Game Review: Costume Quest

Double Fine Brings Its Quirkiness to the RPG World.

 All Reviews May Contain Spoilers of the Story. Read at Your Own Risk

Costume Quest takes place on Halloween and tells the story of a boy or girl (your choice) that sets out on a quest to save their sibling. There are monsters that have invaded the human world and are trying to steal all the candy. When they go trick or treating, the house they visit has a monster who mistakes the sibling you didn't pick as being a piece of candy and kidnaps them. This thrusts our hero into a quest to rescue his/her sibling, so he/she won't get grounded by the parents.

Costume Quest is the first game from Double Fine after Brutal Legends, it's an old school turn-based RPG game; similar in style of older Final Fantasy titles or the newer Blue Dragon game. This game is very simple to play, and trust me when I say it, this game is basically holding your hand all the way through it. I had no issues with this, having played pretty much every RPG in Square Enix's catalog over my 23 years of life. I enjoyed being able to go back and play a nice and simple RPG game without some convoluted game mechanic. Your team attacks first then the enemies, and as you attack the game will flat out tell you when to hit one of the face buttons to do extra damage. No having to learn exact timing (a la Mario and Luigi series), so for people who may not be too familiar with turn-based RPG's, they can use Costume Quest as a good starter game. In the game you collect costumes to give your character and his companions different abilities from the cool robot costume to the more bizarre unicorn costume. Each one brings a unique ability to the battle and helps keep the battles fresh. In addition to the main quest of the game, each of the 3 areas you visit offer various side quest. From collecting creepy treat cards to bobbing for apples, these quests offer some fun things to do when you don't feel like rescuing your brother/sister.

The visuals of Costume Quest have a great charm to them. It's a very cartoony look which works great for the bizarreness that tends to come from Tim Schafer games. My only really big gripe with the game is that their is absolutely no voice acting of any kind. All the text in the game must be read and is not spoken to you. This isn't a huge problem but I feel that a lot of the comedy can be lost on people, when it's not spoken to them. Games like Grim Fandango and Psychonauts were amazing games because of the great voice acting present in those games. The game does feature some really funny dialogue, I just felt it would of been better with voice acting.

Costume Quest doesn't reinvent the RPG genre in anyway considering some of the games released these days, it does the exact opposite, but that's half the charm of it. At a $15 price tag, it can be kind of a hard sell since the game will last you roughly 5-8 hours, but it can offer a nice calm and simple experience in a world plagued by over-the-top action games. Now get out there and save your brother....or your sister whichever you want.