An Easy Way to Pass the Time...

As many of you know, I am always on the lookout for new downloadable games that will serve the purpose of distracting me from my curmudgeonly attitude towards gaming.  Yesterday, I decided to splurge on my PSN account and purchase one of the half-off games offered in their Specials, and ended up coming across a game called Costume Quest, a mind-numbing and delightfully fun candy-centered adventure RPG-lite available on both the PS3 and the XBOX 360.

At first glance, many of you may wonder why in the world I decided to go with this game over the myriad...all right, seven other games i could have chosen.  Ultimately, I liked the characters' big eyes, which reminded me of the cartoonish and cell shaded days of The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker from the Gamecube days of yore.  Other than that, it was $7.99 to purchase ($4.99 for the additional downloadable content), and the cheaper ones looked even less appealing - so, I took a blind leap, and hoped for the best.

While certainly not the most impressive game, it is a very easy way to while away a few hours gathering candy, beating up monsters, and collecting costume pieces to complete whole costumes.  Plus, it's an easy way to get a few PSN trophies...albeit girly ones.  It's not too detailed, and there's nothing amazing about any aspect of it, other than the originality, but it's certainly unique in the way it allows you to use the special skills of various costumes to travel around the areas.

The music is very Halloween-ish, by which I mean "Halloween Sound Effects Tapes from the 1990s.  Very good for background music, because it doesn't get in the way, doesn't sound overly triumphant, and doesn't have the traditional RPG "march into battle" feel made famous by Nobuo Uematsu in the Final Fantasy series.  It's kooky and sufficiently creepy to eight-year-olds, which is the perspective from which this game is told.  For those of you old enough to remember, this game really brings back fond memories of the late Jim Varney's Ernest Scared Stupid.  

The battle scenes are fun, with the sole exception of the random button pushing that occurs to either boost your own or defend from enemies' attacks.  Part of this is my curmudgeonly attitude towards Playstation's shape-based button system ("REALLY???  How the hell am I supposed to remember where Square and Triangle are on the controller?  And Circle and Square look exactly the same!!!").  The same problem existed in Final Fantasy X-2 during the Thunder Plains mini-game.  It is infinitely easier to remember simple letters (and their corresponding buttons) than shapes.  But...that's likely just me being an old man, unwilling to change his ways...despite the fact that I've owned Playstation products since 1997.

What makes me infinitely happy is the brevity of this game.  It's very easy to finish, and when you do, it luckily comes just when you've finally gotten tired of playing the damn game.  While the game is, at first, quite cute, it does get a bit trying after long-term play.  The premise, though interesting when you first start playing the game, doesn't hold its freshness throughout, and by the end of the second section, I found myself wishing that there wasn't a third, much less a fourth downloadable section.

Overall, however, the concept is fresh, the gameplay is decent, and it's cheap enough to be worth the $13.