Two hundred and fifty spins into our free play session, the reels had handed us loose change and not much else, and the tickets that open the bonus still hadn’t shown. Beetlejuice Megaways slot keeps its best idea locked behind that drought, and on our visit, it was a long one. Light & Wonder builds the 1988 movie into a grid, with the top of each reel switched off, dimmed beneath a drift of red fog, and only coming into play once a win lands. Trigger the bonus, and it turns loud and busy for a while; getting there was the hard part.
Each spin reveals the lower half of the reels initially. The bottom rows are in play; the top sits dark behind the red fog, so the game looks bigger than it plays. Land a win, and the winning symbols burst away, the top half switches on, and the gaps refill from above.
Each drop is another cascade, and every cascade can bring a fresh win. With all rows active, the Megaways counter can reach 248,832 ways, though most spins stay well below that.
The ghost only appears on the first drop of a spin, never during the cascades that follow. Once the reels settle, every ghost on show becomes one shared symbol, drawn at random from the paytable, so a grid dotted with them can turn into a wall of Beetlejuice faces or a wall of tens. It behaves like a mystery symbol, and what it lands on is beyond your control.
A trio of ticket scatters in the live area calls up the bonus, the game barking his name to summon it just as the movie does. Three tickets open the round with 8 free spins, a fourth ticket makes it 12, and a fifth makes it 16.
The round keeps that split grid and the cascades, and adds what regular play never has: a win multiplier that begins at 1x and steps up by one every cascade. One busy free spin can pile several of those steps in a row.
Reel height is where this one differs from a standard Megaways. Each reel deals 2, 3 or 6 symbols while its top half stays shut and doubles to 4, 6 or 12 once a win uncovers it, with the ways recounted from whatever lands. The stake runs anywhere from 0.10 to 500.00 in credits, set on the keys beside the reels, and there’s no buy button and no turbo, so the one road into the free spins is landing the tickets the slow way.
A wild can turn up on any reel and fill in for all but the ghost and the ticket, though it pays nothing on its own.
Beetlejuice himself pays for two of a kind; the rest start at 3 of a kind, and the card ranks all share one value, so the low end is a single flat tier.
| Symbol | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beetlejuice | 0.50 | 1.00 | 2.50 | 5.00 |
| Lydia | — | 0.50 | 1.00 | 2.00 |
| Green Demon | — | 0.40 | 0.80 | 1.60 |
| Miss Argentina | — | 0.30 | 0.60 | 1.20 |
| Shrunken Head | — | 0.20 | 0.40 | 0.80 |
| A / K / Q / J / 10 | — | 0.10 | 0.20 | 0.40 |
Figures show the win in credits at a 1.00 stake.
When the free spins finally arrive, this is a good slot. The multiplier that keeps building is the draw, and a long cascade streak can turn a slow round into a proper one, all set to the film's music and its grinning lead ghoul. The trouble is the game basically depends on it. Between bonuses, Beetlejuice Megaways goes near silent, the wins stay small, and with no way to shorten the delay you take it as it comes. Fans of the 1988 picture will find plenty to enjoy in the symbols and the win screens; anyone else is mostly buying the film licence.
For this review, we played a long stretch at a 1.00 stake, most of it before the bonus showed. Wins came in the 0.20 to 5.00 band and rarely stacked, the cascades sometimes running four or five drops deep without adding up to much. A handful of ghosts landed too, and none of them paid. Only once did a base game spin clear more than 5.00 in the whole sitting. A luckier visit might reach the bonus far sooner, since the wins here run hot and cold, but ours made us work for it, and the tickets were slow to come.
The last of the tickets showed at long last, bringing the bonus and eight free spins, a bell ringing as the screen washed green with smoke and the chant barked out. The round runs on that half-then-full grid, but now every cascade nudges the win multiplier upward, and it holds that figure across all eight spins.
For the early spins barely anything happened. Then the fourth began to cascade, the multiplier ticked up with each drop, and by the sixth it sat at 8x. The music kicks in for the bonus and does more for the mood than it sounds like it should.
The last spin is where it came together. One winning drop fed the next, the multiplier climbing from 9x through to 15x as the cascades kept clearing, and a round worth 24.80 suddenly added another 63.40 for an 88.20 finish, Beetlejuice mugging on his little TV set as the coins fell. That one spin outscored the whole flat stretch before it. An age waiting on tickets, then a minute you don’t want to end.
