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‘Costume Quest 2’ Review: Sweets from a Stranger
Written by Vikki Blake, @_vixx
With all the hallmarks of a fun – if forgettable – seasonal hit, it’s tempting not to take Double Fine’s Costume Quest 2 too seriously.
But beneath the agreeable exterior beats the heart of a slick little RPG that’s as sweet and addictive as the Halloween candy we’re tasked with collecting. It’s no surprise that fans have been clamouring for a second instalment.
Costume Quest 2 plunges us back into the lives of Wren and Reynold – the fraternal twins you may recall from the original game – who once again find themselves stumbling unwittingly into yet another Halloween disaster, this time courtesy of arectypital bad guy Orel White – a pissed off dentist with a grudge against all things Halloween – who banishes the holiday.
And so our premise is set. The perky twins set off to locate the dentist and undo the past,
leaping back and fore through time via a selection of time portals whilst collecting candy from strangers and battling monsters along the way.
The gameplay plays out just as the original story. There’s a mishmash of puzzles, sidequests, turn-based battles and, naturally, trick-or-treating. With each door you knock in the hope of topping up your candy pail, there’s every chance you’ll encounter a weird and wonderful enemy instead of a friendly neighbour.
When a monster does step in and challenge you to a battle, your chosen flavour of twin transforms into whichever costume they happen to be wearing at the time. On most occasions, the costumes – and their associated superpowers – are fantastically fun, with each lending it’s own particular RPG flavour (Soldier, Medic etc.).
Unsurprisingly, this means that, initially, you’ll need to seek out bigger and better costumes. This is not as easy as it seems. Whilst some costumes come ready-to-wear, many do not, and to complete them you need to think strategically – and sometimes a little experimentally – and explore your surroundings to locate the materials and patterns necessary to create your costume.
That said, the costume selection is by no means a prerequisite, and it’s probably pretty easy to sail through the game with nothing but the costumes you and your friends arrive wearing (our Candy Corn companion aside). Once you settle into a party that works as you’d like, it’s hard to bust out of the rut and experiment with the new outfits.
Which brings us onto the battles themselves. Rarely challenging, the turn-based combat offers up the bog-standard mix of basic attack with the occasional individual special power, although these can be enhanced by collecting/purchasing Creepy Treat cards.
Time-based responses and button-prompts are your tools and whilst they’re rarely difficult, it’s easy to mis-time the odd attack and have a colleague expire as a consequence. The key, as you might expect, is to mix up the cards and your characters so that each contributor brings something different to the fighting arena.
The issue here is that the combat rarely challenges you, and you may often find your curious exploration of the story environs stuttered by interruptions of the rinse-repeat combat sequences. Animations are rehashed over and over, and progression feels consciously sluggish compared to the original. Oh, and I did I mention that you have to backtrack, endlessly, to fill up your life meters after each battle? No? Maybe that’s because I was so frickin’ tired of it, I STOPPED CARING.
That said – and somewhat amazingly – the game’s holiday-themed foundation rarely feels cheesy or forced. The environments are colourful and detailed, crammed with Halloween-based props that lend a rich, warm and comfortable glow to the various backdrops that are the perfect setting for this warm, occasionally laugh-out-loud story.
Even though you can often see the next twist or turn coming a mile off, that doesn’t detract from the enjoyment in any way thanks to a (mostly) sharp, witty script. (And at least this time you can read the text at your own leisure – the original game was not so obliging.)
The Final Word: There’s a heady mix of exploration and combat here, and whilst the latter can, on occasion, be a little tiresome, it’s not quite enough to tamper the enjoyment. In fact, very little does – Costume Quest 2 is fun and funny way to while away a few hours long after the Halloween decorations and candy pails have been boxed away for another year.
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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