A few months ago I was playing with a
long bubble wand with my niece, and thinking about bubble swords, and
I decided I would play Costume Quest close to Halloween. I was hoping
to recapture some of the magic feeling of Halloween night, dressed up
in a costume all night pretending you're on an adventure in the dark.
And I got that feeling right away since the first costume you get is
a cardboard box robot, which I am proud to say I once
trick-or-treated in.
Costume Quest is a tiny little
turn-based RPG, a format I wasn't sure would work too well. I was
surprised to learn that you can have a great story and interesting
character progression in a small package that only takes a few hours
to play (I would estimate about 5 to beat it and get all the
trophies).
The story involves Halloween night in
a new town for twins Wren and Reynold. You choose one to be your
avatar, and then head out into the night. Monsters kidnap the twin
you aren't playing as, and you soon recruit a few new friends to try
and locate your missing sibling and stop the monsters' nefarious plan
to steal candy. Fortunately, you find that when you engage a monster
in a fight, you become a real-life version of your costume. You also
become Kaiju sized, as do your opponents. That part is strange, but
works quite well, especially since a lot of the costumes are of big
things (giant robot, Statue of Liberty, french-fries....).
The graphics are colorful and
cell-shaded. The human character design is quite reminiscent of
Animal Crossing. The children you see out and about are all in
various costumes that are all simple and look great. Adults are often
comically obese or crazy-skinny, so the whole thing has a pretty
cartoony vibe to it. The environments look fairly good. You'd think
they'd run out of settings that worked for Halloween, but your 3
levels are the suburbs, a mall that is holding Halloween events and
store-by-store trick-or-treating, and a Halloween carnival. A handful
of the graphical assets are not as high-fi or well designed as they
could be, but by and large everything looks good.
The first thing you might notice about
the sound in Costume Quest is that there is no voice acting (beyond a
few grunts and such from monsters here and there) despite the fact
that there is a ton of dialogue. This was off-putting...for about
five seconds. Then I got so caught up in the clever writing and the
flow of the way the text pops in and out during conversations that I
totally dropped this complaint. In fact, I think this is one example
of a game that is better without voice acting. The sound effects are
good for the most part, but maybe a little lacking. The music is
good, with happy-go-lucky spooky music throughout including wavering
organ sounds and Nightmare Before Christmas-ish tunes.
As you go around the levels, you use
the left-stick to control your character. The other members of your
party (up to 2 other characters) follow behind you. There is no
camera control, but it's not needed. Unfortunately, your character
can get stuck on stuff and stop moving, which seems like an
unnecessary glitch. I feel like you should just slide past stuff, not
get caught on it. Cross makes you talk to npc's. Square makes you
swing your candy bucket. You can use this to hit a million different
types of inanimate objects to make candy (the game's currency) come
flying out. Part of the way into the game I discovered that hitting
npc's makes them each say something unique and funny. There are a lot
of kids and adults out and about, and I started hitting them all once
I discovered this. Circle activates your costume's field ability.
Only a few of them have these abilities, and in general they are only
used in a few places to access specific areas. For example, the space
warrior costume's light saber can light up dark areas that are too
spooky to go through otherwise, and the knight's shield can block
falling stuff (such as waterfalls) that block your way. The real
useful one is the robot's roller skates, which let you skate around
quickly. It gives you a very cool kids-wearing-heeleys-at-the-mall
vibe and is super useful for getting around. It's unfortunate that if
you want your lead character to wear other costumes, you often will
want to switch back to the robot when you're not in battle just to
use the skates.
R2 let's you switch costumes quickly
using an equip wheel. This works well for your main character, but
get's a little tricky when you are trying to switch out multiple
characters as each one has their own screen you toggle between. It
would have been easier to have a costume select screen where a
costume can be equipped to a character with the press of a unique
button for each character. This is how battle stamps (abilities and
stat boosts) are equipped, so it's strange that costumes don't
function the same way. Triangle brings up your journal where you can
equip battle stamps, look at your quests, look at collectibles, and
check your stats.
The game has three levels, and in each
you must trick-or-treat at all the houses/stores/carnival tents to
continue to the next. When you knock on a door, a grown-up might
answer and give you candy, or you might interrupt a monster who is
robbing the house's candy and get into a fight. This leads to some
real tension when you knock on a door and the drum roll plays.
