Trick-or-treating RPG
They venture out into the neighbourhood and soon come across a candy-hunting goblin creature who mistakes your sibling for candy, and so kidnaps them. Your task is a rescue mission but to open the goblin gates which are blocking you, you must first clear the town of candy, so time for trick-or-treating.
Costume Quest is an RPG, but there are no random encounters. Initially, battles are only found when knocking on houses, but when you get to the goblin camps, you see them walking around and engage them by walking into them.
In battle mode, your kids transform Power-Ranger style into a larger, real version of their costume. So the robot costume ends up looking like the Power Ranger's Megazord. There are all sorts of costumes you find during the game; vampire, knight, jack o'lantern, Statue of Liberty, french fries. The battles are simplistic which means it is accessible to newcomers to the genre. You only have a choice out of the basic attack and special attack. The special attacks charge after a few turns and each costume has a different attack, either dealing large damage, or assisting your team defensively. The basic attacks need some sort of interaction and the game is pretty lenient with the timings. This can either be timing a button press, moving the control stick, or hitting a button repeatedly, which varies depending on the costume. When defending, you need to press a button to reduce the damage dealt to your party, so it all feels like the Mario & Luigi series. Initially, when you have only 2 characters, the battles can be quite hard, especially when you fail to block a move since they can take you down in a couple of hits. Once you meet your third character, then it makes it much easier since you are dealing more damage, and the opponents have more people to target, thus spreading the damage. Even though the battle system is stripped down, it does work very well. You don't have to keep a stock of potions, because you can't use items in battle, and your health resets after each battle. This is a good thing, because it is less fiddly, keeps the battles flowing, and you can focus on the strategy for individual battles. By defeating enemies, you gain experience which levels you up, find collectable cards, and awarded some extra candy.
Candy can also be found on the floor or hidden in various objects around the map. Candy can be spent on stamps which add extra properties to battle such as more HP, extra damage, extra defence, poison attack, chance of dodging attacks etc. Only one of these can be equipped per character, but it would have been nice to be able to equip two to enable more strategy and customisation.
As expected, there are a few quests scattered around too; hide and seek games, apple bobbing mini-game, and kids asking for cards to trade. To navigate around the map, sometimes you need to switch your main character's costume to gain access to an ability. The robot has roller skates which allow you to travel on ramps, the knight has a shield to block falling rocks, spaceman has a glow-stick to light up the darkness.
Graphically, Costume Quest is very impressive with sharp, charming cartoon graphics, The children are cute, seeming a cross between cel-shaded Link, and Animal Crossing's Villager. It's a shame there's no voice acting, because it would have added extra charm and more entertainment.
At around five hours in length, it's a bit on the short side for an RPG but you could say it has hit a gap in the market, given that RPGs can often rack up 20-30 hours of your time. The idea/theme is certainly interesting and the simplicity of the game is it's strong point, although might not please everyone.