Mini Review: Rugrats: Adventures In Gameland (PS5) - Fun and Frustration in This Nostalgia Trip

Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is a flawed throwback to platformers of days past. Aesthetically, the teams at The MIX Games & Wallride have absolutely nailed it. If you grew up watching Rugrats, you’ll be swimming in nods to the cartoon, ranging from characters, to environments, to props. And there's even a filter allowing the game to transform into an 8-bit treasure.

This side-scroller sees Tommy Pickles & friends collecting coins to unlock a Reptar item trapped in Tommy’s TV. You control one of Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, or Lil, all while swapping on the fly, a nice touch. They have separate health pools and different stats too, making swapping important if you need someone with a better jump distance for example.

Any great platformer lives and dies by its controls, and that’s an issue here. Basic platforming is adequate, but more elaborate levels call for climbing, jumping, and combat together, asking for a level of precision the game simply doesn’t have. Screen transitions spawn enemies in a way that allows for cheap shots before you move, they respawn too quickly, and the controls don’t handle multitasking of combat and platforming well. Climbing and item manipulation suffer the most here, working poorly, or sometimes not at all. Boss fights have a tendency to combine all of these aspects into one, making things even worse.

Luckily, level design is good, offering sprawling environments with numerous secrets and alternate pathways. Plus the levels feel unique from one another. The kitchen has an industrial aesthetic, the attic more of a haunted house, and so on. They brilliantly take mundane, everyday items and extrapolate them into fantastical environs, much like you’d expect from the mind of a child.

Cumulatively, you end up with a title brimming with nostalgia and good ideas, but controls that hold the affair back.