People have always enjoyed frightening themselves in controlled doses. Horror stories, ghost tales, and unsettling art give us a safe way to stare at the darker corners of the imagination without actually wandering into them. Slot games, however, usually avoid this territory, preferring bright colours, friendly symbols, and themes that feel more like a carnival than a nightmare.

With its new Dark Spiral slot, Hacksaw Gaming ignores that tradition and heads somewhere far less comfortable.

Welcome to your nightmares

The Dark Spiral slot from Hacksaw features up to 331,776 ways to win across six reels. Betting starts at $0.10 per spin and goes up to $35 per spin.

At the maximum bet, you will have a chance to win up to $350,000 thank to the 10,000x maximum multiplier. The slot features medium to high volatility and has a projected RTP of 96.22%.

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Summoning symbols can appear in sizes ranging from 1×2 to 1×4 and may land on every reel except the leftmost reel. When one appears, it reveals a stack of matching symbols or wilds. A 1×2 summoning symbol reveals 3 to 6 symbols, a 1×3 reveals 5 to 9, and a 1×4 reveals 6 to 12.

If a wild lands directly above or below a summoning symbol on the same reel, the summoning symbol expands to absorb the wild and increases in size. When a summoning symbol forms part of a winning combination, it remains on the reel while the other winning symbols cascade. Each time this happens, it reveals a new paying symbol or wild until no further wins occur.

Landing three scatter symbols triggers the Shattered Bonus Game and awards 10 free spins. During this round, the chance of landing summoning symbols is increased. If two or three scatters appear during any of the bonus rounds, you will receive +2 or +3 additional free spins, respectively.

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Landing four scatters activates the Twisted Bonus Game, which also begins with 10 free spins. This round includes the mechanics of the Shattered feature. However, all summoning symbols that land remain fixed on the reels, revealing new symbols when part of a win and on each spin until the round ends.

Landing five scatters activates the Tortured Hidden Epic Bonus, which also awards 10 free spins. This feature functions like the Twisted round but guarantees that two summoning symbols appear on the first spin.

You can also activate Feature Buys. The BonusHunt FeatureSpins option costs 3x the stake and makes each spin five times more likely to trigger a bonus round, while Summon the FeatureSpins costs 100x the stake and guarantees that at least two summoning symbols land.

You can also purchase specific bonus rounds directly. The Shattered Bonus Game can be bought for 100x the stake, while the Twisted Bonus Game can be purchased for 200x the stake.

Is the Dark Spiral slot worth stepping into the abyss?

Horror-themed slots exist, but they are far from the most common releases. Most games lean toward bright colours, cheerful music, and symbols that look like they belong on a children’s lunchbox. The Dark Spiral slot goes in the opposite direction, presenting a bleak, unsettling world that feels less like a game and more like somewhere you probably shouldn’t have wandered into.

However, once you move past the theme and focus on the mechanics, the experience is less intense than the presentation suggests. The gameplay revolves around summoning symbols, which can expand, persist, and trigger cascades, but the feature rarely feels as dramatic as the game’s dark atmosphere implies.

The Hacksaw team still deserves credit for committing to something genuinely unsettling, which helps give the slot a distinctive feel. If you can stomach the grotesque imagery, the Dark Spiral slot offers an experience that stands apart visually, even if the gameplay itself never quite lives up to the menace of its theme. I give it a nine out of ten.

If you’re looking for a few other great Hacksaw slots, try Aiko and the Wind Spirit and Steamrunners.