Candywriter LLC is best known for the life simulator called BitLife, which we’ve covered in extensive depth, since it was first released last year. For those who are unfamiliar with the game, it is available for both iOS and Android platforms, and allows you to simulate the life of a “Bitizen” – a virtual character in the game’s virtual world – from the cradle to the grave, leaving the choice up to you. Will you have them living their best – or their worst life? You’ll have a plethora of dilemmas and various random events to deal with, all of which will play a role in determining your Bitizen’s success in life – or lack thereof.
Halloween is a time for all sorts of scary and supernatural fun, but it could also give the weaker of heart some serious heebee-jeebees, considering all the supernaturally-themed television specials and movies that are aired on or around that day. You may be glad to know that Candywriter is keeping with the holiday spirit, as the company has rolled out a brand spanking new update for its most popular game, which we’ll be discussing in this BitLife guide. So without further ado (or a-boo?), here’s everything you need to know about BitLife version 1.25 – the Haunted Update.
Halloween Costumes – Fun For All Bitizens Aged 3 To 7
One of the most evident changes you can expect from the BitLife Haunted Update is the option to choose a scary character to dress up as, provided your Bitizen is between the ages of 3 and 7. Once you reach your third birthday in-game, you will receive a prompt, as one of your parents will ask you whether you want to dress up as any one of three creatures at random – it may be a vampire, a witch, a mummy, a skeleton, a ghost, an alien, or a few other Halloween staples. The fourth choice would be not to dress up as anything as all – perhaps you think that the best option for your Bitizen is to dress as themselves for Halloween.
While this is a fun addition to the game that we feel is very timely for the holiday season, the main thing to keep in mind is that this is strictly cosmetic. Your choice of costume will not affect your Bitizen’s popularity in school – or lack thereof. You won’t be teased for choosing to go without a costume, and you won’t gain popularity either for dressing in a completely unique costume from everyone else in your class. However, you will notice that all children in school aged 7 years old and younger will have Halloween costumes represented in their avatars, same with relatives aged 3 to 7. Again, this is strictly cosmetic in nature, but it’s hard to deny that this is a fun touch.
What To Expect In Random Halloween-Centric Situations
Of course, Halloween is a holiday that isn’t exclusively for the little ones. Even if you’re an adult, you can celebrate the holiday by attending costume parties or giving out candy to trick-or-treaters, just to name a few, and if you’re an adult Bitizen, those options will certainly pop up from time to time, thanks to the new BitLife update.
The random Halloween scenarios you can encounter as an adult won’t have much of an impact on your life or on the four basic stats, though you can get a slight boost of Happiness, in particular, for most of them. For instance, you may be asked what take you want for your Halloween costume – are you going to go sexy, scary, or play it straight? Your diabetic boss may also be hiding some candied corn that falls out from their pocket – will you eat it, stage an intervention for your boss, or do nothing? Or are you going all-out for the young trick-or-treaters in your area, giving them just a few candies, or ignoring them completely? Additionally, you may or may not choose to investigate some weird goings-on in your area – only to find out that the “ghost” is actually a stray bedsheet.
On the other hand, there may be some unpleasant situations that may slightly affect your stats – are you going to change costumes (and opt for a super-basic bedsheet) or stick with the one you have if you happen to be wearing the same Joker costume everyone else at work has donned for Halloween? The operative word here is “slightly” – you may lose some Happiness for changing to a mediocre, kiddie-level costume, but it won’t be a literal game-changer.
These random scenarios are all relatively benign situations that add to the Halloween flair, but they’re far from being the heart of Candywriter’s BitLife Haunted Update. You got that right – we’re building up to the heart of the update, which is the experience of buying – and living in – a haunted house.
Buying A Haunted House: Be Careful What You Wish For
With the new BitLife update, it is now possible to purchase a haunted house once you reach adulthood and are making enough money to buy a house outright or on a mortgage. Are you going to take a chance on sharing a roof with a Casper-esque friendly ghost, or are you going full-on Amityville?
As you will notice while browsing available homes in the Real Estate Brokers menu, some houses will be listed as being haunted – tapping on these houses will show you the usual information (the house’s age and its condition), but with a new Hauntedness bar included. As usual, a green indicator would hint that the home won’t give you much trouble. Orange, meanwhile, points to a house that’s fairly teeming with spectral figures, while red means that the house is a James Wan horror movie in the making – in other words, it’s VERY haunted. Buy these properties at your own risk – if your goal is to make your Bitizen live his or her best life, this is typically NOT a good way to go about it.
As the game’s changelog suggests, there is a wide variety of spooky creatures that could stalk you in your haunted house – poltergeists, phantoms, specters, and more. Especially if you’re living in a house that’s only slightly haunted, i.e. one with a green Hauntedness bar, chances are you may meet friendly ghosts that won’t do you much harm and will generally leave you alone if you choose to remain calm. And that brings us to the next part of these scenarios – depending on the apparition, you may have the choice of staying calm, letting out a blood-curling scream, insulting the creature, complimenting it, or even calling the police. A few other options may appear, but these are the usual ones you may see – in many cases, you will see a bar in the dialog box that shows you how terrified you are by the apparition.
Other times, you may not see a ghost, but you may notice the drawers shuffling or you may hear someone singing along with you even if you’re the only one home – in these scenarios and other similar ones where you don’t specifically see anything (or anyone), you can either investigate the weird phenomena, hide somewhere, or simply ignore it. Investigating would usually yield nothing, but hiding, strangely enough, oftentimes reveals the spirit behind the strange occurrence.
