Pragmatic Play adds a Halloween installment to its fishing saga
The fanged fisherman is back for the season. Pragmatic Play has launched Big Bass Halloween Splash 1000, the Halloween installment of its fishing franchise, which maintains the recognizable structure of the saga while adding a layer of decision-making before the bonus begins.
Access to the bonus follows the usual formula. Three scatter symbols in the base game award 10 free spins, four award 15, and five award 20. If two land, there's a random chance that extra scatters will be added, ultimately triggering the feature.
The novelty arrives just before the round. The player chooses from six pumpkins and uncovers a maximum of five modifiers, capable of releasing extra wilds, money in symbols, free spins, starting the round already at the second multiplier level, or a higher chance of triggering random features.
Within the feature, the core mechanic remains the same, with levels. The fisherman wild collects the value of any money fish that land on the same spin, and these fish can be worth up to 1,000x. Every four fisherman wilds reactivates the feature with 10 more free spins and boosts the multiplier, which becomes 2x with the first retrigger, 3x with the second, and 10x with the third, which is the last.
There are also three special features that cover mismatches. If a fisherman wild lands but there's no fish, or a fish appears but the fisherman is missing, one of these three is randomly activated and adds more fish or more fishermen to the reels. The pumpkins, for their part, can continue to land on the fifth reel throughout the round and trigger additional modifiers for the remainder of the bonus.
Sharon McHugh, Head of PR at Pragmatic Play, highlighted that this installment adds a selection of modifiers with which the player gains influence over how the bonus round unfolds, from that initial pumpkin choice to the enhancements that appear as the game progresses.
The pumpkin selection is the true structural novelty of this release, as it shifts the franchise from a fixed bonus to one that the player configures before starting. This is the margin a studio has to refresh a saga whose core mechanic cannot be altered without losing the recognition that made it profitable. The launch also arrives right in the middle of the Halloween window, the period in the calendar where the industry stacks its seasonal releases and where Play'n GO's Ghost Booster and 1spin4win's Mystic Fortune campaign have already been noted in recent days, so differentiation must come from design and not from the theme, which at this point is shared by everyone.
Tags: Pragmatic Play, Big Bass Halloween Splash 1000, Halloween slots, Big Bass franchise