The latest offering from Black Eyed Priest is here, just in time for Halloween. Ding Dong Dead just released under Puppet Combo’s publishing label, Torture Star Games.

It’s a campy, bite-sized offering that sees players babysitting a snot-nosed brat on a spooky October night.

The infamous Ding Dong Ditcher Ripper has escaped the local asylum–and wouldn’t know it–he’s picked up his old pastime.  It’s a great, simple premise that sits comfortably in Black Eyed Priest’s wheelhouse. As such, it’s styled with that radical low-poly nostalgia and endearingly clunky inventory menuing.

The scope of the game is small; one night, one house, only a few key puzzles to parse out. Where it shines is its campy tone and its quirky stat system. You find yourself with five stats. Strength, Agility, Brains, Moxie, and Sexiness. These stats determine your capabilities and your ability to pass skill checks throughout the game.

You might think this is a goofy thing to include in a small horror game, and you’d be right. But it definitely adds to the camp and flavor of the title in a big way. The overall package is pretty slim and focused, so I think adding a system like this gives Ding Dong Dead a certain flair that works in its favor and feeds into the campiness.

As you kill time babysitting, you might find a dumbbell to lift in the garage to build your strength, or an energy drink to improve your agility allowing you to run faster, or even a thong on the ground of the parent’s room to improve your…sexiness?

These stats sometimes manifest into skill checks that you can pass or fail.

Turn too many lights on and you’ll blow a fuse. You better have enough Brains or you won’t be able to reset the breaker and you’ll spend the rest of the night by the glow of a flashlight. Trying to get your girlfriend to come hang out for the night? Hope you’ve been working on your Sexiness stat. Need that little brat your babysitting to shut up? You’ll need Moxie to push him around.

Much of my enjoyment of Ding Dong Dead was the time I spent investigating the house and uncovering all the little quirky things I could interact with to improve my stats.  This added layer of skill checks goes a long way to giving Ding Dong Dead some identity with such a short runtime. I hope that Black Eyed Priest hangs onto this concept for their next bigger release, for something on the scale of the excellent Night at the Gates of Hell.

Almost all of these little interactions are accompanied by funny flavor text that makes it even better. It’s a small thing, but the well-written flavor text added to items in the environment is another highlight, and I think is a thing that needs mentioning. When the scope of your game is this narrow, it needs to feel fleshed out in the moment-to-moment, and Ding Dong Dead certainly does.

Ding Dong Dead unfolds into a series of tasks and items puzzles.

You’ll collect items around the house and use them to solve environmental puzzles. There’s nothing too complex here, and anyone familiar with this style of combining items with other items or using them on specific points around the environment will feel right at home.

There’s nothing too obtuse here to give much pause, allowing Ding Dong Dead to keep a brisk pace, but they’re also just engaging enough to not feel like a chore.  You have a small amount of autonomy as you can invite your friends over to hang out, and even arm yourself with a couple of basic weapons, for when the Ding Dong Ditcher Ripper inevitably pays you a visit.

When that happens, the culmination of your stat-building time at the beginning of the night comes into play.

You have a couple of ways to solve the situation, which can lead to one of three different endings.  You can use your Strength to overpower him, your Agility to outrun him, or your Moxie to command your friends to action. It’s all great stuff.

Admittedly, I wish this segment was a little longer. The Ding Dong Ditcher Ripper plays such a small role in the night’s activities, that the experience is just wrapping up right as he joins the party. There was some great, brief tension as the lights cut out and I heard the killer pass by the motion-activated Halloween decoration downstairs.  Some more of that would have been a great gear shift for a night that has otherwise been campy and fun.

Ding Dong Dead is best thought of as a celebration of everything campy and nostalgic about Halloween (both the holiday and the movie) I would view it as a fun, brief treat as opposed to a full experience. Working through all the potential endings might net you an hour and a half of playtime if you’re very thorough. Still, that’s not a bad thing, as the game is filled with charm, camp, and humor.  It’s well worth experiencing this spooky season.

You can play Ding Dong Dead by subscribing to Puppet Combo’s Patreon for as little as $5 per month.