A while ago, I was talking about CLeM, a cute and simple little puzzle game that was enjoyable while it was there but was just a bit too short for the price. It was a fun and fine game with interesting puzzles even if it included some backtracking to draw out the pace issues; it just wouldn’t be my first choice for anyone who wants to get into the genre of puzzle games. Well, now I found myself feeling like I spoke too soon, as Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland has proven itself to be a decent platforming game, but given its $25 price tag for only a little bit over an hour of gameplay is just not worth it.
A group of babies named Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, and Lil are hanging out in Tommy’s home, only for Tommy’s big three-year-old sister Angelica to come in and claim herself as their boss. However, their attention is taken away from Angelica to focus more on the TV advertising a new Reptar video game, highlighting coin collecting, boss beating, and a mystery behind a Reptar-branded door that requires Reptar coins. With his baby brain logic, Tommy deduces that he can find the video game by unlocking the Reptar door if he gathers enough Reptar coins. Knowing there are Reptar coins around the house, Tommy decides that “a baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do” and he and the babies go around the house to look for said coins. What we see as normal home objects and locations become big lands of giant forests, dreamy landscapes, and even a haunted magical castle.
Getting the game’s biggest strength out of the way, the main gimmick this game has is that you can swap between an HD version and an 8-bit version of the game. Considering how this isn’t even a remake of an old NES game and was just something they wanted to do, that’s a big level of dedication shown to the game. The HD versions have colors and animations popping off on every cylinder, making it look as close to the show as possible with backgrounds filled with all the different elements to fit into the environment it’s trying to portray. However, when it’s 8-bit, the game turns into an NES game. Color palettes become limited as everything becomes more pixelated, with curves getting blockier as the background becomes less complicated. It all plays into the strength of the game’s art style, making everything look more legitimate as if it was actually on an old NES. Even the menus, cutscenes, map, and dialogue sections are redone in 8-bit, giving two different art styles that are both pleasant to look at and explore.
It’s more than just the gameplay sections that fully change. The music is just as fluent in HD and 8-bit. The music in HD form is more traditional music that would be fitting for exploring worlds as babies. It has a welcoming vibe dotted with electric beeps and boops, acting like the babies are experiencing a video game for the first time. These beeps only become much more apparent in the 8-bit style, feeling much more at home on an old NES game, or an in-universe ad promoting a retro game console. Either way, the music not only fits with the theme of the Rugrats, but also the graphics style it’s trying for. Given how they decided to create a physical version for the NES, that’s just another huge level of love and admiration the developers have for this project.
Now for the gameplay, that’s where this game starts to show some problems. The gameplay is a mixture of the Ducktales and Super Mario Bros 2 (the Doki Doki Panic reskinned one, not the hard Japan-exclusive one) NES games. The Ducktales game influenced this game with it being an open map of a couple of stages that, when once fully completed, unlock one final challenge level before beating the game, and Super Mario Bros 2 game is part of this game with how the basic gameplay is based on it. You control one of four different babies to jump, climb, throw, and ground pound through levels, with one having different stats. Some babies can jump higher than others, and others can lift and throw items and enemies better and faster. Lil even has a small floating move like Peach had. Each baby counts as a life, and once you lose all lives as them, they’re gone for the rest of the game. However, you can get cookies, and they can count as extra lives. Also, on all but the hardest difficulties, you can switch babies and their separate health bars whenever you want, making things easier for you, and letting you save select babies for hard platforming sections or bosses.
Before reaching the boss in each stage, you need to unlock the boss gate with a screwdriver. Usually, these are pretty easy to find, with you having to go do a lap around the level to find it, and once you reach the boss gate, the game gives you other paths to go, with one leading you to the screwdriver and the other leading to the gate. It can be a bit annoying to go back and forth, but it’s not that bad. The HD version even gives items an offscreen indicator to let you know that it’s there.
The second collectible you need to find is Reptar coins. On higher difficulties, the number of coins you need to get goes all the way up to collecting every single Reptar coin on the hardest difficulty. Given how even the middle difficulty only allows you to miss three coins, you’re going to be combing through the levels a bit more, and this can show the game’s flaws a bit more. The pick-up and throwing enemies and objects mechanic can be a bit cumbersome to pull off. There’s a moment in the forest level where it just wasn’t letting me pick up the one object you needed to bounce off of, doesn’t even let you know that it could be picked up in the first place, and had to use either a baby with good jumping skills to get up there or bounce off an enemy or block to get up there, and if they were destroyed, requiring you to go off-screen and back to try again, or to go back to the start of the section to use that same flower that has no indication it could be picked up to go up outside the tree.
It’s design decisions like that which highlight the game’s weaknesses in controls and game design. Sometimes it can just feel more annoying than actually an interesting challenge trying to find what the game is specifically asking of you to do. The final level gauntlet shows off just how much this game still has that old hard NES charm, but yet, even with this, it’s still easy to get through as by this point if you’re swapping babies out, you have multiple babies with multiple hit points and lives to help you get through it. It’s only really a challenge on the hardest difficulty, but then the problem goes in the opposite direction and becomes too hard and tedious it stops being fun.
Finally, the real nail in the coffin of me confidently recommending this game is the price tag. Now, $25 for a licensed video game isn’t that bad an offer, but when the content can be completed within an hour, maybe within 2 hours if you’re struggling on a bad day and are being plagued with lag for some reason, that feels a lot harder to justify. If it’s of any consolation, it makes me feel better about recommending the previously mentioned CLeM and saying it’s worth it if you like puzzle games, as despite the price tag still feeling just a tad too much, it’s still more versatile and offers more intriguing content for its 3 hours of content and so, which is twice as much as you would get here when this game is around $10 more.
Overall, Rugrats Adventure in Gameland was just disappointing. At first glance, it looks and sounds good and feels like an actual Rugrats episode, but once you get into the game, you find that it’s incredibly unbalanced in terms of difficulty, even with the difficulty selection option, and even on the easier difficulties can snag a couple of lives from you with how obtuse the mechanics can be at times or with enough enemy spam. Add in that it only is going to be around for about 90 minutes on average for $25, and it’s hard to give it a recommendation. Next time, can we just get remasters of the PlayStation 1 Rugrats games, please? I’m sure that even just a simple re-release collection pack of Search for Reptar, Studio Tour, and Totally Angelica would be better and more worth the $25 price tag than this new, pretty-looking game that just doesn’t play well.
