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 Spacious Sewer: The Twoson sewers, which are filled with hippies and rats.
 * 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 neglected status-effect PSI are gonna come in handy down the line.
 * Animate Body Parts:
 * Apologetic Attacker: The Desperate Survivors.
 * 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:
 * 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.
 * Beef Gate/Border Patrol: Super Doom Shrooms and Blue Antoids, 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 unbeatable by any normal means, they can still be avoided.
 * Broken Aesop: Regarding the endings.
 * But Thou Must!: The game is insistent on having you kill a specific monster, and it seems there's no way around it...
 * 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 explicitly hired to solve a brutally gruesome murder, and once you go through that door in the sewers...
 * Despair Event Horizon:
 * Developers' Foresight:
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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...

"The Remnants, damaged, choked itself to death with its many hands!"
 * Final Boss:
 * Gorn: Everything from the Twoson sewers on drowns the player in several sentences of gory details.
 * 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.
 * Mood Whiplash: In spades. A solid chunk of the edited dialogue causes this (even in the earliest parts of the game), which reflects its overall nature: a charming, irreverent and silly adventure similar to the original EarthBound that hides a much darker and harrowing tale...
 * The 'good' ending has
 * Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Remnants, though only explicitly mentioned in their death message:


 * Never Say "Die"/Non-Lethal KO: Heavily averted, with man of the normal KO messages exchanged for unique and often messy deaths.
 * 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.
 * 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, undead New Age Retro Hippies.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Shout-Out:
 * One of the clocks in says "Adventure Time?"
 * Blue Antoid is the name of a well-known Starmen.net forum-goer.
 * Skippable Boss:
 * Spoiler Title: Pressing the B Button at a critical point is what allows the player to see the rest of the game.
 * 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.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: Desperate Survivors are bloodied and weeping men that appear as sprite-edited swaps of the Annoying Old Party Man. They will always run from you in the overworld, and should you chase them down to fight them, they will rarely attack, instead apologizing repeatedly or else coughing 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.
 * 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: