The Halloween Hack

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"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.

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Yes, that Toby Fox.

Tropes used in The Halloween Hack include:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Twoson sewers, which are filled with hippies and rats. It takes you across the ocean to Winters, with the waters becoming blood red, the hippies now zombified, and mutated roaches and blobs emerging.
• 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 palette 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 does its best to shame you for trying to kill the broken wretch Dr. Andonuts is reduced to despite giving you little choice in the matter, and the scientist himself will constantly berate you/Varik for your persistence. The game even hands you the 'bad' ending for doing what it tells you to and killing him early, but defy it to Take a Third Option and you get the chance to gather up Andonuts's remaining fragments of courage, along with his memories of the other Chosen Four, and... end up killing him anyway.
  • This Aesop ends up a lot less broken once you consider that entering Dr. Andonuts's Magicant is the only way to learn how and why the poor scientist ended up in this state, and presents the only chance anyone has to possibly bring him to his senses, even if it ultimately proves futile. Thus, only by taking advantage of one of the few choices you're given and defying the game's orders do you get to experience the full story, gain context for Dr. Andonuts's madness, and ensure that Varik comes out of it alive - which lines up pretty well with the themes explored in Toby Fox's later works.
• But Thou Must!: The game is insistent on having you kill a specific monster, and it seems there's no way around it... except by pressing the B Button, which causes Varik to abandon the murder attempt and jump into Dr. Andonuts's Magicant.
• 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: Dr. Andonuts so firmly believes he's trapped the Chosen Four in the past or killed them, he ends up hitting this pretty hard. When you finally get to talk to him, he's convinced that he's responsible for killing everyone in the universe and that his own life is meaningless, and quickly devolves into near-incoherent terror upon realizing that Varik might kill him.
• Downer Ending: Pressing the A Button when told to kill the monster. Dr. Andonuts is killed without a fight and dies terrified, while Varik seems to go completely catatonic afterward (and is implied to have died as well).
  • The 'good' ending also qualifies, although for completely different and downplayed reasons - despite Varik's best efforts, Dr. Andonuts is too far gone, forcing him to kill the scientist anyway. But Varik at least unambiguously survives the harrowing experience, and is able to rest after having saved the world.
• 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. The chosen 4 successfully defeated Giygas in the past, but were sent to a whole new timeline, while everyone believes them to be dead in the original one.
• 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... And then you enter Dr. Andonuts' Magicant, where things start to zig-zag and just get downright weird.
  • The 'good' ending has Varik returning home victorious from the tragic final battle with Dr. Andonuts, only for a ghost to fart in his face as he tries to relax.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Remnants, though only explicitly mentioned in their death message.

The Remnants, damaged, choked itself to death with its many hands!

• 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, and 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 Zombies Are Different: The Overrecycled, undead New Age Retro Hippies.
• Palette Swap: All over the place at first; recolors such as Stench Elementals and Frankensteams give the appearance of a more "standard" hack, though it's subverted alarmingly fast in the Twoson Sewers. Andonuts' Magicant 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.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the clocks in Andonuts' Magicant says "Adventure Time?"
• 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.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Dr. Andonuts.