Developer: Sunsoft
Publisher: Sunsoft
Release Date: 1989
(That is some appealing cover art. I wish the game actually had the mansion in it.)
There are some things in life that annoy me far more than they should, such as when IGN released their list of the top 100 NES games well over a decade ago. It was fairly obvious that they did not play the nearly 800 North American games for the system and create an honest list. They simply took the most famous ones and threw in a couple of ultra-rare ones for good measure. It’s something I should really stop thinking about. I know video game lists are meaningless. Well, besides mine anyway. I suppose it bothers me because their rankings seemed to be based more on memory than merit. How else do you explain IGN ranking a game like Fester’s Quest, one that’s much more famous for its flaws than its strengths, all the way up at #45? Either the folks at IGN hadn’t played it since the early 90s or there just aren’t as many good NES games as I thought there were. Honestly, I don’t like either of those options. I’m ranking around 800 of them, so having so few good games to play would be a depressing slog. So, I played Fester’s Quest at the end of 2022 just a few weeks within me writing this review. I’m not clouded by nostalgia and can talk about it honestly. Sorry IGN, but Fester’s Quest is just not that good. It’s not the worst game on your list, but it sure is a flawed gaming experience.
Fester’s Quest is a game that every gamer around my age played and enjoyed for about fifteen minutes. It starts out looking like a Zelda inspired adventure game. That’s certainly an exciting prospect when most licensed games at the time were boring side scrollers. Fester’s gun is upgradable, and there are items and money to collect. Why, this game looks like it’s going to be complex and interesting. There are even other Addams Family characters to find in random houses that give Fester helpful items. Sadly, if you make it very far past the first boss, which is no easy feat in itself, you start to realize that all the complexity is just facade. It doesn’t get much more basic and repetitive than Fester’s Quest, which is really strange considering it’s a game where Uncle Fester is fighting aliens. How can a game with such an interesting premise end up so boring?
(I thought this was really cool when I was eight)
Some of this game’s flaws are very famous. Fester’s gun is only effective at its highest level, but getting all the upgrades can take a while and there are enemy drops that lower the gun’s level. If you get a pile of enemy drops at once, it’s best just to stand still and wait for them to disappear. What kind of a game makes you scared to pick up items? It’s also famously difficult in large part to the constantly respawning enemies. I like a good challenge, but not a boring one. The main difficulty in Fester’s Quest comes from being too slow to avoid the onslaught of enemies. There are a few times where strategy and skill come into play, but it’s mostly just slowly inching forward while constantly shooting. I highly recommend using a turbo controller for this game. Yes, even though I don’t like it much I still think you should play it. Play everything!
(Usually I love games with keys and hot dogs. I guess there's always an exception.)
What surprised me the most about this game, however, is just how shallow it is. Sure, it looks like an expansive world, but it’s depressingly linear. A street scene leads to a hole which leads to a sewer. There are a few houses to visit, but they are on the normal paths and only need to be visited once. All the sewers look the same and mostly have the same enemies. Even when a new enemy is introduced there will soon be a thousand of them making the novelty wear off quickly. The bosses are hidden in Wizardry-esque 3D dungeons, but each one is comprised of gray, smooth walls and floors. Even a couple of the bosses are strangely similar which is sad since there are only six of them. Even the UFO at the end of the game plays just like any other sewer section with different graphics. Everybody hates the sewer sections, and yet by the halfway point they start to take over the whole game. The streets only exist to house items and give Fester a chance to buy a life restoring hot dog. Never underestimate the healing powers of meat in old video games. There are less items to collect as it goes on, so by the end it’s just pop into one sewer, kill a thousand slime monsters, pop back out of the sewer, and go to the boss maze.
(Sewers made a big comeback after TMNT got big. I'm not joking. I was there!)
Sunsoft has a good reputation with retro gamers, but honestly, I’m not sure if I like any of their NES games all that much including Blaster Master. Fester’s Quest fits into that Sunsoft mold of taking way too long to finish because it all has to be done in one sitting. I don’t know what they were thinking making a game that takes hours and hours to complete without being able to stop and come back later. In Fester’s Quest when you die you go all the way back to the beginning. You keep your items, and the bosses stay dead, but you still have to slowly trek back to where you left off. If you think those sewers are tedious the first time, just think about having to go through them a dozen times while your weekend quickly melts away. I love video games more than anything, but I don’t want to get stuck in a tedious loop for hours. It gets old fast.
As you can already tell, Fester’s Quest is not going to rank particularly high. Sure, it’s in my top 45 NES games, but that’s just because I haven’t ranked 45 yet. It’s not quite bad enough to fall into the red section, but It’s still in the middle of the blue section. It’s not as tedious as Hogan’s Alley so I’ll give it that. Hopefully more and more NES games I review will end up in the green section. I play so many bad obscurities on here because the great games have been reviewed to death, but I might play some classics in the near future just to remind me why it’s my favorite console of all time. I still believe in you NES. I just hope after I review them all I don’t feel differently.
https://1drv.ms/w/s!AvR1pVOGMfAniEZub_KTCsR7twUv?e=GCICZP
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