given the duty to track down a mysterious creature who mutilated and ate a little girl’s parents and encounters various horrible things as the adventure goes on. This game isn’t your average Halloween game; its content is comparable to games like Silent Hill and Yume Nikki. This game also has the added effect of making you depressed as you played. Counting real games and fan games, this could be one of the most traumatic and horrifying games in the world, and we're not joking. This is easily one of the most disturbing hacks to come out... well, ever, really."

- The description of The Halloween Hack on Starmen.net

The Halloween Hack (also known as "Press the B Button, Stupid!") is a Fan Sequel ROM Hack of the 1995 SNES cult-classic EarthBound, created in October 2008 by someone known as Radiation. You probably know him better as Toby Fox.

Yes, that Toby Fox.

You can find out more about it here, as well as download it.

For far Lighter and Softer EarthBound hacks, see Hallow's End, another Halloween hack which this is often compared to, and Arn's Winter Quest, another Earthbound hack by Toby Fox.

""...Haha, didn't even wash my hands!" ("Character KO'd" sound plays)"
 * Absurdly High Level Cap: The default level cap of 99 remains from the original EarthBound, but you'll likely still be straining to reach the thirties by the time you complete the game.
 * Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Twoson sewers, which are filled with hippies and rats.
 * Adaptational Villainy:.
 * All There in the Manual: The Monster Book item gives a short explanation of which Standard Status Effects affect which types of monsters. It serves as a major hint (albeit one easy to miss) that those typically neglected status-effect PSI are gonna come in handy down the line.
 * Alternate Universe: The game is set in one where
 * Anticlimax: Two instances in the ending.
 * Animate Body Parts:.
 * Anthropomorphic Personification: Bound to occur, given how much time you spend in.
 * Apologetic Attacker: The Desperate Survivors. Subverted in that they barely attack.
 * Art Style Dissonance: From recolors of normal Earthbound enemies to more visceral and dark resprites to completely original art, and then back every so often.
 * Autobots Rock Out:
 * Barrier Change Boss:.
 * Beef Gate/Difficulty Spike: Monster levels jump quite a bit between major areas.
 * Blinding Bangs: Varik sports red hair that cast a shadow over his eyes.
 * Blob Monster: Evil Ectos, which are palette swaps of Soul Consuming Flames.
 * Bittersweet Ending: The 'good' ending.
 * Bizarro Universe:
 * Bloodier and Gorier: From the sprite editing to the text for entering new locations, and even the descriptions of enemy actions... The game really doesn't let up on the carnage.
 * Border Patrol: Super Doom Shrooms and Blue Antoids are Palette Swaps that roam outside Twoson, and boast utterly ridiculous stats that Varik has no hope of matching. They exist solely to prevent Varik wandering too far off; while almost unbeatable by any normal means, they can still be avoided.
 * Bounty Hunter: Varik is hired as one.
 * Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Played with (and inverted?) for laughs with the Halloween candy item, which comes in flavors such as Cinnamon Crap, Grape Gasoline, and Cherry Chafe... "Oh, and mint, but that's gross."
 * Broken Aesop: Regarding the endings.
 * Broken Bridge: The ghosts that blocked off Threed in the original game return, with a Twoson resident lampshading this and believing the ghosts to be teenagers pulling pranks.
 * But Thou Must!: The game is insistent on having you kill a specific monster, and it seems there's no way around it....
 * Contrasting Sequel Character: The grim and brooding Varik to the all-American child Ness.
 * Creepy Cockroach: The Preemptive Scavenger is an undead, rotting palette swap of the Violent Roach.
 * Darker and Edgier: Ridiculously so. You barely get a minute or so in before you're presented with the protagonist awakening from an explicitly drunken stupor (in a pile of his own vomit no less). He is then hired to solve a brutally gruesome murder, and once you go through that door in the sewers...
 * Department of Redundancy Department:
 * A trash can in the Twoson sewers holds an item called... the Garbagecan Lid.
 * "The Uberhaunt ripped out your innards out!"
 * Despair Event Horizon:
 * Radiation Thinks of Everything:
 * Reach the Peaceful Rest Valley entrance without the Border Patrol wasting you and you'll get... a rock permanently blocking off the cave, with an angry note from Brick Road attached.
 * Downer Ending: Pressing the A Button when told to kill the monster.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Wouldn't be an EarthBound hack without 'em.
 * The Desire Dog appears as a Zombie Dog in the overworld, but in-battle its body is half tentacle-like pseudopods that it frequently uses to attack, and upon death it collapses into an array of wriggling tentacles.
 * The Remnants are slime-like Starmen "corpses" that can manifest several limbs and a gaping maw.
 * Everything's Deader with Zombies: The Overrecycled (zombie hippies) and Remnants (molten Starmen).
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's an EarthBound ROM Hack set on Halloween.
 * Eye Scream: Overrecycled can attack by trying to rip your eyes out of their sockets.
 * Fan Sequel: Set around Halloween in an alternate timeline of EarthBound..
 * Faux Horrific: An NPC in one of the bathrooms prior to a branching path warns Varik of "demons that don't wash their hands". Check one of the doors later on, and sure enough...
 * Faux Horrific: An NPC in one of the bathrooms prior to a branching path warns Varik of "demons that don't wash their hands". Check one of the doors later on, and sure enough...


