ABOUT
Hacksaw Gaming is famous for cute symbols and clean-looking graphics, but this time, the studio adds a little bit of creepiness into the mix with Fear The Dark slot. Don’t worry though, the horror theme is not at all scary, merely serving as a means to bring more charms and personality into an amazing gameplay.
Betting Options and Bonus Features
Despite its name, Fear The Dark is a quirky, funny cluster pay slot with a square layout of 6x6. It’s also an easy-going game evident by the medium volatility level and a standard 96.25% RTP, but players still have a chance to win big with the 5,000x max win. A winning combination is formed when at least 5 matching symbols land in adjacent horizontal or vertical positions, with lower-paying symbols being in black and white while higher-paying ones are in flying colors.
The symbols here are quite diverse, such as stairs, tombstone, cup, cube, ghost, green head, pig, clown… Interestingly, there’s no Wild to be found, but many other unique features more than make up for it. The first feature is Full Moon, triggered by landing the Moon Man Scatter, and it offers 2 - 5 multipliers ranging from 2x to 100x.
These multipliers apply to certain high-paying symbols which will be shown on top of the reels. When no more wins occur, multipliers are removed from left to right, each time taking away the corresponding symbols as well as low-paying ones, in turn creating opportunities for new wins to form.
The Alone in the Dark free spins are triggered by landing 3 or 4 FS symbols in the base game, awarding 10 or 15 free spins, respectively. During this round, there is a higher chance of landing Moon Man symbols. After players run out of free spins, they will be taken to the Darkness Spins mode, which is basically a small window of a second chance.
You will receive 2 additional spins on a smaller 4x4 grid that shrinks to 2x2 on the second spin. Players hope to either land a Moon Man Scatter which resets to grid back to 6x6, or a FS symbol which awards 4 more free spins also on the normal 6x6 grid.
Players also have the option to buy different bonus features:
- BonusHunt FeatureSpins (3x the bet): each spin is 5 times more likely to trigger a bonus game. RTP = 96.41%. Volatility: high.
- Moon Man FeatureSpins (40x the bet): each spin guarantees to have at least 1 Moon Man scatter. RTP = 96.41%. Volatility: high.
- 10 Free Spins (100x the bet): RTP = 96.23%. Volatility: high.
- 15 Free Spins (150x the bet): RTP = 96.25%. Volatility: medium.
Roshtein’s Take
Fear The Dark is an amazingly original slot game. Its theme has the casual vibe akin to many Hacksaw titles, but this one has a lot more pop in the visuals. Even though the gameplay revolves solely around the Full Moon feature, it doesn’t get boring since the feature itself offers so much fun and variety. That’s not to mention the versatility the game offers to players, namely 4 different bonus-buy modes to try. Sure, the Darkness Spins is extra unnecessary most of the time but that’s about the only criticism I have for Fear The Dark.
