Sucker Punch

a Costume Quest review

OOOOoooooo… …ooooOOOOOoooo… …ooooOOOOOOOOOO!

(Those are, um, supposed to be ghost sounds.)

This post is a special Halloween post in a series called… Reviews You Can’t Use!

(Lightning strikes close, and thunder rumbles through the hall. A horse whinnys in the distance.)

…in which your host for the evening brings an old game…

(A pause. Suddenly, with spooky vibrato…)

Back from the dead!

(Organ hit.)

And then tells you whether it’s good or not! But along the way, he is… haunted. Haunted by a series of tangents and stylistic flourishes that, while entertaining, ultimately detract from the clarity and the supposed purpose of the post! Can he resist them? Will his review find the spark of life it requires? It is not for us mere mortals to know in advance, but if you ask me, I’d say it looks… pretty grim! Ahahahahaha! HAHAHAhahahahaha!

(Evil laughter continues as camera pans up and out.)

Holiday-themed games are hard to come by. In recent years, holiday-themed DLC and patches have risen in popularity, and Steam has risen the profile of holidays in the minds of gamers, but the fact remains that it’s hard to find a game that is totally, explicitly tied to a holiday. Holiday-themed movies are a thing. Holiday-themed albums are, too. But video games? Not as much. I can see a few potential reasons for this. Video games traditionally lack a time-limited release channel (excepting the failed Satellaview). Video games frequently sell themselves with the promise of replay value. And, of course, there’s the fact that video games are a relatively punishing, unprofitable industry that rewards experimentation even less than other media. Whatever the reason, this makes Costume Quest, a game unabashedly about Halloween, a rarity.

Costume Quest is a production of Double Fine, the famously irreverent game studio that also gave us Stacking. In it, you play Wren or Reynold (depending on the gender you choose), a young child on a quest on Halloween night to rescue his or her twin (the one you didn’t pick) from a squad of otherworldly goons that have kidnapped him or her and have stolen all of the candy from the twins’ neighborhood. Costume Quest is an RPG, with a simple but flexible battle system that feels something like a combination of Super Mario RPG and the first two episodes of Penny Arcade’s On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. The actions your character can take in battle are chiefly dictated by the costume (s)he is wearing, which will set the fighter’s attack/defense stats and special ability. For instance, the robot costume has high attack and a special ability that fires a salvo of missiles that damages all enemies. The knight costume has high defense and a special ability that shields an ally from attack. In addition to the costume, you can equip each character with a “battle stamp”, which will either raise one of that character’s stats, grant another special ability, or add another special effect like causing the character to counterattack when struck or poisoning the enemies that they attack. Battles are fully turn-based but feature quick-time events that boost your damage in the style of Paper Mario.

This is, however, the extent of the complexity in Costume Quest’s battle system. Beyond that, its combat is simple for an RPG, perhaps aggressively so. On a turn, you can use a basic attack, your costume ability (if it has charged, which takes three turns), or your stamp ability, if your stamp has one. There isn’t even an option to defend! Each character has their own HP stat, but there is no concept of MP or FP or SP, and abilities are free to use unless they need to recharge. There are no “inns” or “potions” in Costume Quest, and everyone’s health is restored at the end of each battle. The entire party levels up at once, and it happens fully automatically. Put another way, there are only two decisions you ever need to or indeed can make about what abilities your party will have in battle: which costumes to wear and which stamps to equip.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. As someone with a tendency to agonize over decisions that don’t warrant it, this was somewhat liberating. Optimizing your team happens on a scale of 3–5 minutes, not 20–30. Nonetheless, if you are craving a robust and detailed combat system that lets you mix and match dozens of abilities and classes of characters until you craft a uniquely powerful team, you’ll be disappointed. If you like developing a character’s unique traits over time and watching them mature into the ultimate thief/mage/swordsperson, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re in the mood for a well-done and occasionally mocking implementation of the classic RPG style, you’ll have fun. There’s still room to experiment within the relatively narrow confines of Costume Quest combat.

Like most Double Fine games, Costume Quest has an irreverent lilt and a distinctive art style. It’s cel shaded and has the kind of jagged black edges on its textures that makes everything look like a cartoon. Like Toon Link, most of the characters have big heads with expressive eyes that convey emotion in the place of voice acting. Two features of the art style stood out to me as unique and enjoyable. First, children and adults are drawn in very different and very idiomatic styles. Children have big heads with big eyes on tiny bodies, and adults have normal-sized heads on either a very lanky or a very rotund body. It reminded me of a time in childhood that I think most of us go through, where adults seem very large, odd, and sort of indistinguishable from one another. It also nicely emphasizes how much the children are the driver of the story. The second feature that made an impression on me was the silly/serious dichotomy that exists between the out-of-battle and in-battle contexts. Outside of battle, characters are squat and cartoonish, and you can see that your robot costume is made out of cardboard boxes and your friend’s Statue of Liberty costume uses a feather duster for torch. In battle, your character appears as a giant and fearsome battle robot in the vein of Transformers or Voltron, the Statue of Liberty’s torch is real and flaming, and your enemies become more muscular and fearsome. It’s a loving paean to childhood imagination, and a bit amusing, to boot.

The plot of Costume Quest is non-serious, and even though it’s a Halloween game, it’s not going to scare you. Even in the heat of battle, ridiculous things can happen, like an onion appearing out of nowhere and getting sliced by a floating knife in order to make your party member dressed as a floating eye use a crying attack. Friends and enemies alike are sarcastic regardless of the stakes at hand, and both of you will be majorly inconvenienced by mundane things for comedic effect. At one point, you even leave a voicemail for the evil, arcane creature you’re fighting. It’s that kind of game. The text is totally kid-safe, although a kid probably won’t get all of the jokes. There are definitely a few double entendres hiding. All in all, it’s a funny game. Not profound, not scary, and not really hilarious, either. Just funny.

Finally, I must always mention the music. The score to Costume Quest sets an appropriate scene, blending traditional “spooky” Halloween instrumentation with a manic, dramatic style that complements the cartoonish style of the game and the sarcasm of its story. It is very obviously computer-generated. I will not remember the music from Costume Quest in any special way, but not all music needs to be remembered that way. It serves its purpose well.

All in all, Costume Quest is a pretty good game. It does not blaze a trail or perfect an art, but it’s pretty good. It’s definitely the best Halloween game I’ve played.

Final Score: OCT 31 / DEC 31