Double Fine's Latest Isn't A Trick

     As I played through the back-half of Double Fine’s latest, Costume Quest, the first in their new initiative to sell smaller, more focused titles, I couldn’t help but feel that Double Fine had finally found its place in the gaming world. For years now Double Fine has been at the forefront of blending humor, in the form of incredibly sharp writing, and imaginative worlds into games that were often lauded for their storytelling, but criticized for their gameplay. They’ve also been on many a list of “Games that didn’t sell well, but should have.”, which brings us to what I consider the perfect fit for the quirky game studio: Costume Quest. This downloadable title for XBLA and PSN does what their previous two games (Brütal Legend and Psychonauts) weren’t able to, which is to create a clever, well-thought out game that doesn’t fall under its own weight when it requires the player to actually play it.

    Costume Quest’s premise is simple; you are a boy or girl on Halloween night ready to trick-or-treat with your younger sibling (Much to the chagrin of your character) when he or she is taken from you by a band of candy-stealing monsters, mistaking his or her Candy Corn costume for being a giant piece of actual Candy Corn. You then proceed to knock on doors, trick-or-treating your way through multiple levels to get her back, bringing other trick-or-treaters with you along the way. The original premise is not wasted on its gameplay fortunately. While Costume Quest is a somewhat simple turn-based RPG with basic timing-based button prompts, it features a fairly deep job system in the form of costumes.

    

Costumes are found throughout each of the game’s three different “neighborhoods”, each bestowing the player with different abilities in, and out of battle. For example, your starting robot costume has a special missile ability which damages all enemies on screen, but also features skates when outside of combat for you to zip around on or to jump off of ramps with. Another example of the game’s 9 or so costumes is the Knight, which features a shield ability, which blocks incoming attacks for a turn, and helps you walk under falling debris or water to get to hidden areas. Not all costumes are particularly useful, but for the most part their imaginative designs and fun special abilities provides a good carrot-on-a-stick for the player.
    
    Further expanding upon its RPG roots is the fairly intricate Battle Stamp system. Throughout your adventures, you’ll come across the young entrepreneur Sadie, complete with lemonade stand (Ala Lucy from Peanuts), except instead of serving cool refreshments, she serves up special augmenting abilities in the form of collectible stamps. You can equip one of these stamps to each of your characters, and their abilities range from a simple counter-attack upon being hit to the “Egg on your Face”, stun ability, to the highly useful splash-damage stamp which also has a chance of poisoning those enemies. It’s a fairly intuitive system that encourages experimentation, both due to the number of stamp combinations in a party, but also because Costume Quest isn’t a very difficult game, and so your risk of a “bad” stamp combination is fairly minor.

  

  The game’s difficulty was actually the only thing I found annoying while playing through its 3-4 hour campaign, as it ranges from fairly easy to mind-numbingly simple to pseudo auto-pilot. But of course, this complaint shouldn’t be much of a surprise; Costume Quest is clearly aimed at a younger audience than the 19-year old college student demographic, with its whimsical art style, its fairly simple game mechanics and the obvious Halloween theme itself. For me, these were all clearly intended as a precision airstrike on the pleasure centers in my brain, bringing back fond memories of dressing up as a child, in search for candy out on the cold streets of downtown Boise, ID.

    But regardless of your childhood memories of the ween of Hallow, Costume Quest is, at its core, fun. Its writing is sharp in much the same way the writing in Peanuts is; it’s a fantastic looking game, with an imaginative art style that perfectly captures a child’s version of Halloween night. The music is also very good, replicating the fun and whimsy of Halloween in its main theme. If I had to complain about one aspect of its presentation, it’s that Costume Quest is an oddly silent game, mainly due to the total lack of VO. All of the dialogue in the game is presented in word bubble form and that’s about all you get. It would’ve been nice for all of the kids to at least talk in Legend of Zelda/Animal Crossing speak, or something similar along those lines. After about half an hour though, I quickly stopped noticing and had gotten used to its simplistic story presentation.

    

In closing, your enjoyment of Costume Quest will more than likely depend on one of three things. Either you’re a young kid who loves Halloween and always fantasized about becoming the thing your costume represents, fending off hordes of monsters with your friends in search for more candy; you’re much older and remember the “good’ol days” of trick-or-treating in your neighborhood when the candy was “good”; or you’re just looking for a fairly low-key, tight game experience that’ll leave you with a warm feeling hours after putting the controller down. Double Fine has crafted an excellent title in Costume Quest, that doesn’t outstay its welcome, while bringing together some of the finest work the studio has ever created.