Ghostly Hallows

Undead pirates crew the reels of Ghostly Hallows, Backseat Gaming's follow-up to its earlier buccaneer releases, this time trading living sailors for a spectral crew working blue-flamed braziers beside hulking ghost ships under a gloomy sky. A captain mans a cannon next to the 6x5 grid, and that cannon turns out to be far more than decoration.

Wins form on a scatter-pays basis: land eight or more of the same symbol anywhere across the grid and it pays, with the very largest combinations of 25 or more symbols worth 100x to 500x the stake. The paytable draws from nine symbols in total, five coloured gems making up the lower tier, with pistols, lanterns, treasure chests and skulls providing the higher-value hits. Winning symbols vanish and are replaced by new ones falling from above in a tumbling sequence, and any fresh win created this way tumbles again in turn.

Before every spin, up to five multiplier values between x2 and x1,024 can appear hidden behind the grid. When a winning combination lands directly on top of one, it is pulled into the cannon rather than applied on the spot, stacking with anything already stored there. A separate Cannon symbol on the reels is what actually spends that stored value: if it appears alongside a win, the accumulated multiplier is applied to the tumble payout, and if it fails to show up on a winning spin the stored total resets before the next base-game spin begins.

Three scatter symbols open the Cannon of the Damned bonus, ten free spins in which the cannon's stored multiplier carries over indefinitely until a Cannon symbol finally cashes it in. A fourth scatter instead opens Ghostly Pirate's Trail, another ten-spin round, but here the stored multiplier holds for the entire bonus regardless of whether a Cannon symbol turns up. Players who would rather skip the wait can buy in directly at four price points: a 2x buy roughly doubles the odds of landing either bonus naturally, a 50x buy guarantees a Cannon symbol on the very next spin, and the two bonus rounds themselves can be purchased outright for 100x and 250x respectively.

RTP is set at 96.3%, with a lower 94.29% configuration also on offer, and volatility is rated a maximum 5 out of 5. The maximum win runs to 20,000x the stake, and the game pays out on roughly 30.67% of spins. Between the scatter-pays grid and the stacking cannon multiplier, results swing between quiet stretches of small tumbles and sudden spikes once a large multiplier finally gets cashed in.