In battle, your side always goes
first. Each costume has a regular attack and a special ability that
charges up and can be used on every 3rd turn. Some battle
stamps give you an alternate attack. All of these options pop up in
front of you when it's your turn. You pick one with the press of a
button, and it happens to whichever enemy you have highlighted (you
select this with the arrows). Normal attacks all require some kind of
input to maximize damage, such as tapping a button rapidly, hitting a
button at the correct time on a moving timeline, or simply pressing a
button as it is prompted on screen. You'll do damage if you ignore or
fail at this, but not as much. The button you have to press is
random, so that keeps you on your toes. You similarly can block some
of the damage of enemy attacks by pressing a specific random button
when prompted. Special attacks all have different effects, such as
damaging all enemies, healing the party, giving buffs and de-buffs,
and other cool stuff. It's a shame special attacks don't require different types of inputs, that would be fun. As it is, you just watch them go off like a normal turn-based RPG. Battle stamp abilities usually do some kind of
status effect. Battle stamps are acquired from a shop where you pay
candy, which you get from trick-or-treating and from battles and side
quests. Battles are pretty easy in general, although I had characters
die a handful of times, and even lost a few battles. Once I got
through the first area however, this became pretty rare as I really
got to know how the battles work, although I still lost a character
here and there and had some close calls. Losing means nothing in this
game, you end up right where you were, but the house you were at
hasn't been trick-or-treated or the enemy you engaged hasn't been
defeated. You also never have to heal outside of battle, everyone
gets full health at the start of each fight, which greatly
streamlines the whole game flow.
Battles stay interesting even when you
get really good at the system as you have a constant flow of new
battle stamps and new costumes at your disposal. Each character can
equip one costume and one battle stamp, which leads to an interesting
amount of customization. Although it would be even more customizable
and interesting if you could equip more than one battle stamp or if
it mattered which character wore which costume. I would love it if
the difficulty were cranked up a bit but you could equip 2 or 3
battle stamps as I saw some cool synergies sitting there un-utilized because you can only equip one. Still, you can find some
interesting combinations. I experimented with multiple types of
builds that all worked well in battle and were fun, so I stayed
interested the whole time. It's bad design that in order to see a
costume's effect on your stats, you need to equip it on one screen
and then switch to the stats screen. You also read about it's
abilities on a third screen, so that's pretty annoying and would have
been easily fixed by putting it all in one place.
There is a battle-heavy segment or two
in the game that starts to drag, but they pass. Enemies also keep
things interesting as you encounter new species and classes of bad
guys, and a handful of bosses that do interesting stuff that you need
to try and counteract. I also forgot to mention how cool it is to see
the shabby, home-made costumes transform into huge, awesome versions
of the themselves during each battle. Seeing each new transformation
and new attacks makes you eager to find new costumes and see what's
next. I especially like the Statue of Liberty's patriotic healing
spell.
There are a few other things to do
besides trick-or-treating and fighting. Side quests such as finding
kids who are playing hide and seek and bobbing for apples are fun
diversions and net you extra candy. There are creepy treats cards to
collect and trade for, although you will probably get them all just
from playing normally. These are trading cards in the vein of Garbage
Pail Kids and Wacky Packages: disgusting and funny puns and gags
involving candy. Just like Garbage Pail Kids, these range from delightfully corny to downright disturbing. These are really well done and great fun to look at,
although I really wish you could zoom in and look at them full size
instead of as thumbnails in your journal. Also if you get multiples
of them, a number appears in the corner to indicate how many you
have, but blocks part of the art. Regardless I really enjoyed this
part of the game; it's really kickstarted my interested in the
real-life counterparts to these cards, and really adds to the theme
of kids doing stuff, since kids love that kind of thing in real life
(at least I did, and still do).
As I briefly mentioned, the dialogue
in this game is really good and clever. Everyone has a few
interesting things to say, some of which might make you chuckle out
loud. I suspect that the great writing is the glue that holds this
whole experience together. From the weird things kids say to the
clueless adults and funny references to other media, a lot
of my delight in this game came from eagerness to see what the next
npc would say. And there are tons of npc's.
Costume Quest is short and sweet and
scratched my longing-for-childhood-at-Halloween-time itch pretty darn
good. It's got a few flaws, but is greatly supported by the way it's
cleverly written text dialogue steadily pops up and flows on your
screen, offering constant clever comments in between your mostly fun
battles with lightly customized characters in a cool Halloween
setting. It's a great game, tier 3.
