From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Quick Impressions: "Fester's Quest" (NES)

So here we have another game with which I was fated to do battle: Fester's Quest for the NES.

Our encounter was a long time coming.

My history with this game began way back in 1990, when it came into my possession in a way that I don't remember (my guess is that either my brother or I bought it on a whim). All I can say is that my experience with it didn't go well. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, even after reading the manual, and I struggled to advance through the game's underground sections because it was impossible to fire higher-powered weapons in narrow passages and I couldn't mash fast enough to take out all of the self-replicating slimes and bullet-sponge frogs.

I couldn't make any progress, and after failing repeatedly for about a half hour or so, I switched off the game in frustration and decided to abandon it and never go near it again.

Ever since then, my exposure to Fester's Quest has been limited to passively watching YouTube personalities and Twitch streamers play through it. And I have to see: Seeing others struggle with this game certainly didn't inspire me to play it. Rather, it only served to reinforce my belief that this was a game that I desperately needed to avoid (for the sake of my own sanity).

But by the end of 2025, something had changed: My "Games to Play" list had dried up (as I mentioned in my Game Boy Double Dragon piece), and I was looking to fill the void with any games that I could find. I was especially interested in finding games that could challenge me in a way that modern games couldn't.

That's when the little voice in my head whispered to me the name "Fester's Quest" and subsequently inferred that I was avoiding the game because I was a coward. "You're scared of this game, aren't you?" it continued to ask me in a needling manner.

And in truth, I was. I imagined that playing through this game would cause me nothing but pain and misery, and I wasn't looking to endure a challenge that entailed not trying to overcome obstacles but instead trying to overcome a game's high number of anger- and frustration-inducing shortcomings.

But the fact of the matter was that the gauntlet had been thrown down and I'm not someone who will run from a challenge. So I decided that it was time for me to face my fear and finally attempt to beat Fester's Quest.

And now that I've done so, I'd like to share with you all of the thoughts that popped into my head during my hours-long experience with the game.

 First I have to talk about Fester's Quest's reputation, which, I've found, is well-earned.

Now, I'm sure that you fine folks have seen plenty of reviews and videos that complain about this game's flaws, and honestly, I don't have any personal complaints to add to the list. But what I can do is give context to the game's bad design choices and explain how they're all very much deliberate and intended to suit the developers' goal.

The truth is that Fester's Quest isn't labyrinthine in nature, as you'd expect from a game that was made using Blaster Master's engine. It's instead entirely linear, and its quest is basically a straight line to the end. There are three or four divergent paths along the way, sure, but none of them lead anywhere; each of them is simply an elaborate dead end. And if you do ever break from the path, it's only because you need to move two or three screens over and obtain an item from a nearby house.

So this game isn't a large-scale Metroid-like action-adventure that you have to spend days or even weeks exploring, no. Rather, it's a largely straightforward top-down shoot-'em-up that can be realistically beaten in about an hour and half to two hours in a first play-through.

The designers were very much aware of this fact, so they implemented a bunch of punitive game elements and nasty mechanics and did whatever they could to stop you from being able to beat the game quickly and thus discover that there really wasn't that much to it.

Each design choice was made to meet that aim:

• They made the game's passages narrow so that your shots wouldn't fit within them and you'd struggle to hit enemies and consequently have to constantly backtrack and take forever to advance.
• They programmed the enemies to be damage-sponges so that you couldn't destroy them without backing up and causing more of them to spawn.
• They included weapon-downgrade icons to severely hamper your ability to deal with enemies and otherwise to clog up narrow paths with unwanted items and force you to have to stop and wait ten seconds for each icon to despawn.
• They refrained from implementing diagonal movement because they knew that doing so would allow you to more effectively engage with enemies and more easily slip by them.
• They gave bosses a ridiculous amount of hit points so that the battles would drag on forever and there'd be more time for you to screw up and die.
• And they place you back at the game's starting point whenever you Game Over so that you're forced to spend 10-15 minutes slowly and wearily re-traversing the same dozen or so unnecessarily long, tediously designed underground areas.

And it's all intended to waste as much time as possible and make you feel as though the game is way longer than it actually is.

If you know what to do, you can beat this game in about 40 minutes, and you'll be at it for that long only because of the absurd amount of time it takes to farm for weapon upgrades and work your way around the damage sponge-enemies. Really. it'd be a 20-minute game if it were designed reasonably and in a way that respected the player's time.

All of the game's terrible design choices make sense when they're viewed in this context.

 For those reasons, I had a very frustrating first experience with the game. I died a number of times and consequently wasted hours re-traversing the same spaces, and because those spans were so intensely boring, I spent them complaining about the game in my head and wondering what I'd say about it if I ever wrote about it on this blog (which I didn't think I was actually going to do).

And in the end, I was left feeling really sour. I was pissed at the game for how annoying it was, and I was glad to be done with it.

The problem is that I wasn't done with it.

I returned to it the next day because I felt bad about how I beat it. Specifically I felt guilty about the way in which I cleared the last one-third of the final area: Because I was low on potions and health (and I forgot that I had nooses), I was worried that I wouldn't be able to deal with the upcoming enemies, which I assumed to be the area's strongest, so I resorted to intentionally spawning three bouncing eyeballs and keeping them onscreen, behind me, as I advanced. This, I knew, would keep the game at its object-limit and prevent any other enemies from spawning.

