Dead Party Launches October 29 at $19.99, With 15% Off to $16.99 for Halloween Weekend

The setup is a Halloween invasion with a joke at its center. UFOs appear over the once-peaceful town of Shady Hill on Halloween, and soon after, the dead neighborhood rises from its graves. Four unlikely heroes take on the task of fighting back, and the game never pretends the premise is serious: the invaders have one major weakness, and it is human music. When a team is surrounded, each character can use the power of their guitars to push the enemy back.

Dead Party is the successor to Dead Block, the zombie barricading game with the same rock-and-roll idea, and the lineage shows in the loop. This is a defense game before it is a shooter: teams scavenge their surroundings, break furniture and objects for resources, build barricades, and deploy traps, then adapt as the horde finds a way through. Different zombie types carry different mechanics, and distinct level layouts force teams to learn chokepoints instead of memorizing one map.

The four modes give a group a reason to keep playing after the story. In Showtime, teams fight back zombies with the power of music. In Fuel Run, they power generators and send out jamming radio waves against the invasion. In Skull Cannon, they collect zombie skulls and use them to shoot UFOs out of the sky. In Horde, the escape plan is dropped entirely and the only question is how long the team survives before being overrun. Story Mode runs alongside those modes with four unique characters, each with different strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and equipment to unlock.

The co-op options are wider than online play alone. Steam lists online co-op, shared-screen co-op, and Remote Play Together alongside full controller support, Steam Cloud, and 23 achievements. For a Halloween weekend game, that means one screen, four machines, or one streamed session all work. The PC specification is modest for 2026, asking for a GTX 960 at minimum and 6 GB of storage, so the barrier to getting a group in is low.

Radiation Blue is an independent developer near Freiburg, Germany, and its earlier work includes Dead Block, the game Dead Party directly follows. Publisher Snail Games USA framed the launch as a seasonal play, timed to Halloween to catch players looking for a multiplayer title for the weekend. It also lands in a crowded horror week on Steam, with the annual Scream Fest sale running until November 2.

That crowd is both the opportunity and the risk. A four-player party game with a clear joke has an easier time finding a group than a slow horror game does, and the $16.99 launch price is low enough for one player to buy copies for friends without much thought. The risk is that a party game without a group is a different game: the design is built around four players defending together, and a solo player should expect a thinner version of the same loop. The launch-week discount through November 5 gives groups a week to decide, which fits a game meant to be played with people rather than alone.

The honest way to judge Dead Party is by the group that will play it. Four friends with a Halloween evening free, a shared screen or four machines, and a tolerance for chaotic defense will get the intended game. A solo player looking for a horror story will find the systems without the company they were built for. The Steam Deck Verified status helps the first group more than the second: a handheld in the living room is an easy fourth seat.

The price keeps the decision simple. At $16.99 through November 5, the game costs less than a round of movie tickets for the same group, and the console versions are still to come for players who would rather wait for their own platform. Buyers this weekend should start with Story Mode, then pick Showtime for the music joke or Horde to test endurance.