 * Final Boss:
 * Gorn: Everything from the Twoson sewers on drowns the player in several sentences of gory details.
 * Guest Fighter: Varik is the protagonist of Brandish.
 * Guide Dang It: Without looking it up or else thinking to buy the Monster Book in Burglin Park, you're not likely to realize the importance of the status effect spells this time around - and given how... rough this hack is, odds are not knowing will possibly kill you a few times over at minimum.

"The Remnants, damaged, choked itself to death with its many hands!"
 * Mood Whiplash: In spades. A solid chunk of the edited dialogue causes this (even in the earliest parts. It reflects the hack's overall nature: a charming, irreverent and silly adventure similar to the original EarthBound that's a facade hiding a much darker and harrowing tale...
 * The 'good' ending has
 * Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Remnants, though only explicitly mentioned in its death message:


 * Never Say "Die"/Non-Lethal KO: Heavily averted - past a certain point, many of the normal KO messages are exchanged for unique and often messy death messages.
 * Never Trust a Trailer: Invoked by Toby, who explained on his site that he used only the humorous beginning scenes for the trailer to give off the impression of a silly hack - something he would also do for Undertale and Deltarune.
 * Nintendo Hard: Even with the knowledge of which spells work against which enemies, you'll be doing a lot of Level Grinding to avoid being ground into paste, at least in the early game. Even with proper leveling, Varik's low PP means every single spell of his will count.
 * New Age Retro Hippie: The Obsessive Recyclers, naturally, which are palette swaps of these enemies found in the Twoson Sewers.
 * Nothing Is Scarier: Commonly used throughout the hack.
 * One of the trash cans in the sewers doesn't give any items or even open properly. It just sits there... shaking.
 * Our Ghosts Are Different: Evil Ectos are ectoplasmic Blob Monsters that let out creepy yells and assault the party's minds with Brainshock α. Thankfully, they tend to go down in one hit.
 * Our Monsters Are Weird: In typical EarthBound fashion, taken Up to Eleven and then some.
 * Our Zombies Are Different:
 * The Overrecycled are undead New Age Retro Hippies.
 * Remnants seem to be the animated molten remains of Starmen.
 * Preemptive Scavengers combine this with Creepy Cockroach.
 * Palette Swap: All over the place at first; simple recolors such as Stench Elementals and Frankensteams give the appearance of a more "standard" hack, though it's subverted alarmingly fast midway through the Twoson Sewers. From that point on, most enemy battle sprites are either heavily edited or else made from scratch.
 * Point of No Return:
 * The first one is marked by a telephone in front of a door.
 * Psychic Powers: Varik (despite the game's insistence to the contrary).
 * Purple Prose: The narration, enemy introductions, their attack messages, even their death messages... this hack can get pretty wordy, and trying to read it all isn't helped by the auto-scrolling text in some cases.
 * Remixed Level: Many of the EarthBound maps are reused in different contexts.
 * The Twoson Sewers is edited from the original game's Fourside Sewers.
 * ROM Hack: One of the earliest EarthBound hacks, and incredibly detailed for the standard of what was possible at the time; it was one of the first to go beyond simple palette swaps.
 * Rule of Funny: Also in typical EarthBound fashion and then some.
 * Black Comedy: Even as the tone goes pitch dark, the dialogue is eagerly sprinkled with morbid quips.
 * Shaped Like Itself: Orange Kid's tangerine "costume" for Halloween, which one of the girls in Twoson swoons over. The girl next to her calls Apple Kid's tomato costume "unoriginal".
 * Shout-Out:
 * One of the clocks in says "Adventure Time?"
 * Blue Antoid is the name of a well-known Starmen.net forum user.
 * Skippable Boss:
 * Spoiler Title: Pressing the B Button at a critical point is what allows the player to see the rest of the game.
 * Stripperific: The Sexy Sisters are performers who use the sprites of blonde beachgoing women. One of the people in front of the Chaos Theater states they're a fan of the duo, despite mistaking the lounging Sexy Sisters nearby for "wannabe beauties".
 * Swallowed Whole: One of the Remnants' attacks attempts grab you and shove you into its gaping maw. Your guess as to where that mouth came from...
 * Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors: Whiteshock, Sleepstun and Timestop. The first is most effective on undead enemies, the second works best on living enemies, and the third works well against non-living objects.
 * Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: The Stench Elemental can replicate the solidifying effect of the teeth-brushing attack used by New Age Retro Hippies using a pair of dirty socks.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: Desperate Survivors are bloodied and weeping men that appear as sprite-edited palette swaps of the Annoying Old Party Man. They ill always run from you in the overworld, and should you chase them down to fight, they rarely attack and instead apologize repeatedly or else cough and wheeze pitifully; even when they do attack, it only does Scratch Damage, and their death message has them say "sorry" one last time... The only possible benefit from fighting them outside of the meager experience is the guaranteed Last Ration drop (which can restore roughly 40 HP), and while Word of God discourages fighting them, there is no real punishment beyond feeling like a massive prick.
 * Wham! Episode: Once you open the door inside the Twoson Sewers, the hack drops its facade completely.
 * Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds:
 * You Cannot Grasp the True Form:
 * Zombie Apocalypse: