It really was better than lost sectors. In Haunted Lost Sectors (HLS), your goal is simply to stand in as many summoning circles as you can to summon "Headless Ones" (just big hive knight reskins) and kill as many as you can until the timer is up, then you fight a mechanic-less boss and get rewards based on your candy and headless ones killed. The decorations do add a nice Halloween-y flair to HLS activities, but they are absurdly repetitive in nature. The Haunted Forest (HF), however, was much more replayable. Even if the general aesthetics didn't change much, it was still very spooky feeling. It was completely dark. The only sources of light were your ghosts' flashlights, minor lights from entities (such as hive eyes or red-hot gladiator blades), and a slight ambient glow from the lightning and clouds all around. The party spawn on a platform, and once ready, could go down to load a new chunk. The goal was simply to defeat as many enemies as possible to fill up a bar. As you went, the path was made up of procedurally generated chunks, and they were Vex in design, but covered in spooky Halloween decorations. The enemies you'd face were random each floor. Once you filled up the bar, you were taken to the boss arena to fight a random boss. Once you beat the boss and there was still time on the clock, you'd be taken to the next floor. Every few floors would introduce a random debuff that would make everything harder. The whole goal was simply to make it as far as you can. Once you ran out of time, self-respawn timers got drastically extended, and if everyone is downed or you defeat a boss with no time left, you are taken to the reward platform where one final amazing surprise may be waiting in store for the unlucky who aren't aware of it. I won't spoil, but it's a very memorable one nobody could forget. Then there are the masks. You could equip special mods on the masks that would grant extremely potent effects, like invincibility while airborne, extra heavy ammo drops, high energy regen, and more. They made the gameplay itself feel fresh and I feel with the updated add density, the HF could be even more enjoyable than it was before. The main takeaway is the the HF felt like a unique activity that can't be replicated elsewhere and HLS just feel like lil matchmade public events in a spookified lost sector.