In Costume Quest, you play as one of two fraternal twins who go out to trick-or-treat, but then your sibling gets kidnapped by monsters and you go on a quest to rescue them. Along the way, you collect new costumes (which give you new abilities), get friends to join you on your quest, and collect power ups.
In Costume Quest 2, you are transported to a world where Halloween has been outlawed, and you work to fix it. Gameplay is similar to the first where you collect costumes and power ups and fight monsters to catch the person responsible for outlawing Halloween.
Gameplay is pretty basic. The core gameplay loop is:
- Knock on a door
- If a human answers it, you get candy and repeat from 1
- If a monster answers, you get into a turn based fight like a simplified Final Fantasy battle; repeat from 1
The battle mechanics are simple enough my young kids (were 5&8 at the time) could handle it with some help on strategy. The strategy gets more relevant later in the game (certain attacks do better on different kinds of monsters), but it's simple throughout.
Both are fantastic, casual, Halloween-themed RPGs suitable for kids, and I really enjoyed playing both with my kids tag-teaming with me. You can get both for $5 total right now.
The reason I bring it up is because my kids asked me to play them again with them, and I was trying to find something similar and came up empty (I don't like replaying games).
Does anyone have any recommendations for games with a similar appeal? The mix of costumes with power ups and simple combat was the main draw for us, but I'm open to looking at anything with a Holloween theme that is suitable for younger kids, bonus points for couch co-op style of gameplay. The closest are probably LEGO games (which are great), but my kids seem a little tired of the formula.
Knights of Pen & Paper, perhaps?
Essentially, your party is literally a group sitting at a table, dressed up as their characters and.. you go trotting over a fantasy land. The combat is fairly simple and the game overall is quite tongue in cheek. You spend in-game gold to decorate your game room, add snacks/drinks to the table, etc - all of which nets you bonuses, IIRC.
I've only played the first game (the +1 edition), no idea if the sequel is good or not. Galaxy of Pen & Paper is a scifi version of the same, afaik.
The game was originally on ios/android, so it doesn't come as a surprise that it does have the option to buy gold. I sure didn't need it when I played the 1st game, but, I still think it's worth mentioning, in case you're entirely against it.
edit: FWIW: according to steam reviews the sequel is slightly better rated (according to user reviews), and is 60% off, so ~3-4 $/€