Costume Quest

                                                                       
 

 

                                                                       

Costume Quest Review

Remember when you were a kid on Halloween? You got to go out late at night, get lots of candy, but more importantly, dress up in your favorite costume. This is but the basis of Costume Quest, one of the best Halloween games I’ve ever played. By the time you reach the end, you’ll be begging for just one more area to trick or treat.

 

Story-

Costume Quest is about a pair of twins named Wren and Reynold, Wren being a girl and Reynold being a boy. These twins are at each other’s neck on who will be the leader this year for Halloween. While you get to decide who you play as, Wren or Reynold, the overall story remains the same throughout the game. Since they are new to the neighborhood, they don’t know anybody in town and are left by themselves. You’re given a Robot Costume while your sibling is given a horrible Candy Corn Costume. The first house you go trick or treating at gives you nothing since they just hate the Candy Corn Costume. Thus you stay behind at the next house being afraid to be seen with your siblings’ horrible costume. It just so happens the next house has been taken over by monsters and they kidnap your sibling mistaking him/her for a giant piece of candy. Your job is to rescue your brother/sister so you won’t get grounded by your parents.

This is the overall premise of the game. You keep going deeper and deeper into town, discovering a total of 2 locations other than your own suburb to trick or treat at. You find new friends, meet new enemies and create new costumes. If you just want to rush the main story, you’re looking at roughly 3 hours of gameplay time. But if you’re like me, and you like to collect all the extra’s, gain all the costumes, and find all the hiding kids, you’re looking at a 5-6 hour game.
 

Gameplay-

Like any RPG, your set into 2 different modes, exploration and battle mode. In exploration mode, the costumes you find give you special abilities such as increasing speed, shielding rocks/water from above, and lighting your way through dark areas. Also, you are given several different quests to accomplish. These range from finding kids playing hide and seek, beating all the bobbing for apple levels, trading special trading cards with other trick or treaters, or going to every house trick or treating. There’s a LOT to do, and each quest is different than the last, with a lot of exploration. When visiting the areas of your suburb you will encounter different kids that ally with you and join your party, they help extremely in battle. When you go to any house and trick or treat, you knock on the door and have a 50/50 chance of encountering a regular person who gives you lots of candy, or you encounter a monster. These monsters are stealing all the candy in your town and definitely want yours. This is where Battle Mode begins.

In Battle Mode, your costumes you create take on a life of their own. Your simple robot costumes becomes a high tech robot killing machine, Your knight costume transforms into a valiant knight ready to do battle, and so forth. Battles consist of turn based fighting style, like any familiar RPG does. You have a basic attack, and a special attack that needs to charge up. After every attack your special meter charges and after roughly 2 turns, you’re ready to unleash it. These special abilities range from devastating attacks, healing your allies, or stunning your opponents. After every battle your health recharges to full, so you don’t need to worry about healing items or anything like that. Battles normally take around 2-3 minutes ranging from what kind of monsters you’re faced with. These can be Monsters that just attack back with clubs, mages that can do a lot of damage, and healers. You will need a good strategy to take down these monsters, simply pressing X or A will not cover it. For every attack you do, you’re given a button prompt. Either press this specific button when a marker reaches a point, rapidly press a button, or just press it when prompted. These can be quite tricky if you’re not paying attention. This gives battles more excitement as opposed to just pressing the same button over and over to attack. Defending from enemies also has button prompts as well. Although the battles are enjoyable at first, towards the end of the game they tend to get a little repetitive.

After each battle you gain XP and Candy. XP gradually increasing till you reach the next level, in which you level stats automatically. Candy on the other hand can be used to purchase different enhancements towards your costumes. In each town you encounter a “shop” that sells something called “battle stamps”. These battle stamps add special properties to your costumes. Such as increasing your health, doing more critical damage, or causing splash damage to all enemies. You can equip one battle stamp to yourself as well as each of your companions.
 

Sound & Graphics -

The music to this game is incredibly well done. Each area has its own special theme that matches the design well. The battle music is really good as well. It’s not too loopy and it’s not too long. As for sounds that happen in the game, they are done pretty well also. Smashing pumpkins sounds like….well smashing pumpkins. Many battle sounds are repeated though which is a little disappointing. Having a couple more variations instead of the same “smack” sound would have been a nice touch.

I’m going to let you know right now that there is absolutely no voice acting at all in this game. From start to finish, all conversations are placed in text format. This isn’t so bad considering some jokes are best told through text. But even on my HD 1080p TV, I had to squint my eyes to actually read what they were saying. Words were definitely WAYYYY too small. Upping the font size would be greatly appreciated. Textures looks really well detailed although the characters remind me like their models were based off Animal Crossing characters. Pumpkins glow, and the lighting is done in such a way where dark places look extremely dark, and street lights looks very illuminant. It’s hard to go into specifics here since the game only has a few graphical areas such as the objects, characters, and backgrounds, all of which look really well put together.

Presentation-

The game screams Halloween, from the title screen to the end credits; you’ll definitely find it to be very Halloweeny. Which is a very good thing, I’ve seen too many “Halloween games” go from Halloween to something completely different halfway through. It’s a nice refresher to see a game know what it’s doing, and doing it very well. There are nice touches such as spider webs hanging from ceilings, to pumpkins literally all over the place. Virtually everyone is wearing a costume, and candy is dropped all over just waiting for you to pick it up.

If you love Halloween, this is definitely a game for you. They put so much effort into making it look like Halloween, that by the time I played it I actually THOUGHT it was Halloween. Although there are no spooky houses to explore, there are some scary graveyards that just beg to be explored. Every inch is covered in something that looks like a Halloween decoration, and decorations you would expect to see are blown completely out of proportion to be even cooler than they would originally.
 

Final Thoughts-

Costume Quest isn’t a game that’s like Halloween, it’s a game that IS Halloween. It’ll have the inner kid jumping for joy, and begging for more candy .There are plenty to explore and plenty to see, and PLENTY of battles to be had. Double Fine certainly outdone themselves with this game. Although there are shortcomings such as almost everything from battles, to sound being repetitive, and being a little on the short side while another area would have been nice. Costume Quest is pretty short, but oh so sweet. With almost no tricks in sight, it’s a big wonderful treat. There are really fun times to be had, and will be had once you pass the title screen.