I confess, I’m not the biggest fan of the Terrifier movies, although Art the Clown is undeniably a badass character. Even so, turning Terrifier into a side-scrolling brawler feels like a peculiar decision. Then again, if Halloween can do it, why not Terrifier? Stranger things have happened in the world of licensed games.

That’s the thing, though: you know exactly what to expect here. A pixelated brawler heavily inspired by Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game, Streets of Rage 4, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. The developers clearly looked at the modern brawler renaissance and said, “We can do that,” before producing something that resembles those games in the same way a corpse resembles a living person. The inspiration is there, but hollow — like artfully arranged corpses, animated just long enough to shuffle across the screen. On paper, Terrifier: The Artcade Game sounds like a fun idea. In practice, it’s a return to the days of underwhelming licensed games where the brand is the main attraction and everything underneath is paint-by-numbers.

Available On: Xbox, PlayStation, PC, Switch
Reviewed On: PS5
Developed By: Relevo
Published By: Selecta Play

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from keymailer

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The opening setup is actually pretty fun: someone is making a movie about Art the Clown and his pals, and they’re understandably not thrilled about being turned into cinematic mascots. The only reasonable response? A bloodthirsty rampage, obviously. Unfortunately, once the intro cutscene ends, the story takes a smoke break and forgets to come back. Arcade brawlers don’t need complex storytelling, but the better ones at least sprinkle in a few scenes or bits of dialogue to break up the action. Terrifier doesn’t bother. I would have liked a little more story.

The campaign runs for roughly two hours across a handful of stages, all of which are built around being parts of the movie set. You can pick from Art, Little Pale Girl, Emily Crane, or Burke the Orderly, each offering slightly different stats. Co-op is available with up to three friends joining you, but in the most baffling move imaginable for a 2025 release, it’s local only. No online play whatsoever, as if broadband never happened.

Everything eventually comes down to punching. Even Art the Clown, supernatural murder enthusiast, ends up punching people more than anything else. You get a light attack, a stronger attack, a dodge, a jumping strike, and a single special move per character. You can grab enemies and pick up weapons, though neither feels especially good to use. It’s about as basic as a brawler can get, which might have been fine if the moment-to-moment feel of the combat was satisfying. It isn’t.

Movement is stiff. Attacks lack impact. Grabs work inconsistently — a real irritation because some of the bigger enemies are best dealt with primarily through grabs. Sound effects fail to sell the action, with punches barely thudding and gunshots cutting off so abruptly that they sound like the audio file tripped over something. The lack of juggling is a major issue. Not circus juggling — gravity-defying punch juggling, the kind that keeps combos flowing and enemies under control. Without it, fights become a cycle of hitting an enemy, watching them fall over, waiting for them to stand up, and repeating the whole miserable process again. Even basic enemies soak up a surprising amount of damage, so the final straggler on each screen often feels like a tedious chore.

The boss fights don’t save things. They should be the highlight — big personalities with flashy attacks — but instead each boss is a forgettable member of the fictional film crew with, at most, two attacks that they spam. Learn those, hit them a few times, back up, repeat until the health bar gives up and goes home. The animations are stiff, the sound design is flat, and the whole thing feels like placeholder content that accidentally shipped. There’s one mildly interesting set piece involving spiked walls closing in while you punch a heavy bag to push them back, but the game never does anything like it again. It’s a brief spark of creativity in a sea of mediocrity.

The pixel artwork is honestly pretty good. The characters look stylish, the environments are nicely detailed, and there’s a certain charm in seeing Art the Clown reimagined in chunky pixels. But everything surrounding that art struggles. The screen is constantly splattered with eyeballs, teeth, and blood. It’s amusing for about five seconds before turning into a constant layer of visual sludge, made worse by the lack of an option to switch it off. The game layers on a CRT filter by default that looks…well, okay, I guess. There’s a VCR one as well, but the game looks far nice when both are switched off – check out the gallery above to see what I mean.

Execution moves offer a brief taste of Terrifier’s trademark brutality, but each character only gets two of them and the animations don’t push the envelope. They also serve minimal gameplay purpose beyond topping up your special attack meter.

Sound design, meanwhile, feels like it was stitched together from a folder labelled “misc leftovers.” Gunshots end prematurely, voice lines sound like they were recorded in a metal bin, and the single looping metal track never once reacts to anything happening on screen.

Extra modes like Time Attack, Boss Rush, and a wave-based Survival are included to pad out the runtime, but when your core combat isn’t engaging, none of these modes offer compelling reasons to come back. Hammering A to stand up every time you’re knocked down doesn’t help, either; it feels like a decision imported from a far worse era of brawlers.

Terrifier: The Artcade Game disappoints on several levels. As a licensed game, it fails to make good use of the source material. Remove the admittedly pretty pixel version of Art the Clown and his comrades in gore, and all you’ve got is a generic brawler, albeit with a little more blood than usual. Nothing about the gameplay reflects the licence. Nothing speaks to Art’s brand of violence. Even his execution moves are bland.

Then, we look at it as a brawler and find it lacking. It’s so simple, so clunky. There are amazing brawlers coming out all the time right now, and in a world like that, Terrifier isn’t putting any power into its punches. It isn’t bad, it isn’t terrible, but it’s forgettable. And that’s kinda worse.