The Google Doodle Halloween game is scarily good
Google's 'Great Ghoul Duel' is back this year, and it's a spooktacular little game
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Google Doodle fun for all
👻 This year’s Halloween Google Doodle game sees the return of ‘Great Ghoul Duel’
🎮 The game lets teams of four compete online to see who can collect the most spirits
😌 You can control your ghoul by using the arrow keys or your mouse
⏱️ There are several spooky maps to play on, and it’s a great time sink
Google Stadia may be dead, but that hasn’t stopped the search engine giant from bringing back a fun Google Doodle game called ‘Great Ghoul Duel’ to celebrate Halloween this year.
The game originally appeared in 2018, but it’s been transformed into an online multiplayer game that can be played by clicking on the Google Doodle illustration that currently resides on Google’s homepage.
Players must collect as many wandering spirit flames as they can in two minutes using the arrow keys or mouse, and return them to their base to cash them in.
You’ll need to beware of your opponents, though, as they can steal your hard-earned spirits by bashing into your tail of flames. Of course, you can steal them right back if you’re quick enough.
The more spirit flames you deliver, the quicker you can access game-changing power-ups like a speed boost or a magnet that draws any nearby spirit flames into your path. That game even has achievements.
Players will be placed onto either the green team or the purple team, and you’ll get to play as various spectral beings like a floating bear head, a mouse, or a hand with amethyst. There are also seven maps to battle it out on, which should keep things interesting.
I’ve played a few games of Great Ghoul Duel – for research purposes – and each match ran extremely smoothly. In a blog post, Google says that the game is running on its Google Cloud Platform and that the ‘Open Match’ function is a “highly-scalable, open source matchmaking framework cofounded by Google Cloud and Unity.”
If you’ve got a few minutes (or hours) to spare today, then, why not check out Great Ghoul Duel for a bit of free online multiplayer mayhem? Boo-lieve it or not, it’s actually really fun as far as Google Doodle games go.