Short, but sweet treat
Costume Quest is a delightful holiday themed RPG from Double Fine, the fine developers of Psychonauts and Brutal Legend.
You start the game out getting ready to trick or treat with your twin sibling when all of a sudden your brother or sister gets kidnapped by monsters and its your job to rescue your twin. You'll knock on doors, battle monsters in turn based battles, and gain new costumes as you progress through the story.
The game is graphically impressive for a download title, while roaming around the game may not technically look that impressive the cel-shaded graphics do the job well. There's a great amount of attention to detail though, you can tell that the devs put a ton of work in creating the world and all of the Halloween decorations in it. (there is one exception though which is a hedge maze section of the game) The graphics during the battle sequences are quite different from the main game. They are far more impressive on a technical level and watching each costumes abilities in combat is a blast, the animations are very good. I found myself always looking forward to seeing what my new costume would do in combat. The best is when you use the Statue of Liberty's special which flashes patriotic imagery on the screen with an eagle and Abe Lincoln.
While you'll recruit 2 party members along the way to help you. The costumes themselves however, are the real stars of this game. There's quite a few of them and they are quite varied from vampires, to black cats to a french fry monster. The way the costumes vary on abilities is very similar to a class system you might find in other RPGs. Each costume only has one special ability and one normal attack but this can be augmented somewhat with the battle stamp system. Each character can equip one battle stamp which will give different benefits like adding DOT's to your normal attacks, stun attacks, etc.
The one thing I would have loved for this game to have is voiceovers. While the music is good and helps build the mood and the charm it's just a real shame Double Fine did not include voice overs. I understand this is not a full budget game like Psychonauts or Brutal Legend but it still would have been nice to have.
While the game is catered to a younger audience there's still a decent amount of challenge to it. You will die on boss fights if you take the wrong the combination of costumes into a battle or if you miss a few QTE's. Some people might be turned off by the games length as it will probably only take most people about 6-7 hours to finish it. I finished around that time and I also got all the costumes and did all the achievements. As far as replay value, there pretty much is none unless you wanted to go through the main game again for fun.
Overall Costume Quest is a charming, cute, great game. If your willing to look past the games length and replay value you'll have a awesome time with the game.
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