// KOTAKU — GAMING
Spirit Halloween 2026: The Kotaku Review
Saturday is Halloween, and woe unto thee if you have not yet assembled your costume, because all the good stuff has been thoroughly picked over and is rapidly rising in price. I’m going as a lazy Luigi (regular overalls and green shirt, actual Luigi hat) to a Trunk or Treat this weekend where I’ll be handing out candy and tiny plastic skeletons to kids. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to care too much.
For those that do, though, there’s always Spirit Halloween. I hadn’t been to one of these in a few years, so my resident Halloween enthusiast colleague Zack Zwiezen graciously showed me around one earlier this week. Together, we took a zillion photos, and we’re here now before you with a presentation of the weirdest, worst, and most notable things we saw there. Most of it’s costumes, some of it’s other stuff, all of it is…well, I guess representative of Halloween in the U.S. in 2026.
Come take a journey with us into Spirit Halloween, three days before that sacred night:
Figured I’d start us off with something fairly innocuous. There was, naturally a lot of Mario at Spirit Halloween. The adult section was (weirdly) mostly Luigi, but the kids’ section had more variety. That said: I don’t know what a normal-looking Yoshi costume, to me, would be. But this specific one upset me for some reason. “Carapace gonflable incluse!” -RV
Again, I’m not sure what a normal one of these would be. You’re probably not gonna let your kid run around in just a vest on a chilly Halloween night. But this still looks wrong, somehow. -RV
The kids’ section had an actual, branded Peach costume, so it was sort of goofy to see this unlicensed option in the adults’ section in lieu of a real Peach costume. I guess Nintendo was one of the few (very few, as we will see) companies to draw the line on licensed “sexy” versions of its characters. -RV
Zack has led me to understand that a wall like this is mandatory in every Spirit Halloween store. -RV
My original pitch for this article was “The 10 Worst Things We Saw At Spirit Halloween” and this was going to either be top of the list, or a Dishonorable Mention at the bottom (because, while “worst” is accurate, it’s unfortunately not very fun/funny, which the rest of this list is intended to be). -RV
Okay, but speaking of Pokémon, is this what passes for Pokémon costumes these days? Just a onesie and a hood? Come on, guys, we can do better than this.
Now this is just flat-out lame. Where are his pants??? This was right next to an actual, full Spider-Man suit on the rack. -RV