It's almost Halloween, and for many gamers, this means celebrating this spooky time of year with limited time in-game events. Whether players turn to horror games for a scare or enjoy less spooky titles, games are a great place to celebrate the holiday. Live service games like Fortnite are particularly good in this regard, offering new seasonal content and reasons for dedicated players and casual fans alike to keep coming back.
In Fortnite's case, it kicked off its annual "Fortnitemares" event on October 5. This event, which runs until November 1, sets a high bar for Halloween celebrations in games overall, and each year provides players with a truckload great content that is as polished as it is Halloween-themed. With its attention to detail, game-changing mechanics and tidy narrative structure, Fortnitemares is the best Halloween gaming event -- and this year only strengthens the game's claim on that title.
Fortnitemares 2021 stands out from other Halloween events through its excellent presentation and storyline. Like other Fortnitemare events before it, the event comes to players during one of Fortnite's battle pass seasons and manages to weave its individual narrative into what is going on at the moment in the season's broader storyline. For example, this year's Halloween event, dubbed "The Wrath of the Cube Queen" takes place during a map takeover by a series of crashed alien ships that have brought with them a multitude of mysterious cubes.
As the season has continued, the cubes have reached a convergence in the middle of the map, making many players wonder what will happen next. At the beginning of the Fortnitemares event, players were surprised with the appearance of the Cube Queen, an otherworldly being who currently sits inside of an indestructible forcefield. From here, she commands her many monsters that appear throughout the map, monsters that players can battle for powerful items. This mini-storyline, which will tie into the larger season structure and wrap up at the end of the event, is another added bonus for players, drawing them into the mystery and action.
Like previous years before it, Fortnitemares doesn't just provide players with a new, compact storyline; it also alters the map with new gameplay for the Halloween event. This year, the Cube Queen unleashed a brand new antagonist: the massive humanoid named The Caretaker. This AI-controlled monster can be challenged as an optional side activity. This massive invisible monster stalks the map, randomly appearing in a different location in each game, and can only be seen when it pulls the player into the "Sideways," a bubble-like portal that changes anything in its radius into a spooky alternate dimension. Players can risk battling this tough foe to earn powerful alien weaponry that may give them a leg up against the other human competitors.
On top of all the new story content, Fortnitemares also provides players with a multitude of unlockable skins and Halloween-themed activities, which can be completed for bonus experience points. Aside from resurrecting past year's Halloween skins, this year added new unlockables each week of the event. Some of the new skins included a crossover with Resident Evil that brought Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine into the fray and a pair of classic Universal Monster skins that gave players access to Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy, complete with alternate looks that mirror the black and white film grain of the classic movies. Even the various locations of the map get unique Halloween decorations, with neighborhood houses covered in pumpkins, spider webs and buckets of candy that players can eat.
Altogether, Fortnitemares succeeds each year because it is a free limited event that offers new gameplay while also fitting into the existing and ever-evolving game. It's clear that developer Epic Games put serious work into the new content rather than simply adding a new seasonal costume or replacing existing things in the game with pumpkins or ghosts. In the past, players have turned into spirits, fought a giant storm elemental and celebrated Halloween, all while competing in fun battle royale matches. While other live service games provide fun annual events, few are as polished and fully realized as Fortnite's -- and this year's iteration just might be the best yet.