Conatct - Acquired the Shadow Thief Costume

Contact prides itself on being "quirky". One of the ways it does that is in the costume system. Throughout the game, you acquire various costumes. In your room on the ship (your main base), you can change costumes. Each costume you wear gives you different abilities. Some give you elemental abilities (Knuckle Mole, AquaShot, NitroBoost, and FlyBoy). Others let you perform certain jobs (Mr. Cuisine for cooking, Fisher King for fishing, and Shadow Thief for stealing and lockpicking). In some ways, these are like the jobs or classes of more traditional RPGs, where switching ot a new job or class adjusts your statistics and skills. The main difference is that in most RPGs, when you change jobs or classes, you keep the skills of your previous ones (a Cleric changing to a Fighter can still cast healing spells, for example). In Contact, you don't - it's a straight up change. While you have certain special skills that can be used no matter what costume you are wearing, others can only be used in the appropriate costume.

So, feeling like I'm near the end of the game, I realized I have yet to acquire the final costume - that of the Shadow Thief. I haven't figure out how I should do this yet, so I had to look it up online. Another way Contact is quirky is that it forces you to use the stylus to do a few things. Up until now, the only thing I knew I had to use the stylus for was knocking fruit out of trees. It turns out I also had to use it to scare a bird into dropping a map to the island where the guy you would give me the Shadow Thief costume lives.

So now I have the Shadow Thief costume and can go back and pick the locks on all those chests I passed up before. I'm currently at 6000 of the 10000 gold I need to buy the tune to get past Rizo island, so hopefully I'll pick up the rest while acquiring the items in the chests.