Seasonal Events

Seasonal Events are scripted events that happen when the system clock is set to a specific date. Events only change the game cosmetically by adding appropriate headwear to all enemies and changing the main menu's music and subtitle. The background images of intermission cutscenes and 2-S: All-Imperfect Love Song are also altered, adding headwear to characters present in them as well.

Notably, these events begin in real-time, rather than on game startup or level start; the moment the system time reaches a valid seasonal date, enemies will begin to spawn with the appropriate headwear.

April Fools'

If the system clock is set to April 1st, the textures of all 3D models in the game will be processed through tri-point filtering, making everything look extremely blurry. This applies to the textures of levels, enemies and the player's weapons.

This texture filtering is what is employed by the Nintendo 64 at hardware level, and is an implementation of bilinear filtering with 3 samples instead of the conventional 4 to save on hardware costs, producing the filter's distinctive triangular shapes as textures appear smeared in one diagonal direction. This implementation is often overlooked by N64 emulators, including Nintendo's own, causing many games whose textures were designed with it in mind to look worse than when rendered on original hardware.

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  1-1: Heart of the Sunrise's opening room as an example of the filter.
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  Filterless image for comparison.

Easter

If the system clock is set from Good Friday to Easter Sunday (calculated every year), all enemies and skulls in the game will wear pink bunny ears.

The main menu's "EARLY ACCESS" text will be replaced with "HAPPY EASTER", as well as its music becoming much faster and overall more cheerful for the duration of the event.

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Halloween

If the system clock is set from October 25th to October 31st, all enemies in the game (and V1) will have a glowing pumpkin placed on their head (or whatever equivalent of a head they have). Skulls will also be replaced with pumpkins, although their functionality will remain the same. Due to the glow that pumpkins emit, dark levels such as 0-S: Something Wicked or 4-3: A Shot in the Dark will become much easier.

The main menu's "EARLY ACCESS" text will be replaced with "HAPPY HALLOWEEN", as well as its music being played by spooky organs.

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Christmas

If the system clock is set from December 22nd, 12:12 AM to December 28th, all enemies and skulls in the game (and V1) will wear red Santa hats.

The main menu's "EARLY ACCESS" text will be replaced with "MERRY CHRISTMAS", as well as its music getting additional Christmas cheer in its instrumentation with bell instruments.

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Trivia

• The first year of the Christmas event did not have its seasonal main menu music due to time constraints.
• The April Fool's N64 tri-point texture filter was added to the game with the Violence update and went largely undetected until the next April Fool's Day. Lead 3D artist Victoria Holland "love[s] the look of it unironically" and convinced Hakita to let her add it.
• The April Fools seasonal event was first teased alongside Ghost Drones in an April Fool's development update, where development was "successfully moved over to 'GZUltrakill' for higher texture fidelity." GZUltrakill is a nod to GZDoom, a Doom source port. GZDoom has bilinear filtering on by default, causing textures and sprites to appear extremely blurry until the setting is switched off.