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Animal Crossing: Creative (and creepy) Halloween costumes to wear in-game

You’ve got a full month to perfect your outfit

By Nicole Carpenter
In a graveyard, a character with pink hair and devil horns scares people Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo
Nicole Carpenter is a senior reporter specializing in investigative features about labor issues in the game industry, as well as the business and culture of games.
Part of Polygon’s 31 days of Halloween

Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Halloween update added a bunch more customization options, including face paint and new eye colors, which opened up a whole new world of possibility for weird and wacky outfits.

New Horizons players have always been creative with their clothes, thanks in part to the ease of designing custom options. But with the new update, players are going even harder on the Halloween theme, with costumes that range from sweet and cute to gross and horrifying. And they’re all very good.

Here’s a selection of our favorites from the community. With enough imagination, you can pretty much create anything in game.

With all custom wares, it’s the hat that’s the most important part of the costume here. Now, who isn’t afraid of waking up during brain surgery?

With the right face paint, you can make any costume creepy. These are classics: the ghost witch and ghost bride. Another classic? The zombie or Frankenstein’s monster. Go wild. You can be a zombie version of anything!

Got a favorite movie? Video game? Anime? Hell, a favorite New Horizons villager? Here’s the thing, you can probably recreate it in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The face paint is the essential ingredient here for a lot of the above costumes, but some added Halloween accessories gave players new options, too. For instance, the Magic-Academy Hood can be repurposed for an Assassin’s Creed character. Bought Impish Horns? Now you’re Zero Two from Darling in the Franxx.

If you’re not into any of these options, I’ve got one last suggestion: just add blood. New Horizons players are already intimately familiar with this one. Almost immediately after the game’s release, players began creating deeply disturbing imagery using New Horizons’ customization tools. There are a surprising amount of blood-splatter patterns already available to download.

The last thing to consider is that New Horizons’ body paint and new eye colors are only purchasable during October — so make sure you spend those Nook Miles this month so you can keep the Halloween party rolling all year round.

Polygon’s 31 days of Halloween

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