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Costume Quest is fantastic.

I guess I should be more specific about that, though. Costume Quest is a great idea with mostly solid execution. It’s entertaining and endearing. It’s cute as fuck. It’s simple. It’s fun. I completely got 15 bucks worth of entertainment out of it. If you have any nostalgia for Halloween, it’s probably worth your time to play.

It’s fantastic.

It’s Halloween, and monsters are attempting to steal all the candy in order to appease a gigantic demon. In doing this, they accidentally capture your sibling, who was wearing a Candy Corn costume. Thankfully, due to being “really serious about Halloween,” you, and the friends you get along the way, can transform, using costumes, into awesome heroes, monsters, robots, and so on to battle the evil on the streets!

I personally love the fact that the only explanation given as to why your characters can transform is that they really like Halloween. It fits the setting perfectly. Of course, I’m not surprised that Double Fine had the chops to be subtle in their writing. Comedy writing is one thing they know how to do, and they continue to know how to do it well. Costume Quest has some great dialog. It’s not stand-up-comedy hour, but it is entertaining, appropriate, and will elicit a few laughs over the course of the game. The art and such sets the mood, and sets it perfectly, but it’s the writing that really cements this game and sells it. Basically, if you like the writing in the demo, the game is probably worth your time.

However, like other Double Fine games, it’s not completely there in other areas. The biggest, stupidest thing the game does is not let you save. The game uses an autosave system, but it doesn’t save after every battle. It only saves when you make progress on a quest, or travel between the different areas in the game. You can fight many, many battles in between finding quest items, and find many hidden things around the world besides. If you were to, say, open a chest with a costume part, then quit, you wouldn’t have that costume part when you booted the game up again. It flat-out sucks not being able to stop when you want to because you’d have to redo several fights, and it is a ridiculous oversight not to give the player the option of manual saving, or at least automatically saving after every combat.
Similarly, the combat is a little flawed. Well, okay, it’s not flawed, it’s just extremely simplistic. Each costume can attack, and has a special move that takes three turns to charge. Basically, you just stall with basic attacks until you use your special, and then the battle is over. There are other things you can do, of course. Battle stamps can give you other abilities and change how your basic attack works, for instance. However, those abilities are almost overpowered: the 2-ply TP power is just ridiculous, and basically lets you completely lock down all enemies so they can’t even attack. Most enemies were stun-locked the entire game thanks to my liberal use of this power.
Still, the combat looks cool enough and the game is short enough that it didn’t really bother me. In addition, the game really makes use of what it has for the boss battles: several boss battles required me to change my loadout and pick different costumes. For example, I couldn’t defeat the last boss until I realized I should use the Vampire costume, since its life-drain really helped with my need for healing in that fight. Of course, there’s only about five bosses in the game, but when they come up, it can get a bit tough.

Still, I totally feel like the setting and writing make up for the few mechanical issues in the game. I had a damn good time, and I have no problem recommending this game for $15 dollars. At $10, I would be demanding you pick it up. It is just so much fun, and it’s great to see Halloween getting its due this year. It certainly put me in much more of a Halloween mood, and I’m proud to have made this the second game where I got all the achievement points.