Remembering Fester's Quest

Owning a Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a library of games that delved you into many, many fantasy worlds, but when it came to the NES there was a fine line between normal looking games, and games that were just plain weird. Several years ago I looked back on Monster Party with its bizarre monster bosses and levels, but Fester's Quest was also unique in being part of the strange category.

Fester's Quest starts you off with an intro showing uncle Fester of the Addams Family minding his own business laying around at night when a sudden alien invasion hits the streets of his hometown, and with his trusty blunderbuss in hand, he sets off to fight the alien horde that gets in his way.

So how was the gameplay? Well you're in a topdown perspective only able to walk in four directions, and shooting any enemies that appear offscreen. These could be toads, floating heads that shoot out bugs, or multiplying green blobs (the worst!) and to start, you have only two points of health to start with.

Nintendo Power even covered the beginning part of the game in a 1989 issue

You're not just shooting things however, to progress you'll eventually have to make your way into some dark sewers to make it to another part of town where a boss resides. This is where item management comes in to play. By visiting certain houses around town, you can acquire items like the bulb (to light up the sewers), a noose (summoning Lurch to take out enemies on screen) or a potion, allowing you to regain lost health.

Upon entering a building where a boss resides, the game goes into a first person mode as you have to make it through a maze to go through the right door, and sometimes touching a certain wall may give you an extra hit of health.

I do have a few nitpicks about this game, and its the fact that there are respawning enemies, the toads in particular have a faster moving speed than you, and if you're not equipped properly, they can overwhelm you getting you a game over, and having to start all the way back at the beginning area of the game.

Another is the fact that you start with so low health, you really have to go out of your way to survive at the beginning of the game, and for Addams Family fans, this may be out of their league to play. I mainly came back to this game time and time again because of how weird it was for an NES game, but the difficulty can take away from replayability.

Granted that this was made by the same developers that created Blaster Master, the difficulty is certainly there. Because of this though, I've never managed to go through the entire game to see the ending.

Overall, Fester's Quest was a nice blend of being one of those strange NES games while having that trademark "Nintendo Hard" difficulty that made the NES so memorable. If you haven't played it, definitely give it a look as its an interesting piece of Addams Family history.

Have you played Fester's Quest? Leave a comment and as always, see you next article!