The Halloween Hack

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 by someone known as Radiation. You probably know him better as Toby Fox.

Yes, that Toby Fox.


 * 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.
 * Blob Monster: Evil Ectos, which are palettes swaps of Soul Consuming Flames.
 * 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, Palette Swaps that roam outside of Twoson. They have utterly ridiculous stats and exist solely to prevent Varik wandering too far off; while unbeatable, they can still be avoided.
 * Broken Aesop: The narrative tries its hardest to shame you for trying to kill the broken wretch Dr. Andonuts is reduced to, and the scientist himself will
 * 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:
 * Downer Ending: Pressing the A Button when told to kill the monster.
 * Everything's Deader with Zombies: The Overrecycled (zombie hippies) and Remnants (molten Starmen).
 * Fan Sequel: Set around Halloween in an alternate timeline of Earthbound.
 * Gorn: Everything from the Twoson sewers on drowns the player in several sentences of gory details.


 * 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: Implied with the Remnants, though only mentioned in their death message.
 * Never Say "Die": Heavily averted, with 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, and Varik's low PP means every single spell of his will count.
 * Nothing Is Scarier: 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.
 * Our Zombies Are Different: The Overrecycled, undead New Age Retro Hippies.
 * Palette Swap: Recolors such as Stench Elementals and Frankensteams are to give the appearance of a more "standard" hack, though it's subverted alarmingly fast in the Twoson Sewers. has far more enemies with original sprites.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Spoiler Title: Pressing the B Button at a critical point is what allows the player to see the rest of the game.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: Desperate Survivors are are bloodied and weeping men who always run from you in the overworld. Should you chase them down to fight them, they do nothing but 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 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 sewers, the hack drops its facade completely.