Create your own witchy brew with Google’s interactive Halloween doodle

Nope, Google hasn’t jumped on the sparkly vampire bandwagon (or even the trendy Walking Dead) — the search giant has gone traditional but quirky for today’s Halloween-themed doodle. This one’s all about green-faced witches, coffins full of spiders and things that go bump in the night.

You start off the game by hurling a choice of four ingredients (a bone, skull, poisoned apple and a jar of potion) into a cauldron full of swirling green liquid — which two ingredients you choose to chuck into the brew will determine which short animation you’ll see next. For example, if you pick the apple and the bone, you’ll see a dark hill filled with pumpkins, which will light up as your mouse passes over them.

There is also a bare patch of earth with the protruding hands of the undead (which you have to quickly click on before they return underground), a game of hide-and-seek by moonlight with a green ghoul and a house full of ghosts you will have to release, among others.

While there isn’t really an end goal to the games (the doodle keeps on looping and returning to the main section with the cauldron) and you can’t rack up a high score as you could with some of Google’s previous doodles, there is another trick. If you click the search icon, Google will show you the results — not for ‘Halloween’, but for ‘Halloween witch’. It’s rigged the Knowledge Graph panel to the right of the results to give you some tips on defeating the next witch that comes across your path (“throw a pail of water”) and how to avoid them completely (“don’t eat red apples from strangers; hide if you see a flock of flying monkeys”), along with the usual Wikipedia excerpt.

Instead of the usual related searches, it has a “witches also lurch for” section filled with everyone’s favourite Muggleborn, dark felines and um, “broom sales”. You’ll also see the panel if you search for “witch”.