Double Fine games are pretty famous. They made the widely, and wildly acclaimed Psychonauts. Costume Quest opens on a Halloween evening in what can be assumed to be a friendly American town. You’re introduced as a couple of kids, wandering out trick or treating.
That’s when it all changes. The second house you knock on the door in search of Candy ends up with some ogre kidnapping your sibling and throwing them over a tall fence. This results your costume you into a literal towering mech, to fight the terrors that kidnapped said sibling.
Combat is timing based, as you then start to explore a bleaker all hallows eve, where you’ve lost your sibling. It isn’t long before you make a friend and start bashing everything in sight with a paper bag in search of candy.
Here’s where the game turns into a typical fetch-quest RPG with costumes dictating your abilities, and “battle stamps” augmenting these abilities with extra stats, or special effects that you can use to devastate the enemy forces, which aren’t entirely explained.
This is a playful game about the horrors of Halloween, and the imagination of a child. I never experienced Halloween as a child, and arguably; had no such imagination beyond the most horrific disaster awaiting us all – the heat death of the universe.
Existential dilemmas aside, there’s a whole bunch of stuff to do in Costume Quest, with the titular quests coming through thick and fast – trick or treat houses, make more robust costumes, collect tons of candy, Candy doubles as the in-game currency to exchange for things.
Somehow, all of this is strangely charming and extremely compelling – and very addictive. This is a game you can not only enjoy as an adult, but probably, also, as a child. It is simple, challenging, and I have to say it again – charming. It really is very good, and that’s a refreshing change from what I’ve become used to so far as I’ve delved into the realms of my Steam library.
Pick this one up if you can, and you haven’t already, and have a spare afternoon and an evening to journey through the imaginations of Double Fine – it is worth your time, if only to learn how to make an uninteresting scenario (Trick or Treating on Halloween) into an interesting, imaginative game. While the mechanics aren’t deep, there’s a certain sense of joy you obtain by defeating monsters, timing your attacks correctly, and bashing things around with a pail full of candy.
