If you've seen any slasher flick, you know the drill: every youth is horny, and the horny must die. Despite Halloween not being quite as trope-riddled as some of its stabbiest contemporaries, its recent asymmetrical PvP adaptation did include a minigame where two players could slip into a closet and bang each other for buffs—but after only a few days in a deluxe edition-exclusive early access, the feature has reportedly been removed.

In fact, it seems to have been silently hotfixed out. The most recent patch notes make no mention of the sex minigame, but the comments sure do. On the Steam thread, one user commented "ADD BACK THE CLOSET MINIGAME" five times in a row. Others have noted that Lynda, a flirty playable civilian who previously got extra benefits from the sex minigame, has had that trait removed, which I can confirm with a quick launch of the game.

Players on social media are not pleased, as you might imagine. "Lame as hell," wrote Choice-Scholar-2297 on Reddit. A thread on the game's subreddit titled "Please add back sex mini game" is quickly gaining traction; freetheree's original post reads, "Why did they remove it!??!?!?!? Me and my homeboy just wanna have sex in a closet? And we can’t???? Tf??????"

Lots of the sorts of jokes you might expect are being thrown around, and of course, it is hilarious that if this change sticks the game will have had closet sex as an exclusive time-limited pre-order bonus. Unfortunately, there might be a good reason for its removal.

You see, players are also speculating about the reason this might have been changed: dead players can respawn as older characters, such as a police officer or Michael Myers' therapist Dr. Loomis. Fine on its own, disturbing when those characters can potentially solicit sex from a high schooler—Laurie Strode, for instance, is only 17 years old in the version this game depicts. While Illfonic has not confirmed this is why the feature was patched out, I struggle to imagine a more convincing reason.

I've reached out to Illfonic for comment on the patch, and this story will be updated if I hear back.

Like a lot of survival games, Stalker 2 had a long journey from janky larva to playable, easily recommended butterfly. It's tempting to say that these games ought to just stay under wraps until they're done and relatively bug-free—but at Gamescom 2026, GSC Game World CEO and head of game direction Ievgen Grygorovych told PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens that deciding when to release is a more complex consideration than you might think.

As for why the studio didn't just wait to release the game until it was in the state it is now, Grygorovych cited both creative and financial reasons. "To make something better, you need to receive feedback, and this feedback should be fresh. From a business perspective, it's also impossible, because it's very expensive to do two years of additional work … in most cases, it's unrealistic."

GSC Game World has more legitimate reasons than most to release an unfinished game. The Ukrainian studio was working on Stalker 2 when development was interrupted by Russia's invasion, forcing the team to move out of Kyiv, and its progress was later hamstrung by a devastating office fire and numerous leaks. And notably, the game's buggy release did arrive after delays—but regardless of all the unique trouble GSC Game World encountered, Grygorovych pointed to woeful market conditions across the board as another consideration.

"You have to always find the trade-offs that allow you to bring the best experience you can with what you have," he said. "It's always a balance because every developer would like to have an infinite amount of time, but the market around is awful: lots of layoffs, studios are closing. So actually, the market state is not very promising. We're just trying to find the best configuration we can."