I did that all the way till the end.

But because I felt that using such a tactic tainted my victory (even after I tried to justify it by framing it as a fair response to the game's "unreasonable design decisions"), I went back and beat the game in a wholly legitimate manner. Doing so allowed me to feel more satisfied with my performance.

And I'm surprised to find myself saying that I actually felt more positive about the game than I did during my first play-through.

I'll have more to say about this later on.

 What's sad about Fester's Quest is that it has a lot of good qualities but can't help but waste them. Take what it does visually, for example: It's a nice-looking game, but it doesn't leave you feeling that way because of how unvaried its environments are. It ultimately comes off as mundane-looking because it only has four environment types, and two of them comprise 90% of the game's world.

The labyrinthine first-person 3D areas, which are found within gray buildings, are visually interesting, yeah, but they're confusing in presentation and largely empty (the only 3D area that contains anything of value is the first one, which hides a health-extension power-up in one of its dead ends). They, like so many of the game's other areas, only exist to waste your time and create situations in which it takes way longer than it should to get to the next destination.

The game's bosses are cooler-looking than Blaster Master's, but sadly they're nowhere near as varied as the latter's. They're all pretty similar in how they operate: They simply walk back and forth and regularly stop to fire projectiles in predictable ways. Fester's gunshots barely hurt them, and you can't hope to beat them merely by abusing health and invisibility potions, so you have no choice but to tactically assault them with missiles (which feel as though they were included only because someone on the design team realized, late in the game's development, that it was near-impossible to defeat the majority of bosses with Fester's normal weapons) and hope that enough of them connect (in most instances, a number of them fly around aimlessly before despawning or otherwise chase after the bosses' projectiles).

The final boss (the alien ship computer), conversely, is a joke. The room that it inhabits has safe spots in its corners, and you can pretty much trivialize the fight by standing in a corner and launching missiles at the boss' core. I'm not going to complain about that, though, because I feel, after gauging the boss' attacks, that the battle would be nightmarish if it forced you into a position in which you had to dodge the screen-filling projectiles and somehow find space to execute your attacks.

The boss battles represent the best part of the game, but still, they could have been much better. Had the designers given the bosses unique movement-patterns and cut their HP-totals in half, the battles with them would have been more exciting and ideal in length and thus very satisfying.

It's the same story with the game's music: It's great, as you would expect SunSoft music to be, and it's jamming every step of the way, even when its ominously toned, but there simply isn't enough of it. During your adventure, you mostly hear the same two tunes in alteration, and after a while, these tunes become as repetitive as the environments, and likewise they become mundane and lose their ability to keep you engaged.

Still, they're absolutely high-tier 8-bit video-game tunes. It's just too bad that they're wasted on Fester's Quest. They deserve to be in a better game.

 The game's difficulty is, as it's purported to be, pretty high. But really, once you know where to go and where all of the items are located, the difficulty reduces significantly. The challenge, then, boils down to two specific elements: the later boss battles and the final area, which can be a terror if you don't have upgraded weapons, more than two health units, and an ample amount of health potions, invisibility potions, and Lurch-summoning nooses (which act as screen-nukes).

But if you come into any of them fully equipped, you'll have a good chance of enduring whatever's thrown at you.

And I have to say: It's nice that the game replenishes your health and fully restocks your items after you defeat a boss. It's a shockingly generous act from a game that's otherwise always trying to punish you or put you at a deficit.

 Honestly, Fester's Quest isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Coming in from Blaster Master, I assumed that it would be incredibly labyrinthine and confusing because of how unvaried its environmental design is. It really isn't. Instead it's, as I said, highly linear and pretty straightforward.

It's more playable than I thought it'd be, and actually, to my great surprise, it has some moments when it's enjoyable. It's too bad that it doesn't work well as a game, overall, because I can definitely the potential that it had. If it didn't have all of the stated design issues, its linearity could have actually worked in its favor. It could have been used as the basis for a more-fitting formula: stage-by-stage action.

The designers could have dropped the majority of the underground areas, many of which are obviously there simply to pad out the game's length, and expanded upon the overworld and 3D areas and break them into individual stages. This approach would have allowed them to make a short-and-sweet top-down action game in the vein of Jakal or the company's own Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Instead they gave us a cruelly designed, highly repetitive shoot-'em-up that's basically a collection of Blaster Master's worst parts. Why they did so, I don't know. It could have been that they lacked ambition or resources, or maybe they were up against a tight deadline.

The actual reason will probably remain a mystery.

The only thing that we can say for sure is that SunSoft's efforts resulted in a game that's way under par for a company that was producing multiple classics at that particular point in time (the late-80s/early-90s period). It's a game that's only memorable to us because of how torturously designed it is and how much it tormented us.

Still, it's not a terrible game. I mean, I would never say that it's a good game or that I really enjoy playing it, no, but I can tell you that it's really not, as it's purported to be, one of the worst video games ever made. What it is, rather, is a disappointingly middling action game that intentionally sabotages itself too much to be enjoyable for more than a few minutes at a time. And that's too bad because it had the ingredients necessary to actually be a solidly designed, fun-to-play action game.

For whatever reason, though, its creators weren't interested in getting it to that place.