Is Halloween: The Game banned in Australia?

Yes. The Australian Classification Board refused the game a rating, so it cannot be sold in Australia on disc or digitally. The ground was “illicit or proscribed drug use related to incentives or rewards”.

Search Steam from an Australian account and the game simply is not there. Other asymmetrical horror games, such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at A$21.95, are sold normally, so the store is fine; it is this one title that is missing. New Zealand is different: Steam sells it there at NZ$60.99. On PlayStation, though, New Zealand has lost the PS5 version.

Why it was refused

The problem is one mechanic, not the violence and not Michael Myers. Players can use marijuana from their inventory to gain a gameplay advantage, an ability that helps them survive the match. Australian guidelines treat drug use tied to an incentive or reward as an automatic refusal, however mild the rest of the content.

Everything else in the game fits comfortably inside an R18+ rating. A fictional or reskinned substance would most likely have passed; a real, named drug tied to a buff did not. The item itself is covered in the marijuana entry of the item database.

Why New Zealand was caught, and then let go

New Zealand has its own classification office and never refused the game. It got swept up because the ACB rating governs physical releases and the IARC rating governs digital ones, and the physical distributors cover both countries. The ACB rating took precedence, so one Australian refusal removed the physical and the digital release in both territories at once.

New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature Classification then cleared the game for digital storefronts, and it returned to Steam in New Zealand at NZ$60.99. Older articles that say both countries are blocked were written before that and never updated.

PlayStation in New Zealand: pulled again

The PS5 version did not stay. New Zealand PS5 owners found the game locked on their consoles and the purchase refunded by Sony without asking, in some cases getting kicked out of a session in progress. The licence cannot be restored from the console.

The New Zealand PlayStation Store no longer lists the game, while the US store still sells it at $39.99. Steam in New Zealand is unaffected at NZ$60.99, so PC is the way to play it there.

If you were refunded, you keep the money but the copy on your PS5 stays locked. There is no word yet on whether New Zealand PS5 players will be able to buy it again.

Don’t region-shift a Steam account to get around the Australian ban. It breaches the Steam Subscriber Agreement and puts your whole account at risk, not just this game.