• Format: XBLA (version reviewed), PSN
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: THQ
• Developer: Double Fine
• Players: 1
• Site: http://www.costumequestgame.com/

Costume Quest is a tribute to Halloween first and a game second. It’s an utterly adorable story of children trick-or-treating their way to victory against an evil witch and her band of goblins. But it’s also undeniably simple; it walks a fine line between elegant and boring.

The game begins with a brother and sister about to go out for Halloween. After choosing which of the siblings you’ll play as, you take off into the neighborhood where your sibling is mistaken for a giant piece of candy and kidnapped by goblins. From there you have to trick-or-treat the neighborhood, defeating any monsters you encounter and collecting as much candy as you can.

The style of the adventure is one of the strongest elements. The kids themselves waddle around in their costumes, clanking their candy pails around through an environment that’s so evocative of autumn weather that you can almost smell it. When battles start, the various costumes come to life, realized as the badass 50-foot tall heroes the children imagine them as – it’s awesome.

From the start, most players will no doubt be a bit put off by the game’s lack of voiced dialogue. While the writing is uniformly excellent, the little beep that plays with each new dialogue bubble isn’t enough. Even some stylized mumbo jumbo would’ve been nice but the writing is endearing, and the bubbles are comedically timed, so you do get used to it.

Costume Quest is, at heart, steeped in JRPG-esque mechanics. You explore a town, mall, and carnival raiding the environment for candy, talking to strange townfolk, and initiating battles with goblins. There’s a shop where you trade candy for stamps, providing combat buffs to your party members. And much like modern JRPGs, Costume Quest tinkers with the concept of random battles, making trick-or-treating door-to-door a gamble that can result in candy or a battle. Further into the game enemies will patrol around the environments, giving you an opportunity to sneak up behind them for a battle advantage.

The battles themselves couldn’t be more simple. You trade shots with the enemies in turn-based combat, with simple QTEs (ala the Mario & Luigi RPGs) deciding whether you hit harder or defend better. For the first two-thirds of the game there’s enough enemy variety and new elements introduced that the combat is never boring. This is when Costume Quest is at its best – the story is fun, the combat is just engaging enough, and the questing and exploration keeps things moving along.

But as this decidedly short quest (5-6 hours or so) wears on, the combat starts to drag. You’ll eventually figure out a tactic that works, and the game never really challenges that. Especially towards the end when enemy groups are pretty much all the same, and there’s no reason to use all the great costumes you unlock.

Costume Quest begins on the right foot, and for the vast majority of the time it’s a total joy to play. In the last hour or two the gameplay loses steam, but the story and charm never let up for a second. If the combat wasn’t such a chore later on, it’d be a perfect little game. As it is, we wouldn’t mind seeing an even better one next Halloween.

• Format: Xbox 360 (version reviewed), PS3
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: Rockstar Games
• Developer: Rockstar San Diego/Rockstar North
• Players: 1 (offline), 2-16 (online)
• Site: http://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption/

Don’t mistake Undead Nightmare as just another DLC pack for Red Dead Redemption. Unlike the previous expansions, which brought features into multiplayer that probably should have been there to begin with, Undead Nightmare is much closer in spirit to GTA IV’s Ballad of Gay Tony or Lost & Damned. With that said, it’s probably best enjoyed after you’ve already played through Red Dead Redemption’s single-player story.

A big part of the appeal of Undead Nightmare is the return of old characters in completely different circumstances. The expansion doesn’t really fit into any part of the Red Dead timeline, but when you start mixing cowboys and zombies, continuity doesn’t really matter anymore. The point is that aside from the new zombie-fighting gameplay, Undead Nightmare also tells a great story full of familiar faces you probably forgotten you loved. For fans of the Red Dead storyline, it’s an essential bit of fan service.

The cinematic presentation – hell, all of the presentation – is entirely on par with the full game; just on a smaller, 5-7 hour scale. John Marston is as entertaining as ever, offering his witticisms and simple-minded motivations in an entertaining narrative. Marston’s goal is to solve the mystery of what’s caused the undead to walk the earth, which ends up being as good a cause as any to revisit a cast of unsavoury characters.

As Marstan’s journey begins you’ll face two immediate challenges – zombies only die by headshots and ammo is scarce. The latter becomes less of an issue as the game wears on, but the opening missions are decidedly survival horror-esque. The former challenge is something that may be the most divisive aspect of Undead Nightmare. Aiming isn’t easy in Red Dead Redemption – it never was – and headshots are really the only kind of shots that matter here. Combat takes precision, patience, and planning, something that’s in short supply when mobs of zombies come running. Simply put, Red Dead’s aiming isn’t tuned to a controller the way most first-person shooters are. The aiming is smooth, but the amount of skill it takes to line up that tiny little dot with the head of a distant zombie is far greater than it is in most games.

This may end up being a frustrating dealbreaker for some people, but it also makes the combat in Undead Nightmare feel a bit different compared to other shooters and even Red Dead itself. You’ll rarely have any reason to take cover, but you will want to get to higher ground. When you don’t have a safe vantage point you can use dead-eye for some slow-motion zombie dispatching or you can keep moving atop your trusty undead steed.

