The Haunted Hoard: Castle Costume (PS4)

If an individual plays a game and can’t quite explain why they find it enjoyable, there’s no harm done there. However, if a game developer tries to reproduce what they find enjoyable in a genre but doesn’t understand why they like it, they can end up with a game like Castle Costume. This 3D platformer is a clear love letter to the old collect-a-thon style of adventure to the point its website speaks of it helping kick off a collect-a-thon game revival, but there are so many fundamental issues with how it tries to pull this off that it perhaps stands as one of the worst examples of that genre to date.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues right out of the gate is that, in a game where you are nominally meant to be collecting a lot of items scattered throughout the levels, the opening stages are practically pitch black. Castle Costume progresses through a sequence of wide open levels where you need to complete a few goals that almost never tie to collecting items to progress to the next stage, and while this game is definitely going for a Halloween aesthetic, the lighting in the first batch of stages has no excuse for being so dark. It seems as if all the lighting provided in the city streets and village worlds is provided by objects in the environment, the moon and stars sitting this one out as the player has to hope the dull glow of an oozy puddle or the reach of a dim streetlight can illuminate their path. You aren’t completely blind and can spot the major shapes in a world like buildings and cliffsides, but even if you have your brightness high, these areas are designed to be incredibly difficult to see in for no clear reason. It just makes running around them looking for goodies more tedious and reliant on spotting dark objects in a dark world, but things get even worse when you consider that most of Castle Costume’s level are a strange mix of too empty and filled with too many useless trinkets.

The items you are told to collect are things like demon masks, pumpkins, coins, or weird looking objects like two collectibles I can only describe as pink pentagons and atoms for lack of any in-game explanation of what they are. Almost every stage is teeming with an absurd amount of items that will be floating around in the air waiting for you to run or jump into them, but none of these tie to any meaningful level goals. These are solely there for the purpose of unlocking a single bonus level, and considering the main game’s levels have so many flaws already, rewarding the tedious effort of collecting thousands of these knickknacks with another bland an frustrating stage is not rewarding at all. Rather than having milestones to reward you for getting certain amounts of these or little perks along the way for being attentive, it’s an all or nothing affair, and considering how many of these just seem strewn about levels with no care to their placement at all, it’s hard to get invested in the task. You can sometimes see them placed as a jumping challenge or in a hard to reach place, but you’re just as likely to find them floating in a barren open area, and considering how much level space is wasted on giving more room for these collectibles, the stages end up with very little meaningful to do in them. One of the only instances of meaningful collectibles involves the strange Trick-or-Treating goal in some stages where you go up to three arbitrary doors from some of the many identical ones in the level and potentially play a short diversion where you can easily grab the floating items of importance. Even when it has the gumption to integrate the collect-a-thon gameplay into the main story progression, it can’t muster up an interesting way to do it.

Surprisingly, late in the game there are a few levels that turn up the lights a bit. A sudden tropical world lets you finally see your main character in clear light for the first time, your nameless pumpkin-headed boy finally free to navigate a clearly visible world. The final stages in the place actually named Castle Costume are lit decently as well due to the abundance of fire and lava, but just being able to see everything isn’t going to fix the problems with the general platforming challenges. Your character’s mediocre jumps are repeatedly put to the test as you need to land precisely on things like bouncy white balls as small as he is, and many long vertical climbs punish you with a drop to the beginning of the climb if you slip up. The bane of platform game pacing is here as well, slow moving vertical platforms you have to wait on if you weren’t there in time are common, but there are even more bothersome ones in the form of platforms that move in a way that’s hard to notice. You might be able to notice the general movement of level geometry over time, but it’s hard to gauge the sometimes subtle but meaningful rise and fall of platforms or slight drifting to the sides they might be doing. This can happen because of areas where platforms are just floating around in the air and the ones you’re standing on are moving, meaning there’s not any object to anchor your point of reference on. Some areas in the game don’t pay attention to their hazard design much either, with Castle Costume in particular including large rotating flames that cover so much space that if they’re not synced up you will be knocked into the lava and die. Falling platforms in that area make it even more tedious to try and make your way through, and while not every place is so cruel, it’s still hard to point at any instance where platforming feels like its anything more than a poorly implemented chore.

Some platforms behave in strange ways as well, such as a large cylinder you climb clipping into a large floating block for no clear reason if it drifts that way, but actual glitches can occur during platforming too. I fell through the roof of a building into the unmodeled interior once, and at another point, I was climbing up a wooden ramp and got stuck floating in place. The fact the game gives you a penalty free respawn option is likely a way to try and prevent a glitch from getting you trapped, but I wasn’t able to pause during the ramp glitch so that didn’t help there. You have limited lives that you can lose though, the level resetting if you run out which isn’t too much of a problem in most stages save for when it involves the game’s often long and bland platforming gauntlets. Most stages have an area separate from the world where you jump around more challenging locations to satisfy a level goal, and you can feel how limited your movement is when it’s asked to be done with a degree of skill instead of walking around large flat action hubs. You do get new abilities over the course of the game such as the ability to do a drift after a double jump, and odd level geometry sometimes meaning you have to use weird ability mixing to conquer it in a way that doesn’t feel like the actual intent of the designers. Having extra jump options does mean you can adjust your jumping a little better, but other things like a new attack feel incredibly pointless, especially since the enemies in Castle Costume are a complete joke.

