This was originally posted on the now-defunct Random Fury! videogame blog.
The premise behind Costume Quest is bewitchingly simple: Kids dress up in Halloween costumes which then become hyper-realistic in combat scenarios. For example, one of the costumes is a blue robot. When roaming around the overworld, it appears to be made from a cardboard box, tinfoil and roller-skates – But get into a fight and it becomes a giant stereotypical anime robot that can propel its own fists at an opponent and fire twenty missiles out of its chest all at once. Why would you be fighting though? And who are you fighting? Well, depending on which of two siblings you have decided to play as, the other one dresses up like candy and gets kidnapped by monsters from another dimension who are fixated on stealing all our worlds sweets – and of course you have to go and rescue them. I must say, they picked a great day to invade – Halloween – as there is usually an over-abundance of candy during this time of year, and due to the amount of scary costumes about, monsters are more likely to be able to move around undetected.
The best way to root out monsters is quickly identified as Trick or Treating – I love how they included this aspect of real life into the gameplay. Knock on a door and it’ll either be a person who will give you all their candy, or a monster who is ransacking the house looking for candy – and now he’s been disturbed, he wants a fight. Combat in Costume Quest is simple – you have one button to attack, and this comes with a mini-QTE that boosts damage. You also have a special attack which needs three turns to charge itself up, and each costume has a different special effect. Some are attacks that damage all your opponents, some inflict massive damage on a single enemy, and some hide, heal, revive or add protective barriers to your team-mates. There are just enough tactical decisions to be made in the battles to keep them from being tedious, such as taking out the enemy healer first, and they rarely drag on for more than the time it takes to charge up your special move, which in the case of the robot’s multi-missile attack, usually finishes things off nicely.
Trick or Treating all the houses unlocks the second half of a level, giving you more scope for things like completing quests for people, finding children who are playing hide and seek, buying Battle Stamps (which are essentially perks you can assign one at a time to each character, offering things like damage boosts, regenerating health, splash damage and poison effects), gathering instructions and materials for new costumes, and just generally saving the day! Most costumes have abilities in the overworld that help with both traversal and puzzle-solving. For example, the robot has roller-skates which increase movement speed, the space ranger has a glow-stick which lights up dark areas and the knight’s shield can protect you from falling debris. Even the humble fetch-quest is enlivened by the costume mechanics – bring a French Fry vendor three new customers, Pied Piper-style, by wearing a French Fry costume that looks suspiciously like something from McDonalds, and activating that lovely, hot, salty, greasy French Fry smell near them to make them peckish.
I had to ask myself how much of the game was actually happening though, and how much of it is thanks to an over-dose of sugar and an over-active imagination. These three kids activate morphin’ time and become large enough to crush a diner under their foot at least 100 times in one evening and not one adult comments on it? It can’t be a coincidence that the main bad gal and her do-gooder brother look just like your parents. The whole game may well be an imaginary scenario, shared between the children, and egged on by their parents, but that is not a bad thing. Sometimes I long for days of old when my brother and I could while away hours by making up storylines for why his Alien figure was teaming up with Cobra and invading the Action Force oil rig, which was being defended by Lion-O and Optimus Prime.
It’s like developers Double Fine took the greatest of all-time 60+ hour RPG, boiled it down to its bare bones, then dressed it up in a Halloween outfit. That’s not to say it has been dumbed down – Costume Quest is a streamlined and competent role-player which jettisons padding and does away with the grind in favour of characterisation, tonnes of charm and a memorable storyline. That it can be finished in 6-8 hours is utterly irrelevant as it packs more fun and imagination into its short playtime than most modern role playing games do.
You can buy this superb game digitally for your Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or PC – I was writing about the Xbox 360 version which, in the name of full disclosure, I paid for myself.