As mentioned, spirits in a haunted house may be friendly or malevolent in nature – you can view this information after an apparition by going to Relationships and tapping on the spirit’s name in the Others section. If a spirit is friendly, you need not worry too much about your stats and any long-term effect on them, neither do you need to be concerned about any physical or psychological conditions – don’t worry, we’ll get that. But if a spirit is unfriendly, meaning a Friendliness bar that is orange, red, or close to nonexistent, that’s where you may need to worry about your Bitizen’s future. Not only can these spirits attack you if you insult them, or even compliment them or run away – yes, they can actually chase you down and beat down on you, potentially making running futile.
It’s not just physical injury you need to be concerned about – an angry, malevolent spirit could cause your Bitizen to suffer from PTSD, schizophrenia, high blood pressure, or other conditions, most of which cannot be cured by a simple trip to the doctor. Psychological conditions like the first two could also affect your Smarts stat – it’s not uncommon for smart Bitizens to go stupid from all of the haunting. (Other than that, Health typically goes down gradually for each year you live in a haunted house.)
On a tragic note, there are times when a spirit could terrorize you in such a way that your Bitizen could suffer a potentially fatal heart attack! This usually happens once their Health has been sufficiently worn down by the physical and psychological ailments we mentioned above, and once you choose the “scream” option in the dialog box. (Or insult them.)
As you can see, the best option to choose during haunting scenarios is to stay calm. Fighting, insulting, or even complimenting or running away could result in attacks, and calling the police would invariably result in the cops laughing at you and/or berating you for wasting their time. Your Happiness may take a hit of about 30 points once the haunting is over, but at least remaining calm will normally result in the least overall damage to your stats, both in the short-term and in the long-term.
Just Who’s Out There Haunting You?
Now that we’ve given you an overview of what to expect when you buy a haunted house in BitLife, let’s talk about the identities of the spirits that may haunt these residences, apart from the specific types Candywriter mentioned in the new changelog.
Although the spirits may typically come with old-timey, seemingly random names, you may find some of them familiar, especially if you’ve been playing the game for some time, or if the Bitizen you’re controlling is the descendant of someone you controlled a life or two (or even more) ago. Deceased Bitizens from the Cemetery could make their presence felt in your haunted house, and that too includes a Bitizen’s parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents! But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be friendlier – apparently, these ghosts don’t recognize their descendants, and could attack them if you choose the wrong action. We had one playthrough where our Bitizen was killed by his own mother’s ghost, who beat him with a baseball bat after he decided to run away – yes, this is possible through the new update!
Solutions To Haunted House Issues – To Exorcise The Spirits Or To Sell Your House?
Luckily for anyone who’s had it with the stress that a haunted house brings, even to a virtual family, there are some options available, starting with exorcism. Once again, you’ll want to go to the Relationships section, then go to Other, where you can see all the spirits that are haunting you. Tap on any spirit and choose the “Exorcise it” option – before doing so, however, take note of the two bars in the information section. Friendliness is self-explanatory, of course, and the same applies to Activeness, which determines how often these ghosts (or other creatures) tend to haunt your place.
With that said, we should warn you that exorcism comes with a small fee, and is most successful with the friendlier, less harmful ghosts and less so with the nastier, more frequent haunters. And if an exorcism fails, you might even find yourself on the receiving end of another attack!
The “Summon it” option, on the other hand, simply attempts to summon the spirit, thus forcing another encounter with the creature. We don’t know why you would want to do this – unless, of course, you’re trying to further torment your Bitizen. (It isn’t even guaranteed that you’ll successfully summon this creature to begin with!)
If you feel as if your Bitizens have suffered enough from all the haunting, the best recourse is to sell the house. We haven’t had much difficulty taking this route – the “purported” presence of spirits isn’t enough to dissuade many customers – though as a caveat, you usually will be selling the haunted residence at a loss.
Odds And Ends – What Else Has Changed?
On top of the Halloween-specific changes we mentioned above, Candywriter also added a few miscellaneous tweaks which they specified in the changelog. Chief among these is the addition of new countries for your Bitizens, as Czech Republic, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Monaco, Morocco, Pakistan, and Syria are now available to choose from. The developer also hinted at the usual interface tweaks and bug squashes, specifying as well that there have been “many spooky stepfamily glitches” that were sorted out. We couldn’t quite figure out what those were, but the important thing is that Candywriter has tied up (at least) some of the supposed loose ends from the Stepfamily update.
This scenario only seems to have appeared on the BitLife Haunted Update, despite the fact that it has little to do with ghosts, monsters, or other creepy-crawlies. Once your Bitizen turns 2, you may be asked to choose a skill for them to “flex” at this tender age. If you choose toothbrushing for your Big Flex, this would result in a boost in Looks. Choosing riding a tricycle improves Happiness and, we’d guess, the Athleticism stat as well for school scenarios, while choosing writing offers a big boost to Smarts.
The next common new scenario we noticed might have something to do with Halloween, as we’ve mainly noticed it after a Bitizen suffers from PTSD or schizophrenia following a ghostly encounter. Since the new update rolled out, some playthroughs have seen our characters get arrested for murders they supposedly didn’t commit – this may be an attempt to reflect the fact that many people in the real world get framed up for crimes and it isn’t uncommon for innocent people to rot away in jail, though on a darker note, your Bitizen might not “remember” committing the “crime” because of their mental condition. It’s something to watch out for, though it’s also unavoidable in many cases, considering how schizophrenia and PTSD aren’t easy to treat in the game.