Review: Costume Quest 2

Wren and Reynold return for more Halloween fun

The original Costume Quest was a seminal game for Double Fine; it was the first game to come out of Amnesia Fortnight, a two-week period of experimenting with small-scale games. Costume Quest‘s success led the way for Stacking, Iron Brigade, and other download-only games. 

Now, Costume Quest 2 is here just a few weeks before Halloween and it’s delivering the same fun as the original. It may be a little too similar in some spots, but there are plenty of improvements to satisfy fans.

Costume Quest 2 (PC [reviewed], Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Wii U)
Developer: Double Fine
Publisher: Majesco, Midnight City
MSRP: $14.99/£10.99
Release Date: October 7, 2014

Costume Quest 2 begins right at the end of the DLC pack for the original game, Grubbins on Ice. Siblings Wren and Reynold, along with their friends Everett and Lucy, have found themselves in a limbo world with numerous trans-dimensional portals.

Thankfully, they’re able to get back home, but only to find themselves as the protectors of Halloween against a new enemy. Who could hate Halloween so much? Why the devilish dentist Orel White, who uses time travel to free the monsters from Repugnia and wipe Halloween and candy from the face of the Earth.

There’s plenty of fun to be had with the time-travel plot; it’s amusing to see Everett and Lucy all grown up and in the second third of the game, their daughter will team up with Wren and Reynold. You’ll find lots of kids in the past who you meet in the future and it’s entertaining to see how they have turned out, whether they achieved their hopes and dreams or whether everything went wrong. Don’t expect too many head-scratching moments due to time travel — it’s a fairly linear game that you could play with kids and they wouldn’t find it confusing to follow. This is still a light, fluffy, colorful series.

Costume Quest 2 follows the same structure as its predecessor: there’s a series of neighborhoods where your team of three party members can go trick or treating and at each house you can either get a neighbor dishing out candy or a monster encounter which leads to a turn-based battle.

There are tweaks to the battle system this time around which make it a fresher experience. Now, each enemy has a class — either monster, magic, or tech — and the costumes your party wear will be stronger and weaker against those classes. So for instance, the superhero is strong against wizards but weak against tech, meaning you’ll inflict more damage against magic users but take greater damage against tech enemies.

Like the first game, each costume has its own special ability either offensively or defensively and some even have abilities that you can be used outside of battles. This time however, those battle abilities are tied to a progress bar that will move on with each successful attack or block. The ability to land a blow in real time has returned but now it’s standardized across all costumes, along with a real-time blocking system.

Eventually, you’ll unlock a risky counter-attack prompt and a combo strike too but the combat wears out its welcome towards the end as you’re really just repeating the same button prompts over and over again. Another thing that’s new is that your party’s health bars will carry over from battle to battle but that’s undermined by having healing fountains dotted around each area. As long as you go straight to one after each fight, you’ll have no problems preparing for each battle.

To give Double Fine some credit, there’s a whole host of new costumes you’ll find throughout the game, all with distinct special abilities. You can customize your own party to either specialize against one specific enemy type or to try and cover against all classes. Like with many games that features randomized battles like this, you’re not really able to prepare well for encounters; even though each neighborhood has only a few enemy types, you’re not going to know the make-up of an encounter until it starts. So you might have only one costume that’s good against magic but end up facing three enemy tech specialists.

The best strategy just seems to cover all your bases and hope for the best. While the costumes are new, some of the abilities are just repeated from the previous game. For instance, the Pharaoh costume combines the resurrection ability from the unicorn and the grapple function of the pirate, all from the previous Costume Quest. True, there’s not really much you can do in a game like Costume Quest 2 but it’s worth trying out all the costumes yourself just to see the animations, even the clown’s frankly horrifying healing animation. 

Despite its limits, Costume Quest 2 is a fun little treat, one that doesn’t last too long but perhaps that’s for the best. Double Fine has done a decent job overhauling the combat system but while there’s a more robust set of mechanics than the first game, they do wear thin towards the end.

Costume Quest 2 still has that Double Fine charm and any game that includes a Blazing Saddles joke in 2014 is okay in my book.