Yep, you can ride a zombie horse. In fact, Undead Nightmare is full of monsters and mythical creatures to track down. They play into the expansion’s additional side missions and challenges. Just like the main game, you can waste hours going for that 100% completion stat. With a surprisingly meaty main quest and a ton of additional bits, this expansion could easily last you over a dozen hours.

Undead Nightmare is absolutely a ride you should take, as long as you’re up for a bit of a challenge. If anything, it’s a return to a great world and cast of characters, and a clever reminder by Rockstar that Red Dead Redemption is a game of the year contender.

Did the title of this article scare you? Probably not. Do you know what else isn’t very scary? Horror games. Given that it’s the time of year that people all over Britain will be shutting their curtains and pretending to be out as one or two geezers come knocking and demanding free sweets, I thought it might be fun to look at the gaming side of horror. Oh, but if you want a little tip that saves you spending Halloween in the dark might I recommend answering the door only once coated in fake blood and brandishing a kitchen knife. Word soon gets around.

It’s important to look at what constitutes a game falling into the horror genre, or a horror sub-category I suppose, as you can have horror FPS or horror Adventure games and so on. More and more these days it just seems to mean that you’ll be fighting monsters of some kind. Oh, and things will be gory. Enough blood to satisfy even the most hedonistic of vampires. If the enemies are zombies then it’s almost a given that the game is classed as horror too, but can anyone really say they were ever scared by Left 4 Dead? I’d admit that the shocking disregard for the fan base of L4D is truly terrifying, but that’s another issue.

Before I tell you what I think does constitute a true horror game I will first tell you what I think doesn’t. Doom 3 is a good example off the top of my head. Why? Making you jump isn’t horror, it’s just shock. Shock comes quickly with a fright and disappears just as fast. “Ah!” you might exclaim as your hand jitters as something leaps into your face, but seconds later that emotion is gone as you’re busy firing away or watching your health. Then you might get a shock the next time something jumps in your face again and the third time and maybe even the fourth, but after that it just gets tedious. You’re body actually becomes accustomed to you reacting to something jumping into your face every other corridor. So called horror becomes a routine.

Ignoring the monster, isn't this a lot like Saw1?

Typing that last sentence just reminded me of another example: F.E.A.R, you could set your watch by the horror in that. I lost count of the cheap frights. Hell, the most horrific thing about that game was the developer thinking that they could get away with such a shockingly bad acronym for a title.

A big annoyance I have with games that claim to be be horror is also related to weaponry. If I’m wielding enough fire power to bring down a small nation single handedly then I’m not going to be afraid of what’s around the next corner (except maybe Janet Street Porter’s disembodied flapping mouth, as there aren’t enough weapons in the world to silence that).

Horror, to me, is distinguished a little differently from fear. Or rather it is an amalgamation of fears so that we can all relate to it. For example, you could have someone who has a deathly fear of spiders. Any game featuring spiders no matter how small and no matter what genre would bring out fear in them. This isn’t a general fear this is a personal one; so not everyone could relate. A good horror game needs to tap into more than one phobia or fear, it needs to tap into our human nature and exploit fears we all share.

So what does make a good horror game in my opinion? Atmosphere. Playing as someone utterly alone is a good place to start, so is having only basic weaponry to defend yourself with. The original Silent Hill is a perfect example of atmospheric horror because it created the impression that the whole town was against you as you stumbled about in the fog listening to a crackling radio and being attacked by nightmarish nurses. It’s a type of fear that everyone can relate to that doesn’t depend on personal phobias or cheap frights. It’s the anticipation of the fright that’s important, the fear of what’s around every corner. If you get around a corner and there’s no fright you don’t feel any better because you know there’s another corner and another and another all with that potential chance. If you were playing Doom 3 you would have been attacked at every single corner and be sick of it by now.

Implied violence is another good example of horror done right. I don’t quite mean walking into a room and trying to work out who could have spread all that blood up the walls or placed a set of dismembered arms on the floor in the shape of a love heart. With graphics constantly improving the subtlety of works is disappearing and this doesn’t just apply to horror.

In a way, horror was easier to achieve when we didn’t have all these fancy graphics. The original Clock Tower from the nineties is another great example of horror done right. You had little to no defence against a stalker hunting you and if he found his way to the room you were in you had to quickly find some place in it to hide and hope he didn’t discover you. Instead of health you were presented with panic and if very panicked additional things could happen like stumbling and falling as you tried to run away from the tiny stalker with very large scissors. This is another general fear that was tapped into very well. It’d be hard to find someone not afraid of being hunted by a killer with no way to fend him off.

I know that today there are modern games that do manage to almost pull horror off right, but I would argue that they resolve to use one simple tactic: scare the player once every so often to create suspense. They don’t go overboard like Doom 3 but they don’t use the subtlety of games from the nineties either, so to me it’s no better than initial shock followed by a yawn as you blast the enemy that scared you to pieces. Resident Evil 3 almost emulated Clock Tower in so much that Jill Valentine was constantly hunted by the nearly indestructible Nemesis but you had guns, so it wasn’t as scary.

To recap what would make a perfect horror game: odds stacked against you, being alone, being out gunned, subtle fear, intimidating atmosphere, implied violence and no BFG9000.

What games to do you think do horror very well? Let me know down below! I would have to say that the scariest game I’ve ever played was when I was a bit younger and my sister made me try one of her horse racing simulator things. I still wake up screaming sometimes.