One of the things I like most about video games is how easily they let you step into someone else’s shoes. Over the years, I’ve been a lot of things, from strong superheroes to clever detectives, but never something this adorable. Enter Boris, a small boar on a journey to find his siblings. Is it worth it or should you leave this little boar alone?
A touching story
At the center of Adorable Adventures is Boris, the cute little boar that you’ll control throughout this adventure. The story is pretty touching and told in an interactive way that reminded me most of those typical children’s cartoons. Boris wants to free his mother who got stuck on an abandoned little farm, but he isn’t strong enough to do this by himself. In order to save her, he’ll need to find his siblings in the Cévennes National Park, located in France.
While exploring this National Park, a narrator explains what Boris is doing and how he’s fixing things. I really like this approach and the effort that went into it. The game is clearly meant for a younger audience, so it’s very entertaining and clever that it’s told as an interactive storybook or early Sunday morning cartoon. As the title of the game already suggests, it’s all pretty adorable and adventurous for our little Boris.
A nose for adventures
In order to progress in the game, you’ll have to pick up the scent of your siblings so you can track them down. Your nose is your main tool here, and it’s actually a pretty fun gameplay mechanic. What happens is that you’ll see a colored path made up of floating particles leading towards whatever you’re tracking. The game introduces this core idea early on, and it remains the main mechanic throughout your adventure. Now, if it was just a matter of following those trails, the game would be over in half an hour, so there’s a bit more to it than that. While following a trail, you’ll often run into stronger scents that take over everything. Certain flowers can completely block your current trail, forcing you to find and identify them first before you can filter them out. Once you recognize a scent, you can ignore it and continue following the correct one.
That’s basically the gameplay in its simplest form. You move around, pick up scents, and filter out distractions until you find your siblings somewhere in the park. To keep things from becoming repetitive, the game introduces small twists along the way. While it starts in a gorgeous, lush forest, you’ll eventually come across burned-down environments caused by humans. There’s a clear message here, but it also impacts the gameplay. Ashes interfere with your sense of smell, forcing you to approach situations differently. I liked that shift. It adds a bit of variation and gives the game something extra beyond just following trails. National parks and forests are great playgrounds, but…maybe don’t mess around with fire.
That being said, I do think the game becomes repetitive a bit too soon, especially since it only takes a couple of hours to finish. There are some small side activities, like taking pictures with hidden cameras, entering races, or jumping from swings, but they mostly feel like short distractions rather than something meaningful. I do appreciate the effort put into the worldbuilding. It has that small open-world feel and could easily be someone’s first “bigger” video game. That said, even younger players will probably notice the lack of variation after a while. It’s still a fun and adorable adventure, but it misses that extra layer to really make it stand out.
Conclusion:
Adorable Adventures is indeed very adorable, but could have been a bit more adventurous with its mechanics. It has a very clever core mechanic, but it could have used a bit more variation to really stand out. Even so, it’s still a fun little adventure, especially for younger players.
