Completion Time: 5h:22m:00s
Rating: 3/10

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Trick or Treat

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When I was first setting up the Halloween editions of these blogs, I was worried there weren't enough horror games on the GameCube to qualify, and I was mostly right. Looking up games that could make the cut will give you the likes of your "Resident Evils" and your tangential series like "Scooby-Doo". This title was an oddity, though, as I'd never heard of it or even seen it before. What's one to do but purchase the game and get ready to play it for the 2025 Halloween season? So that's just what I did.

I'll be damned if I'm gonna take orders from this gross fool

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Another World

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At first glance, this comes across as your standard 3D platformer, though with more linear stage construction like a "Crash Bandicoot" or "Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards". And that's a fair amount of what you happen to get, too. You play as bickering siblings, Alicia and Greg, who venture to the land of the dead to free their friends who have been turned to stone by some mad scientist because God knows why, and your journey consists of a lot of jumping and fighting across platforms and landscapes. The platforming for what it's worth is fine, I never had much trouble with it functionally, especially due to the the fact that you have a consistent shadow beneath you when you leap so you can gauge where to go. It's amazing how many games manage to miss this during implementation. "Spirits and Spells" managed to do it, and the lighting was abysmal in this game. I had to crank it up to max eventually to even see an area I had to squeeze Alicia into, but the shadows were never an issue!

I kid you not, this is max brightness. See the hole in front of me I gotta squeeze through to progress? Yeah, me neither...

Now what was an issue was practically everything else. There's a decent mechanic wherein you gather these yellow crystals that allow you to swap between Alicia and Greg every 30 obtained or so. These stock up to about 9, and you must change control depending on the environment. Alicia can handle the icy cold and handles range attacks through throwing her hats and casting spells, while Greg can withstand fiery temperatures and uses his pitchfork to take care of enemies. At least, it should, but the hit detection is way off and doesn't always work. Not to mention the swapping which I can handle, but the dependency on changing between the two is critical to some puzzle solving, which makes the reliance on 30 crystals to do so a bit ponderous. Say you come across a wall with only a tiny crack at the bottom to squeeze through. Well, you need to be Alicia for this, because she can hide in her hat and waddle underneath said wall. But if you've already used all your swaps and there aren't any more crystals to be found... then what do you do? To the developers credit, they found a workaround to keep you from being stuck. Stand around for about a minute without doing anything and they'll foot the cost of another swap token. It kept me from soft locking, sure, but it seems like a pretty big flaw to the game's core mechanics.

Oh don't mind me, just waiting around for the game to let me play!

The fact that this is "the land of the dead" means very little, because it's more like Halloween Town. There's this goblin that orders you around and teaches you through tutorials, and then witches and vampires and other ghouls running amok in addition to your stock skeletons and bats. The environments don't do much for this either, I never had any idea of where exactly I was or what I was meaning to do given that the texts were lacking clarity. Not to mention, eventually the levels partway through start to repeat themselves, just with slightly different environmental affects to them. I don't recall there even being a clear reason for this, it's as if the main party took a break for the season and then came back to finish the job in the winter, it's just plain bizarre. And kinda ugly? I wasn't really getting into it, which is a shame because I feel I could easily if there was more polish and more just going on in general.

More ice, more problems

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Completing the Game

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There is nothing to complete. Literally nothing. Just beat the game and you're good. I was told online a few places that beating the game on Normal would unlock a Hard difficulty, but even that didn't happen. Either it's false or only applicable to the GameBoy Advance version of the game.

All well and good, I wouldn't want to do the fight with the robot dinosaur again

This was a strange one, and the theming was apt. If only it were better constructed or functional, I might've had a better time. But everything about this screams shovelware projects, if even still containing more effort than most under that classification. I can only thank everyone involved that they at least kept the game blissfully short.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 45/652