Halloween is coming, and that means it's time for kids to grab their costumes and go door-to-door in search of candy. The kids in Spirits and Spells are no exception, and when they hear about a candy mother lode they eagerly set off for the spooky old house in the woods. Unfortunately the house belongs to the Bogeyman, who turns the children into stone by stealing their souls. Now Alicia and Greg, a young girl dressed as an ice witch and a boy costumed as a fiery red devil, must search the World of the Dead to release the souls of their friends. Sadly, this is to be a difficult journey, plagued with frame rate problems and instant death at every turn, making a cute children's platformer much more difficult than it should be.

While Spirits and Spells is a 3D game, it remains at its heart very much a side scrolling platformer where the player jumps over obstacles and dispatches mindless enemies. The levels are linear, with tons of instant death hazards sprinkled liberally through out. The player has no control over the camera, which can lead to some serious frustration as they run right into an unseen enemy or over a cliff that they had no hope of noticing before they die. This leads to the areas between checkpoints becoming more of a game of memory than skill as you discover all the ways you can die and then try to avoid them. There are protection fairies you can pick up to keep you from dying by being hit by monsters, but they do nothing to protect you from the terrors of knee deep water or falling rocks. Adding to this is a hit detection system that doesn't match the attack animation. It is possible to stand in a spot with your weapon going through a monster without having any effect, only to move a tiny amount and finally kill it.

While there are two playable main characters, you can only use one of them at a time. By collecting magic crystals you can switch between the two at will, which is necessary for the majority of the game's puzzles. While Alicia is resistant to ice, Greg resists fire, and both can activate floating pumpkins that will generate one or the other, allowing them to progress through the stage. Both also attack differently-- Alicia using her hat as a boomerang and Greg swiping at enemies with his pitchfork-- and can pick up more specialized abilities later in the game. This adds a bit of a strategy element to the game, as you choose the character whose attack is most useful in an area, or the one who can disguise themselves best among the monsters. However, because you die so frequently, running out of crystals can be an issue, and if the area you are in isn't rich with crystals you can end up doing the unthinkable and killing your own character just to collect more to get past an obstacle.

Spirits and Spells is a theme game and it's overflowing with Halloween goodness. The visuals are influenced by cartoons and claymation and the level details are appropriately cute and spooky at the same time, with some nicely animated environmental hazards to spice things up. A lot of thought was given to character design, both for the children and the monsters. For instance, Alicia will hold on to her hat while running to keep it from falling off. The skeleton monsters look grumpy and have a nice lazy gait, and have an amusing Looney Tunes-like delayed collapse after you kill them, and witches are turned into croaking toads once they are defeated. The game doesn't really play up to the capabilities of the Gamecube and some monsters, especially the fairies, are extremely low polygon, but over all the style works. Surprisingly, even without advanced graphics the game suffers from framerate loss quite frequently, especially when collecting magic gems.

While Spirits and Spells has a great visual style and an appropriate, if repetitive, soundtrack, it is definitely a flawed game. Children most likely won't have the patience to memorize the hazards of each area death after death just to progress to the next part. People looking for a challenge might enjoy the game's mechanics but will likely be turned off by the noticeable and frequent framerate loss. In the end, this is a cute Halloween setting that just doesn't function well as a game.