The Terrifier films have been a massive success in recent years, bringing a renewed focus to practical effects and extreme gore. They haven’t been without controversy, of course, with its extremes being divisive, but the cultural impact of Art the Clown can’t be overstated. The sinister silence and sadistic enjoyment of violence embodied by Art feels like the natural conclusion to the mute killer tradition so familiar in slasher films. The sheer power of David Howard Thornton’s performances combines the best of physical acting and practical effects, so choosing to translate this into a pixelated 2D beat ’em up is a brave choice. Unfortunately, in the case of Terrifier: The ARTcade game, what we get is blood over substance, and repetition over innovation.
The early announcement trailers for Terrifier were promising, obviously coming with a major departure in art style, but a clear continuity in how blood-soaked everything was. The demo was less convincing, however, with clunky combat and repetitive level design leaving many feeling apprehensive. I was willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt, but any optimism was quickly quashed once the story mode was finished in under two hours and I was left searching for positive points to make.
First up, let’s deal with the aesthetics. Pixel comic takes on horror can be handled well, and titles like the recent Halloween and Evil Dead 2D platformers show this. To give this game full credit, the sprite work for the main characters is great and the cartoon versions embody their grotesque nature. Environments are pretty bland, though, and there are only about eight enemy variants in the whole game outside of boss fights. The choice to splatter the screen with blood and leave corpses lying around suits the franchise, but makes visibility extra difficult and leads to taking damage with no chance to avoid it.
Music is exceptionally repetitive. There are some nice riffs and hooks but it all plays on a loop that quickly begins to grate and feels at odds with the silence so identified with Art the Clown. Sound effects are severely limited although they do provide a suitable amount of squish to attacks.
The cluttered nature of the graphics is compounded by odd decisions such as having the ‘press to join’ text at the top of the screen constantly flash, which proves highly distracting when solo. It being a four-player game is a plus point, though the implementation is annoying. Other graphical issues included the VHS filter simply not working on my desktop computer – it was fine on Steam Deck, but just covered the whole screen in white when I tried multiplayer on the big screen. This is a real shame as that filter suits the game perfectly, far more so than the overly crisp and clean filterless mode.
Combat is where a beat ’em up lives or dies. The four characters all have very similar attacks with light and heavy strikes, dash attacks, jumping attacks, and a special with a bar that needs to be charged through executions. While this sounds like a decent range of attacks, in practice there are no real combos or indeed any skill required. Every enemy outside of bosses can be stun-locked by tapping the light attack and nothing else is particularly effective. Weapons can be picked up, but they have very limited uses.
The four characters have little to distinguish them in terms of gameplay either. They look like they should fit the usual range you’d expect in a beat ’em up but they all handle practically the same. The special moves are unique to each, but they only have one to use. Even executions are underwhelming, with each character having two different animations that become incredibly repetitive after the first ten or so, with literally hundreds by the end.
Bosses are nicely designed in terms of sprite work and all represent figures from the Terrifier production team, with cameraman, sound guy etc. leading up to the final boss fight with director Damien Leone. That encounter is frustrating rather than challenging as there is a tiny window to inflict damage on him. Even series heroine Sienna Shaw gets a disappointing fight with only three moves to memorise and avoid.
