Given that I’m an old-school arcade nut who spent entirely too many hours and dollars in them while I was a teenager, it has been incredible to see how many top-notch retro arcade titles have shown up in this generation. Not merely ports or updates of existing titles, there’s been a cottage industry of indie games that have worked hard at emulating the looks and play styles of that era, making new classics in their own right. Appropriate for this time of the year we now have Halloween 1985 to add to the list, but I’ll admit that I have some mixed feelings about it as an overall package.

Absolutely channeling the look of the era when arcades were in their prime, there’s no doubt that it looks the part, though perhaps cheating a little to make it all look so polished across all sorts of stage and enemy designs. You won’t find any trickery to save memory by reusing assets and palette swaps, the amount of distinctive pixel art in this game is truly impressive. The reason for that is that every stage you can choose to tackle has its own distinct theme, monster, traps, and feel. It’s actually quite extraordinary how many different titles you can find some sort of nod to, including lesser-known titles like Rock n Rope, Bagman, and others. Your general mission will be to collect all of the pumpkins on each stage, but you’ll be sorely tempted to try to get bonus points for grabbing them in order or knocking out each stage’s monster. Considering that some of the traps that take them out are also lethal to you, you’ll need to be pretty careful.

Spending time with it, my complaint could be considered an odd one, but in terms of the design my major issue is that there’s no real ramp up. One major element of the best classic arcade games is that they incrementally stepped up the difficulty as you went through each of their stages. That was an excellent way to let players pick up and understand the base mechanics, get in some practice, and then progressively crank up the challenge. While each of this game’s areas are different, and some are a little tougher than others, it feels like it’s missing that phase where you can cut your teeth and have a win or two before getting crushed. In other stage-choosing games from that era like Circus Charlie they were at least in order of difficulty and let you know which were going to be more demanding, here they’re just all sort of dialed up equally, and I think that’s a weird and critical deviation from expectation that feels like a misstep. I really dig what the game has going on, but I do think it lost the classic arcade design thread, so I’m less enthusiastic about it in the end.