Fear The Dark

Theme and Design

Those expecting another horror slot from Hacksaw in the vein of Rotten or Cursed Seas will be disappointed with Fear the Dark’s style. It is more humorous cartoon than Hollywood gorefest – RIP City meets Scooby Doo perhaps. But rightly so in fact, to fit with the more comfortable, mid level variance as well as the house style of the Poketz series which includes Gronk’s Gems, another light-hearted cartoon slot.

Put it this way, though the game is set in a graveyard if you're old enough to play this slot then you shouldn't be too scared by those ghouls and zombies on the grid!

RTP and Variance

Fear the Dark has four available RTP settings – 96.25%, 94.33%, 92.36% or 88.25%. The top setting of 96.25% is about average for a UK slot but which setting you play at is at the discretion of your casino. We verified the RTP for Fear the Dark at five popular UK slot sites. This is what we found:

• Casumo (independent): 94.33%
• BacanaPlay (Skill on Net): 92.36%
• Barz (White Hat Gaming): 94.33%
• All British Casino (L and L Europe): 92.36%
• MrQ (independent): 96.25%

For the optimum RTP setting your best option is to play at MrQ, a site which performs consistently well in this test.

Fear the Dark is a medium variance slot like Frank’s Farm or Fruit Duel by the same provider. That should make it a more palatable slot than Hacksaw’s high variance games like Itero and Hand of Anubis. Expect a more even distribution of wins.

Maximum Win

The maximum win in Fear the Dark is 5,000x. This is about average for a mid-variance Hacksaw slot. If you are looking for a higher potential at the same variance you could try Gronk’s Gems or Pug Life, both of which are capped at 7,500x.

Symbols and Paytable

Fear the Dark is a cluster pays slot played out on a 6 reel and 6 row grid. The objective is to land ‘clusters’ of 5 or more identical symbols linked horizontally, vertically or diagonally. There are no fixed paylines.

Symbol values start low but build to a decent size when the clusters are 14 or more in size. And remember, this being a Hacksaw Gaming slot, there are plenty of multipliers available to drive up your wins.

The low value symbols are the black and white stairwell, gravestone, cup, cube and cross. These start at 0.1x for 5 in a cluster and increase up to 28x for 14 or more crosses in a cluster. The premiums are the scary characters – ghosts, melting faces, pig masks, clown and zombie. These are valued at from 0.5x for five in a cluster up to 120x for 14 or more zombies in a cluster.

There are no wilds in this game, but there are two scatters to unlock special features as explained below.

Features and Gameplay

It doesn’t take long to figure out what is happening in Fear the Dark. Like most Hacksaw games, it’s pretty simple stuff.

Full Moon Feature

During the base game, you should be looking out for the Full Moon scatter. This symbol only needs to land once on its own to trigger the Full Moon feature. Between 2 and 5 symbol multipliers now become active, displayed at the top of the grid.

These multipliers can be 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 7x, 8x, 9x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x or 100x.

These multipliers will be applied to any winning clusters made up of the corresponding symbols in the current cascade. But they also extend the cascade because when no more winning clusters are formed, then the symbol multipliers are removed one by one from left to right. And each time one is removed, corresponding symbols AND all low payers are removed from the grid, which may create more winning clusters for you, and so on.

The round will only end when ALL symbol multipliers have been removed.

Alone in the Dark And Darkness Spins Bonuses

The free spins round in Fear the Dark has an interesting two-part format. To trigger it you need to land at least 3 free spins candle scatters. 3 scatters gets you 10 spins and 4 gets you 15 spins. You can add a further 4 spins during the round for each scatter landed.

During Alone in the Dark you have more chance of triggering the Full Moon feature.

However, there is a twist. During free spins, candles burn around the grid. Once your spins are used up, the candles are all extinguished and the Darkness Spins are activated, starting with 2 free spins.

Before each Darkness Spins the grid shrinks in size, first to 4x4, then to 2x2. However, if you can trigger Full Moon, then the grid will return to 6x6 and you’ll start with 2 Darkness Spins again. And … you can re-start the whole round by landing another candle scatter, re-setting the grid and starting Alone in the Dark Spins.

All this madness only ends when you run out of Darkness Spins and no scatters – Full Moon or Candle – land.