developed by Double Fine (San Francisco, CA)
project led by Tasha Harris
designed by David Gardner, Tasha Harris, Gabe Miller, and Elliott Roberts
written by Elliott Roberts and Tim Schafer
Second of the three new games I bought in the “Humble Double Fine Bundle” on May 7, 2013.
The idea here is that cozy Halloween trick-or-treat nostalgia is the perfect subject for a video game: it’s a ritual process with role-playing, and prizes, and delicious menace and mystery. And huge sentimental significance. This is a good insight! It’s true. In fact it’s so true that even with gameplay as bland and rudimentary as it has, Costume Quest still manages somehow to seem fun. The fact that it’s so manifestly a great idea for a game carries the player along.
Well, for a little while, anyway. Then its arms get tired and it sets the player back down. To play a bland and rudimentary game. Luckily, by the six-hour mark, the point when it finally dawned on me that I ought to stop playing Brütal Legend, I was at the end of Costume Quest. Saved by the bell.
Basically: another exceedingly well-meaning production from the exceedingly well-meaning people at Double Fine.
The game is in three sections, each of which took me about an hour and a half to get through. I found the first section quite charming, despite recognizing that as game design it was shallow and monotonous. The important thing was that it felt right; it invited the same attention I would cheerfully bring to a middling network Halloween special, and rewarded it with the same kind of vague carpeted comforts. I was willing to disregard what I was actually doing (namely: almost exclusively busywork and padding) and just roll with it for its sweet naturedness and exemplary Holiday Branding Compliance. I got at least an hour of that kind of satisfaction, for real, which is to say at least two half-hour TV Specials’ worth. Not bad!
The problem, for me, was that the subsequent second and third sections were — quite unabashedly — just recapitulations of the first section. Liked trick-or-treating in the suburbs? How about trick-or-treating some more at the mall? And now how about trick-or-treating some more in a rustic village? Yeah… okay, I guess.
It’s the economy approach to game design. I can respect taking an economy approach to production — I certainly respect Double Fine for scaling down their ambitions and putting out something modest and cute. I just wish they had allocated more of their little budget towards refining the design until they honestly believed it merited six hours of play. I would gladly have given up a few animations and map areas for that.
Despite its relative brevity, this game still felt like a slog. But let’s acknowledge that sometimes slogs are games. For example, I recently witnessed Beth playing all the way through “Slog Sandwich: The Game” (my gift to her!). I can absolutely respect a slog every now and then. On the other hand, Beth’s game was about building an actual skill — the things she was doing as a player on her last day would have seemed outlandishly difficult on her first day. That’s a process that inevitably takes time and practice and patience, and offers real rewards for it. (Yes, real rewards: I strongly believe that genuinely learning something new is an inherently healthful experience — especially when the thing learned has the purity of being utterly useless and burdened by no social significance. It’s like roughage; it keeps your mind regular, present to the world.)
Whereas Costume Quest is an RPG, a genre I have always considered philosophically dubious, because (as I’ve complained before) it’s all about phony skill-acquisition: you are told that you’ve “leveled up,” but of course so have your enemies, so what you’re doing remains exactly the same, just measured in larger numbers. The player needs no skill or understanding at the end that isn’t already available at the beginning. The only difference is, essentially, how much Halloween candy you’ve gathered in between. Since in the context of the game, that’s a completely make-believe task, there’s no good reason why it ought to be a repetitive six-hour slog.
(Well, except for the obvious reason: that game purchasers are really purchasing invented obligations, to delay the necessity of returning to their own unpleasant feelings, so the more invented obligations per purchase the better. Any slog is a good slog.)
Anyway, whether -advertently or in-, this game is sloggish. You’ll notice that they punch the word “Collect!” in the preview. Yup! There sure is a lot of collecting to be done.
After finishing the game, naturally, I immediately played the DLC (“DownLoadable Content”) despite its being none other than: one more area in which to do all the same stuff again. I guess I didn’t want to return to my own unpleasant feelings yet. I’m not embarrassed to say it.
DLC is an awkward fit for the notion that games are an “art form,” because long after the window of time in which selling DLC for a given game is good business, the DLC continues to live on as a weird satellite to the game itself, occupying some formal gray area. Is it part of the work or is it not? Usually it gets lumped in to a “Complete Edition” (or, as has hilariously become industry standard, a “Game Of The Year Edition” or “GOTY,” basically the video game equivalent of “World Famous Pizza”) such that the form of the game that heads off into posterity is one with a barnacle or two clinging to it. The main menu always has to ask: do you want to play “The Game Itself” or “Inconsequential Cash-In, Previously Sold Under The Title ‘The Unmissable Final Chapter Of The Game Itself'”?
In this case I played it. I knew I would get through it one sitting and I did.