Fester's Quest

Licensed video games frequently get somewhat of a bad reputation. Nowadays, it's easy to dismiss any video game translation of a move or a TV show. In the NES and SNES days, however, it was much, much worse. Both overall quality and pure selection of what was licensed was a tumultuous affair. It's understandable why X-men, Ghostbusters, and Star Wars would receive video game adaptations. But in the face of those obvious choices, came other intellectual properties that make no sense at all. Licenses such as 7-Up, The Three Stooges, and, you guessed it, The Addams Family. Generally, these licensed games were created for the sole purpose of piggybacking on popular franchises at the time to earn a quick buck with the quickly developing video game sector. It's a smart business move, but it didn't exactly result in a utopia of quality games.

Enter Fester's Quest. Starring Uncle Fester himself, aliens have come down to Earth and have wreaked havoc on the planet. Obviously, it's up to you to grab your modular gun and blow them all away. Yes, on top of it being an Addams Family video game, it's a top-down shooter. A combination like this feels doomed from the start, and, well, it is doomed. Yet somehow, it's not quite as terrible as you might think. The actual act of running around the overworld and shooting up aliens feels remarkably functional and fun, at least for a little while. There's a fair amount of running around and exploring, finding some secrets and whatnot. However, it doesn't take long at all to see the glaring problems that accompany this game.

To begin, we have to look at the weapon system. When you kill an alien, there's a chance that they drop either a weapon upgrade or weapon downgrade mod. It doesn't really feel like upgrades or downgrades, but rather sidegrades. There are few actual viable weapon stages to be at, with some of them actively inhibiting your ability to stop anything. This is primarly thanks to the baffling design decision that bullets don't phase through walls. So if you're in a sewer tunnel, which you will be most of the time, a few firing types will do nothing but hit the wall and dissolve. So, the general cadence of the game is that you farm up weapon upgrades until you get to the objectively most effecting one, and roll with it for the rest of the game. This works alright until you kill something in a tunnel and it drops a weapon downgrade, leaving you to either take it or wait for it to despawn. All of this is capped off by the nail in the entire games coffin: Dying sends you back to the beginning.

Yes, Fester's Quest has no checkpoints. You get to keep some upgrades, such as health upgrades, but you're sent back to the very first starting screen. You have to trudge through the same long, long path of sewer systems and first person house mazes that you traveled through the first time, just to get to where you died. If this is at the final boss, tough luck. You start over. There's no way to get past this. No password system, no checkpoints, just complete rebuilding. Basically, to beat this game, you almost need a guide to minimize the amount of wrong turns you take so you can get back to your point of death as soon as possible. If it weren't for the terrible weapon system and the lack of checkpoints, this game might even be reasonably fun. Instead, any fun that you have with this game is completely eclipsed by the massive issues. It's not the worst game ever, as it does still function on a pretty reasonable level, but it's not anything that you should rush to play.