Every The Sims 4 Supernatural & Spooky Pack to Evoke the Spirit of Halloween

Amnesia: The Bunker has received the Halloween update, adding a Shell Shock difficulty that ups the challenge players can face in the game. In addition, Amnesia: The Bunker has also received a Custom mode, allowing players to change more than 30 settings to curate the experience to suit themselves.

It was a Monday night like any other. And by “any other,” I mean that I was standing in my kitchen, water all over my floor, soot all over my cabinets, my father with two holes burnt clean through his shirt, and an empty blender in my hand. At that moment, I knew one thing for certain: The Sims was to blame for this.

The Sims 4 is a cozy game with light supernatural elements, meaning we’re not in the game for the scares. Even so, there’s something to be said for ghosts in the previous installments of the games, who acted like… well, ghosts. In The Sims 4, however, ghosts feel a bit more like irritating, slightly transparent neighbors than they do departed spirits.

For most of the history of the game, Sims jumped from being Newborns directly to being Children. It was a bit jarring to see a Sim go from being swaddled in a blanket to looking around nine years old in a (literal) flash. Fortunately, the developers agreed and started introducing new age groups to bridge the gap.

Immersive sims like Dishonored or System Shock can be very fulfilling, but they are also oddly stressful. After all, the flipside of the genre mantra of solving problems through imaginative application of the tools is that when you achieve a boring solution, that's all your fault. Did you miss the final jump while trying for a complex, third-storey infiltration in Deathloop, resulting in a sadly non-immersive firefight in the courtyard below? Did you fail to combo those magical abilities and terrain variables as the developers hoped - nay, dreamed you would, forcing you to rely on ye olde cover-shoot tactics to reach the checkpoint? Shame on you! Don't you know how much imsims cost to develop? Go back to Open-Ended Systems School and retake that course in The Power of Choice. Also, consider playing Mosa Lina instead.

Amnesia: The Bunker came out earlier this summer to a warm reception from horror fans, and now developer Frictional Games is about to give the game a new boost via its big Halloween update. One of the big additions is the new Shell Shock mode, that provides a particularly tough challenge by making certain key items harder to acquire, increasing fuel demands, and making the Stalker more unpredictable. That said, if straightforward punishment isn’t your thing, Frictional is also introducing a new Custom mode, which allows you to set over 30 parameters to determine how you want to the game to play. You can check out a rundown of all the different options, below.

The Sims 4 is basically an open sandbox world where you can do pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want. While that’s part of the game’s appeal for some players, many Simmers love a good challenge. Sims 4 does include challenges called “scenarios” that players can attempt, but homegrown challenges have been a part of the Sims community for years and we don’t plan to stop any time soon.

The relaunch of Red Dead Online as a standalone title in late 2020 was something of a false dawn for its ever-optimistic community. Rockstar maintains the title but has been in a cycle for several years of repeating content, and it could fairly be said that this playerbase has been surviving on rations ever since 2020. This led to one of the best in-game protests I've ever seen, where a ton of RDO players gathered together in summer 2020 dressed up as clowns to protest the lack of substantial updates.

GTA Online has embraced the eerie and supernatural with the introduction of the Albany Brigham and a host of spooktacular activities. As darkness descends upon Los Santos, and ghostly sightings become more frequent, the world of Grand Theft Auto Online is turning sinister and thrilling.

It’s hard to think of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas or edgy retail chain Hot Topic without thinking of the other.

I'll admit I passed on the original House Flipper craze because I'm not one for job sim games. But I really like to build and decorate houses, which, it turns out, House Flipper 2 is totally prepared to support. House Flipper dev Frozen District has already announced that the sequel would have a sandbox mode, but now it's been shown off in a new trailer. I'm all in this time.

The spooky season will soon be upon us, and Rockstar is celebrating with Halloween-themed content for Red Dead Online, but it's far from a treat for long-time players.