The basic enemies of this horrid Halloween adventure are little kid-sized mummies who run towards you. They are easily dispatched with your default attack, but that doesn’t prevent the game from constantly using them to guard the Witches you need to save in a commonly rehashed level goal. For some reason, the game plonks down a lot of skulls on sticks who breathe blue flames in a set direction, their placement meaning they will almost never hit you since they’re so easily navigated around. Some later enemies can at least take a hit even if they’re not tough, and they might have a projectile attack to actually bother you, but the spiders that can explode if you’re near them are a tacit admission from the game that the unusually dark levels were an awful idea. To prevent the black bugs from blending in, the spiders stand in place and have a bright yellow ring around their feet, meaning they only pose a threat if you just stand next to them and let them detonate. The bosses are no better, although the flying eyeball you fight first at least has the beginning of a decent idea. You need to platform over to jump into it to deal damage, but you’re thrown back to the start of the platforming challenge after every hit, the boss’s attacks speeding up as you do so. You need to hide behind forcefields while approaching until the boss’s blasts become too fast at their highest speed to completely avoid, but the issue is that you’re just doing the same platforming sequence again and again to beat her with no interesting alterations to that course. The second boss is the real bit of comedy, as you don’t even need to start moving until it’s taken a few hits from an automatically attacking torch. Even when the giant treasure chest boss starts actually posing a danger to you, you can still beat them with mild movement that doesn’t even directly engage them, and the final boss fight is actually just a manner of dodging lasers and the like as you wait out similar automatic attacks. While regular enemies don’t need to be more than obstacles in a platformer, they barely achieve that at the best of times here and the bosses are often slow and uninspired battles.

The lack of care shows even in the small bits of story the game has. Your pumpkin-headed playable character is aiming to stop Angry Aaron, a man whose awful Halloween experience as a kid has lead to him trying to take it away from everyone else. Despite supposedly committing that act, a lot of people seem to be happily standing around in costume and making spooky puns, but you still need to save the witches he locked in big green soul spheres that lock off parts of the level until a task is performed. Sometimes this style of ugly energy barrier used for those spheres just cuts off a level abruptly to prevent you from wandering outside the intended area, but at least it doesn’t let you wander around too far beyond an already too wide style of level design. The characters you can talk to in Castle Costume have plenty of typos in their dialogue text, the abundance of them making it seems like no proofreading was done at all. They are meant to help direct you towards goals or tell basic jokes with no charm to them, but you’ll have to rely more on the dedicated goal indicator button, and even then it’s not always clear on what you’re meant to do in the area it shows you to go to. With the plot a complete bust too though, Castle Costume ends up not getting much of anything right, even its Halloween set dressings abandoned when the game decides to explore a sandy beach or have you fight a treasure chest in an ice cave.

THE VERDICT: With levels designed around the almost entirely pointless collect-a-thon angle and still feeling empty despite being littered with the collectible trinkets, Castle Costume was already off to a poor start as a 3D platformer. The goals you are meant to shoot for are often bland, recycled, or lack direction, and the battles and platforming involved in completing some of them are poorly conceived and occasionally glitchy. With levels bathed in darkness detracting from the already subpar Halloween theming by hiding it from sight, Castle Costume is left without a leg to stand.  Everything feels like it’s done with so little care or thought, making it hard to care at all about this thrown together rough draft of a video game.

And so, I give Castle Costume for PlayStation 4…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Castle Costume just does not understand the genre it’s in. When it comes to its collect-a-thon aspect, it makes the infamous Donkey Kong 64’s plethora of poorly placed items look tame, Castle Costume’s stages filled with items scattered around with little thought or purpose. When it comes to movement, Castle Costume is no Super Mario 64, the hero’s moves randomly added to and still not always interacting with the environment in the intended ways. Crash Bandicoot’s snappy attacks and involved boss battles are leagues ahead of Castle Costume’s negligible foes and passive big fights, but they couldn’t even hold a candle to the worse members of a genre that admittedly does not focus on combat very option. The Halloween art style that doesn’t even seem to have too much of a hand in the art direction at times feels like it’s a desperate attempt to add one thing that can appeal to players, but even as a light-hearted spooky romp it can’t deliver. Castle Costume feels like a thrown together first attempt at a game that should have gotten more refinements and had its gameplay run by people who could point out it errors. No stage is without sin even when the tropical stages finally let you see the action properly, and it’s already hard enough to trudge through the normal stages, so going for an extra bonus stage by getting all of the awfully placed items sounds torturous.

Castle Costume can maybe be used as a learning tool about the consequences of poor technical design, bad structuring, and directionless development, but it’s not going to appeal to the collect-a-thon player looking for a modern member of the genre to get involved in. So much of Castle Costume feels pointlessly added or pointless to engage with, but I have to imagine it all comes from a lack of understanding rather than some form of malice. If this was some project of a fledgling game designer, it could help them learn to improve, but it was pushed out as a product, removing that protection that something personal and unreleased can use to deflect criticism. Castle Costume ends up being a magnet for critique instead where it feels like every part of the game can be improved, so make sure that the promise of a Halloween collect-a-thon doesn’t suck you in, because Castle Costume can’t even pull off that premise with any degree of success.