Thanks to for the review copy for GBC
Title: Gumball in Trick or Treat Land
System: Game Boy Color
Price: $11.99
Release Date: 2025 (Itch) Feb 2026 (Steam/GBC Cart)
Story
In this goofy RPG adventure, you take control of a Gumball who ends up in a strange Halloween-themed world, and must help a scarecrow get the resources he needs to send the Gumball back home! Thus, Gumball must go across the Trick or Treat land and meet all sorts of goofy characters, help them out with their chores and even learn powerful magic to defeat some nasty treats.
By and large, this game is one where the plot isn’t gonna excite you. At the end of the day, you can probably get a vague guess of how this game will play out and how each new area’s subplot will likely end up. It’s a pretty simple RPG story that I feel was meant for an all-ages audience, and it shows, but in the midst of all that is plenty of immensely funny NPC dialogue that I was kinda bewildered by. I’ve played many RPGs that tried humor with their NPCs, and most of the time it just makes me shrug or not even flinch. So I dunno what it was that Gumball did to me, but maybe the goofy graphics combined with some legitimately funny lines made the NPCs quite memorable, and it led to me just going out of my way to bother every NPC to see what new funny line they’d come up with, and definitely is the highlight of the game.
Presentation
This is a real GBC game, made on GBC hardware, and I think it has some GB studio elements to it? I can kinda notice some of the usual font aspects I spot in other GB Studio titles, but this game has had way more work done to it in order to make the presentation rather pleasant, and also fitting for GB/SGB/GBC modes.
The whole game looks to have a crude artstyle as if someone doodled it, yes, but I feel that seems to be pretty intentional here, and helps to make the game pretty cute. From a tree stump with eyes and no mouth, goofy little candy corn pieces, and a weird Owl, this game has some pretty silly character designs that quickly grew on me, and in GBC mode I felt all the color choices were suitable for the areas you were going through, fitting the halloween vibe just fine. No, it’s not gonna have any razor sharp graphics or stunning cutscenes, but Gumball does just fine without them and maintains its goofiness proudly. The pause menu also has a cute little notebook background, and touches like that are plentiful throughout the game, including during the battle scenes.
The audio is a bit more of a mixed bag; the OST here is serviceable, but not quite as memorable, although it at least still abides by the whole goofball nature of this RPG. It can be a bit shrill, but not to the point of making me want to mute the game audio.
Gameplay
In Trick-Or-Treat Land, Gumball must wander around to hunt for missing patches to get back home, talking to various NPCs and entering battles with enemy candy along the way, Pokemon Trainer style. Yes, that also means you’ll come across candy that’ll do a 180 degree spin in milliseconds and force you into battles, even when you swear that you timed avoiding their line of sight properly.
So how do the battles work? To be honest, paper-thin, and quickly became easy to break to pieces as you progress. Your main attack is to throw treats at your opponent, and you start the game off with a focus technique where you spend a turn to recover HP. This might seem like it would just lead to a loop of an enemy hurting you, then you healing up, and that just repeating over and over into a stalemate, but the enemies can miss more than you might expect, allowing you to comfortably use your normal attacks and take out opponents.
Eventually, you do gain new techniques, making these simple fights even more trivial, almost to the point you might as well automate them. Gumball learns magic techniques that can do more damage than his normal attack (so do the enemies, of course), and you eventually get the occasional partner who can help you out. Even as the opponents in a new area ramp up in difficulty, so do you, and there’s seldom a time in which the battles will test your thinking as much as most other RPGs from the console.
The majority of this I feel can be pinned on the finite amount of enemies you can gain EXP from; there are ways to run into random enemies to grind for extra cash, but they will not give out EXP, and once you fight all the enemies with EXP that’s all you get for the game. Thus, if you just go out of your way and fight every last non-random battle you come across, rather than skipping through them, you’ll be more than prepared to deal with any new area you take on and can knock over every battle like a bowling ball. The battles are definitely the weakest part of the game because of this, with even the bosses not being all that exciting, although I at least found the animations when you miss an attack amusing.
So with an RPG’s battle system so trivial and paper-thin, what else is there to Gumball’s appeal? Surprisingly, more than you expect. I already praised the funny dialogue earlier in this review, and I feel the writing is where Gumball shines at its best. Not many games that try being funny end up making me have much of a reaction at all, since they tend to just copy memes or have poorly written jokes, but Gumball’s writing humor is just the perfect kind of surreal and goofiness that I really got excited talking to every last NPC and trying to see what new funny thing I’d come across next.
I think the goofier artwork helps to make the dialogue a lot more impactful in this manner than if Trick-Or-Treat Land just looked like a clone of Final Fantasy Legend or Last Bible. It also helps there are plenty of optional things to go do, whether that be using materials to make items, returning missing library books, and even fun upgrades like being able to turn into a speedy ghost to travel around faster, so it’s not just Point A to B with nothing extra to do, and you can even talk to a fortune telling rat if you get stuck and need to figure out how to find the next patch within reach.
Take all that into account, with the battles being pretty trivial, the exploration being rather fun and the NPCs being well worth your time talking to, Gumball in Trick-Or-Treat Land ends up being a game I really enjoyed moreso for the journey of it all rather than the depth of its RPG-ness. Sure, you have several dungeons and new regions to explore, making this a game with a few hours of fun to it, but it ends up being the dialogue and the literal friends you meet along the way which make this RPG adventure quite memorable, and one I’m super confident to say I would have enjoyed immensely growing up on my original GBC. In fact, the easier battles and funny dialogue might make this a perfect beginner RPG for kids without feeling completely dumbed down!
Conclusion
In conclusion, while it may have taken me a year to finally get around to covering this game (just in time for its debut on Evercade), I am super glad I finally got around to writing about it, since Gumball in Trick Or Treat Land has been a pretty darn charming game ever since I encountered it at the 2025 Midwest Gaming Classic, and I’m glad it finally came out proper for people to buy via Steam or a real GB cart.
It definitely isn’t gonna have the polish of other GBC RPGs from the time, but it does contain a whole lot of charm, and the funny nature of the game as a whole makes this more than worthy of a full play, and might even stick in your head for years to come. From goofy music, hillarious dialogue and a charming world well worth exploring, Gumball might be a very simple RPG, but at least it’s a fun kind of simple, at just the right length. All in all, a pretty solid homebrew GBC adventure, and definitely one to check out for RPG fans, especially those who like funny writing. I still stand by giving this game an honorable mention last year for that reason!
I give Gumball in Trick or Treat Land a 7 out of 10,