Party Hard (PC) review "I don't think this is what Andrew WK had in mind..."

Slashers get a bad rap. Enough of them blast their audiences with gratuitous violence, gore, nudity, cliches, and off-beat humor that people tend to regard them as either a joke genre or lowbrow horror. Sadly, in many cases, they're right. Admittedly, slashers' sameness and predictability comprise some of the material its viewers look for. They want to see people blast music, screw in the woods or an abandoned house, get chased by a masked maniac, make horrible decisions, then suffer a gruesome fate. The thing is even when slasher flicks are at their lowest, most repetitive, and most predictable, they can still be fun to watch.

Slasher games, however, don't get the same luxury...

Okay, it sounds like I'm about to utterly destroy slasher simulator Party Hard, but the truth is the game is at least amusing to some degree. Its amusement fades, however, when it hits its more basic moments, unlike the aforementioned movies that seemingly benefit from rudimentary content. Here, you take the role of a masked killer who's fed up with late-night parties across his city. He travels to parties in different parts of the US, starting with a tiny barbecue in someone's backyard for a little tutorial stage. After that, though, he hits many of your standard celebratory places: a bachelor pad, a frat house, a couple rooftops, Las Vegas, and even a bus.

Guiding the dude in a 2D pixel-generated screen, you mosey about the premises waiting for golden opportunities to off drunks without getting caught. Mainly, you slink up to one and stick your knife into their anatomy, they collapse into a pool of their own blood, and then you move on to the next victim. However, you've got to be sneaky. If someone sees you, they'll call the police and you could be arrested. Could be. If you run away long enough, the cop will give up and allow you to continue slicing up college kids, rednecks, clubbers, bouncers, and even some of your own obsessive followers.



If a moment doesn't immediately present itself, you can always wait. And man, sometimes you will waaaaaaaaiiiiiiit. It could take a while, but one person could dance forever in the living room, move to the bathroom where plenty of witnesses take long dumps, then wander off to an area behind the house with another NPC for a little action. Now's your chance! You walk ever so slowly to their humping grounds, drive your knife into one, then rush to snuff out the other before they can run to a phone.

Of course, even if you shank someone out of the public eye, one of their friends still could discover their corpse and call the authorities. However, as long as you're not in the area, you typically won't be a suspect. A cop shows up, zips the cadaver into a body bag, and drives away. Attendees continue to dance, sometimes eerily surrounded by bloodstains and body bags, apparently apathetic to their friends' demises. Strangely, bodies pile up and no one thinks to question the masked guy walking around that no one remembers inviting...

Thankfully, you can sidestep some of the nonsense and hide corpses, provided the level allows you to do so. Some stages come with dumpsters to throw the deceased into, others offer more inventive means to disposal. My favorites come from the rooftops, where you can simply throw a dead dude off the edge. Another level on a boat sees you tossing them into the ocean, waiting to get munched by sharks. Better yet, if a live party goer happens to be next to either of those edges, you can push them in and save yourself the trouble of stabbing them first.



Yes, there are other ways to scotch your annoyers. Traps litter the grounds, just waiting to be activated. For instance, you can slap a horse or zebra, and it bucks hard enough to dispatch multiple folks behind it. If that's not your thing, you can always poison the punch bowl or beer keg. Those hazards stay active for a set time, intoxicating anyone who draws near to them. Slowly, samplers barf and croak, and sometimes their pals blame the person next to them when they expire. That summons the police again, who club the suspect to death before dragging their carcass off. If you're lucky, their car may also run over some pedestrians. Best of all, these devices typically don't draw attention to you for some reason, so you can spike the punch without worrying about anyone suspecting you.

I know this all sounds exciting, but those are only the best bits, and they make up a short portion of the experience. There's a sad point not far into each level where you've spent all of its traps, and now you're left with the tedious routine of waiting until everyone is alone and simply slicing them. You'd think this title would offer an array of weapons, but you're sadly limited to your kitchen blade, a sword that's only sometimes available, and the occasional stun bomb. Really, you spend a fair portion of Party Hard sitting still, observing, checking your surroundings to make sure no one is coming, and giving your target a fatal poke before scuttling off. You do this repeatedly for stages that sometimes last over twenty minutes, and this is assuming you don't slip up late into a mission and restart.

Yes, you can dance awkwardly to get people moving and disperse crowds. Two things with this ability, though: For one thing, it doesn't always work and sometimes even backfires. It could leave loiterers unfazed, or even prompt them to knock you senseless for a short time. Lastly, it doesn't always prompt those affected to wander to useful places. Sometimes they merely move to a different part of the same dance floor, or even all gather in one place where they can all see each other get killed. You're honestly no better off with this skill than you are just waiting for them to move on their own.



Therein lies the difference between slasher games and films. When films fall into a familiar routine, you can still swill some brews and laugh along with its ridiculousness. Filmmakers have caught onto this and made their own intentionally silly films, some of which work on a meta level as well. When games slip into more dry moments, though, they become tedious. Mainly, this happens because of gaming's interactive nature and the fact that games that become minimally interactive tend to become less enjoyable. Party Hard exemplifies that notion by falling short when it runs out of steam and becomes more of a people watching simulator with added violence.

The game almost gets it stunningly right, though. Almost. It features some fun and creative kills and lots of cathartic slaughter, but each stage fizzles out too quickly without providing something to dull the tedium of gawking and stabbing. The title could have gone any number of directions to achieve this end, including decking out locations with additional traps, providing an array of weapons, piling on some trickier constraints for an added challenge, or even tacking on side objectives. Don't get me wrong; I definitely enjoyed bits of the content on offer. However, the long stretches of waiting or repetition leave something to be desired.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (September 14, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.