Costume Quest (2010)

Costume Quest is a fun-sized, turn-based RPG centered on Halloweed and trick-or-treating. That makes it perfect end-of-October/beginning-of-November fodder—especially this year, as it was one of Xbox's Games With Gold titles.

The synopsis finds an alien species taking all the candy. Your character's sibling is dressed as a piece of candy corn, so gets misidentified as candy and is snatched. So: Battle bad guys, collect candy, find your sibling.

If you've played more adult-flavored turn-based RPGs, I suspect you'll find the battles here more-or-less a breeze. There's a fairly small number of actual bad guys, with limited powers, so the main difference level-to-level is how hard they hit and how much damage they'll take. I did die a bit early on, as even an easy battle can turn sour if you're missing button pushes and you don't have anyone else on your team (you'll gather two more teammates during the first third-or-so of the game).

Those button presses put Costume Quest in the vein of RPGs like South Park and the Stick of Truth. On your turn in battle, you're not just selecting WHAT you're doing, but hitting a timing button press (or set of presses) to deliver your attack at full power. Not that there's a whole lot of choice, to be honest. You've got a basic attack, a special attack that has a multi-turn cool-down, and maybe a third option depending on how you have your character kitted. There's no health potions, no items, nothing like that. Ease of battle will basically depend on three things: Your ability to consistently hit the right button at the right time (both on attacks and defense), targeting the right opponents (ie, take out healers first!), and how you've kitted your team.

Mostly, leveling up happens in the background. You level up, you gain health, you attack harder. You can't choose to focus more on health or power or whatever; it's automated. What you can choose is your costume (each costume has a different set of attacks and specials) and what sticker you put on your costume. Stickers are little bits of flair that you purchase with the candy you've collected. Some give extra power, some extra defense, some gives you more health at the outset, while others heal you a little bit each turn. Some fill that third option I mentioned above, filling that third slot during your turn in battles. Of course, the farther you get in the game, the stronger the stickers get. And you only get one sticker of each, so you can't put the same sticker on each character—it forces you to develop a bit of a different play style for each. Unfortunately, you can only equip one sticker per character, so you can easily go the entire game without, for example, getting anything in that third battle slot. While you can only use one per teammate, the stickers ARE very helpful. You can feel the difference in battles. Enough so that the idea of trying other stickers feels unnecessary. I ended up just changing stickers when there was an actual upgrade to the one I was using. That is, until the final boss, who wiped the map with my team—at which point i had to sit down and really think about what stickers/costumes would be most effective.

While the battles are fun enough, the real charm to Costume Quest is atmosphere. As someone who never trick-or-treated as a kid (shakes fist at Christian parents worried about satanism), I loved being able to live out my long-awaited fantasy of going door-to-door getting candy. Loved the settings. While the story is a bit lightweight, I also enjoyed tracking that throughout the game, too, particularly the dynamic between the two siblings. And it's a properly-sized game; just meaty enough that you feel like you've played a game, but also recognizes that its assets will start running thin dragged out too long.

If you're looking for a first turn-based RPG for your kids, Costume Quest is a pretty solid option. But if you're like me, just looking to burn some hours in a lightweight turn-based RPG, well, I had a blast.

Costume Quest is a Halloween-themed action/adventure game. During a night of trick-or-treating, twin siblings Reynold & Wren encounter a group of candy-hungry monsters. One of the siblings is kidnapped - being mistaken for a piece of candy, and the other mounts a rescue mission.

In terms of gameplay, the main idea of Costume Quest is that your abilities are determined by your costumes. For example, a robot costume allows you to zip around quickly on roller skates. A ninja costume allows you to sneak around. A spaceman costume comes with a glow-in-the-dark sword that can illuminate dark areas. The same idea carries over to the combat mode, where the characters turn into giant versions of their costumes. Their abilities (offensive/defensive/support) change accordingly as well.

While there are a number of things to find or to do - costumes, quests, mechanics, collectibles and so on - Costume Quest falls apart when it comes to depth. For example, combat mode has a bunch of variables - your costumes themselves, battle stamps that grant abilities, buffs/shields and so on. However, the fight usually comes down to simple beatdown. You keep attacking enemies in a loop until they're all defeated. That's pretty much it. The second major mechanic, trick-or-treating, suffers from the same problem. It's amusing at first to knock on a door and see a monster pop up with some corny dialogue. It's much less amusing when you're forced to do it 20 times in a row. There are also a fair number of collectibles. I managed to get all of them without even knowing how they worked. I think I got a silly costume as a reward, and it had zero effect on my gameplay.

It's a bit of a shame that Costume Quest doesn't know what to do with all of its ideas. It's amusing, clever, and hilarious at times, but those feelings are quickly overtaken by the tedium of doing the same tasks repeatedly with little-to-no variation. Thankfully, the game doesn't stretch long enough to go into grinding territory.