For Halloween, my friend and I compiled a list of related games and played them, usually for a short period of time. One that we devoted more time to was Fester’s Quest for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was developed and published by Sunsoft and released in the USA in 1989. The game stars uncle Fester from the TV show The Addams Family as he attempts to prevent an alien invasion.

My friend and I took turns playing, handing off to the other when we died. We saw Fester via a top-down perspective as we explored the city around him. We were quickly greeted by enemy aliens whom Fester had to shoot to defeat. Often times they would drop pickups. These pickups varied; we most commonly came across money, but there were also weapon upgrades and downgrades, as well as usable items.

Money would allow Fester to buy hot dogs and restore his health, but he had a very limited amount of health; two hits and it was game over. Another item we came across frequently was keys. Keys allowed Fester to get into houses where family members were taking shelter. They would provide Fester with important items. One my friend and I liked was the TNT which was very helpful in defeating stronger enemies.

It didn’t take long for my friend and me to explore to small area available to us. To progress, Fester had to go underground and get to an otherwise inaccessible area of the city. We only made it out once though. The underground consisted of corridors which made it very difficult for us depending on how upgraded Fester’s gun was.

As we accumulated upgrades, Fester’s gun got stronger, faster, and sometimes had a wider bullet spread. This combination of wide bullet spread and narrow corridors was bothersome. Luckily, our enemies would sometimes drop weapon downgrades which allowed us to “fine tune” Fester’s gun to our needs. We spent a lot of time accumulating enemy drops so we maxed out a few items, but we never maxed out Fester’s gun.

So my friend and I didn’t get very far in Fester’s Quest. We both thought the game was tough, but that our deaths were mostly our fault. I wish we could’ve maxed out Fester’s gun and maybe that would have helped us underground, but I guess Sunsoft didn’t want people to max out everything very quickly. Fester’s Quest is supposed to have first-person dungeon-crawling so that makes me want to give it another go. Unfortunately, Fester’s Quest doesn’t have a save feature and each time we died, Fester began with the same amount of items and upgrades, but he always started at the very beginning, so completion is unlikely.