Halloween is my favorite holiday. It's also my birthday, but truthfully my love for the day, and the overall season, goes well beyond it being my birthday. I have always loved this time of year. The intense Florida heat and humidity starts to ease off, as suddenly mornings and evenings are actually quite pleasant outside. The sky gets this indescribable golden hue, where the afternoons just suddenly feel different. A local church is selling thousands of pumpkins, as they do every year. The spooky decorations start to appear in yards and stores here and there, and the Spirit Halloween that has been haunting our nearby shuttered Staples for many years suddenly re-materializes - and just like that, all is well in the world for a few weeks. Autumn is here and Halloween is near.
Needless to say, my birthday being on Halloween naturally led to every single birthday party being a costume party in my younger years. Several consecutive birthdays were spent in an awesome costume, pounding the pavement in my best friend's newly established upper middle class neighborhood, harvesting the year's delicious candy and treats. As with all people, you hit that age where you find yourself suddenly too old for trick-or-treating, at least until you're of the age that you can take your own children to make their Halloween memories. So imagine my delight when I learned that there's a very cute and cozy video game series all about trick-or-treating; and there's a slight trick to this treat, as Costume Quest, is surprisingly a turn-based RPG series. No wait! Come back you supposed hater of the turn-based RPG, you need to try this one!
Costume Quest and Costume Quest 2 are jolly, adorable games. Developed by Double Fine Productions, the studio behind Psychonauts and Brütal Legend, the original Costume Quest released in 2010 and its sequel in 2014. Both games follow the adventures of twin siblings, Reynold and Wren, as they explore their town and neighborhood, make friends, battle monsters and most importantly - trick or treat. The story isn't particularly deep, and neither is the gameplay, but I'd argue that isn't what the games were even going for. They're both short, sweet, wholesome RPGs that aren't necessarily trying to break the mold, but that is novel in and of itself. How many turn-based RPGs can you think of that are under ten hours in length? The average RPG seems to be somewhere around forty hours, which keeps me from playing many of them, with my extremely limited free time. And in regards to Costume Quest's wholesomeness, I could easily play a game like this with my child and not be afraid of any violent or suggestive content suddenly appearing on screen. The same could not be said for Persona or Final Fantasy, or many other similar franchises. In an era of excess across basically every facet of our lives, I've come to appreciate easily digestible, succinct stories that don't try to push the envelope anywhere.
Story wise, I won't spoil the little bit of story there is, as it does reach a surprisingly grand scale, involving inter-dimensional travel, time travel and those kinds of sci-fi elements. The first game basically just focuses on Wren and Reynold exploring their neighborhood and a nearby small town. They meet more trick-or-treaters who join their party and the brief story revolves around this party trying to rescue a kidnapped child from monsters who have descended on their town. The second game is entirely about time travel. The children must travel to the past, present and future and try to save their town from a dystopian future. Comically, the villain of Costume Quest 2 is a dentist, which is perfect for a Halloween-themed game all about children and candy.
On the gameplay front, like I said earlier, the series functions as a turn-based RPG. You walk around the map interacting with neighbors and townsfolk, collecting candy and costume pieces, completing short quests and battling monsters. The combat, while being a straightforward RPG, is visually pretty novel, as both the children and the monsters become kaiju sized, and your cheap looking, rinky-dink costume morphs into a proper, professional looking outfit. I like to imagine that this is what the children are picturing the battle looking like. They probably think their costumes look perfect and awesome, and the battle that they're partaking in is of dire importance. The myriad costumes that you wear come with bespoke themed abilities for you to use in combat, which adds an additional layer of fun and intrigue to finding all of the pieces of a new costume for you to use in battle.
The last thing that I wanted to briefly touch on, regarding the Costume Quest franchise, is the cartoon series that premiered on Amazon Prime several years ago. I'm not a huge fan of this art style. It's ugly, and looks like far too many other cartoons from the last several years, but I do think that this franchise is perfect for a cartoon series. It's wacky and creative, and the show seems to re-imagine the world of the games, rather than just adapt the plot we are already familiar with; which is exciting if you like Costume Quest, because it's ultimately just more, original stories set in this world. Beyond the art style, the only other truly disappointing element of the cartoon series is that this didn't come out in the era of Saturday morning cartoons. I could so easily imagine being addicted to a show like this if it aired on Fox Kids in the late 1990s or early 2000s. It just feels like the perfect concept for waking up early on a Saturday morning, fixing yourself a bowl of sugary cereal and watching this before you go outside and re-enact the events of the show with your friends. Alas, I will always mourn you, Saturday morning cartoons. You were too good for this world.
This wasn't going to be some full review of the two games or the cartoon, though I could maybe do that in the future. I merely wanted to shine a light on a franchise that has unfortunately become almost entirely forgotten. I highly recommend that you check out at least one of these games this Halloween season. Like I stated earlier, they're very short games, and not particularly expensive on Steam. For some reason, they aren't available on Nintendo Switch, where I feel like they would be an absolutely perfect fit. They are very endearing, charming experiences, and I'm bummed that Double Fine never revisited the series again. I think there's absolutely room to do a 10-15 hour Costume Quest 3 in a larger town with more quests, party members, costumes, etc. Who knows if we'll ever see a new game in the franchise. I hope Costume Quest sounds as cool to you as it did for me all those years ago, when I first played it. I think if you do decide to check the games out, you're in for quite the treat.
P.S. It looks like there's also a one-off Costume Quest graphic novel called Costume Quest: Invasion of the Candy Snatchers. I have not heard if it's any good, but the writer of it is who went on to make the cartoon series, so I assume Double Fine liked his work enough to pursue that larger endeavor with him. It could be worth checking out.
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