Review by: Danielle Riendeau

Take everything awesome about Halloween: eating tons of candy, unleashing your imagination on costumes, and celebrating scary stuff. Now take the strengths of Double Fine: wildly creative game concepts, fun mix-n-match gameplay and amazing art direction. Combine the ingredients, add a pinch of Tim Burton and a heavy wallop of the Mario and Luigi series, and serve on hearty snack-sized plate. Viola, you’ve got yourself Costume Quest, a seasonal treat that satisfies every Halloween-craving sweet tooth.

Positively dripping with style, humor and charm, the game stars Wren and Reynold, two twins who have been told to stick by one another on All Hallow’s Eve. You pick a twin at the outset and go trick or treating with your sibling, who promptly gets captured by a band of goofy monsters intent on stealing all of the candy in the town.

It’s up to you to rescue your brother/sister, which you do by donning magical costumes and trick or treating your way through town, collecting a buddy or two as you go along. In the first main area - the suburbs - you get a feel for the flow of the game. You knock at various houses, each of which will contain either a monster (triggering a turn-based battle), or a costumed adult bearing candy. Cover all of the houses, and you’re allowed to move on to the next area.

There are plenty of little side quests that run concurrently with your main objective, each of which will afford you candy (the currency in the game, naturally), or crucial quest items. You’ll collect and trade nastily named “treat” trading cards (roll-up barf was my favorite), play hide and seek with neighborhood kids, and scope out secret passageways paved with candy. You’ll also collect costume “recipes” and “ingredients” – crucial for building new outfits that give you combat and “exploration” abilities.

Whenever you run into a baddie, a brief cutscene whisks you off to a hyper-stylized battlefield, where your cutesy kids become badass comic book versions of their costumes. The twee cardboard robot becomes a giant Gundam-style mech. The adorable kitty outfit turns your kiddo into a giant panther of death. Perhaps the very best sees your little French-fry become a spidery fry box of doom, punching enemies with pincher-like claws and raining death with the amazing “salt attack”. The animations are unskippable, but they’re quick and positively hilarious.

At its heart, the game is a light action-RPG, in the vein of a minimalist Mario and Luigi. Combat is fun, flashy and stripped down to the barest elements – each costume affords one “normal” attack and one special power, and all attacks are preceded by a simple button-press command. Getting the timing right earns you increased attack power, and defending with similar commands allows you to block the brunt of your enemies’ assaults.