Children are more intelligent and curious than the game industry gives them credit for

Just because something is made for children doesn’t mean the quality has to suffer

I have always loved video games, but before I made them my full-time job, I worked as a teacher for over a decade. The age group I taught for the longest is 4-6-year-olds, and you would be surprised by what someone that young can do. Their brains are not as developed as adults, but if you spend enough time with them, you understand more about how their minds work, and how much they are truly capable of when demonstrated correctly.

My students knew that I love video games, and as my school was a private one, many of the kids in my class had a Nintendo Switch. They would often tell me about the games they loved playing. Classics like Mario, Pokémon, and Kirby were all popular games, and parents would often give me Kirby-themed goods after I spoke to their kids so much about it. The thing with all the games on that list is that none of them are easy. Yet, just like me, they jumped on goombas, collected Pokémon, and took down Whispy Woods. Even after I left school, kids would send me pictures of their islands in Animal Crossing.

My point is that 4-year-olds play the same games we adults do. They may not be taking on Ornstein and Smough, but there are plenty of games that are ‘suitable for all ages.’ I bring all this up because back in April I was forced to play Peppa Pig: World Adventures and of the one hundred games we’ve reviewed at GLHF, it remains the worst. Not because as a 33-year-old adult I didn’t enjoy playing it, but because my 4-6-year-olds wouldn’t enjoy it either.

This is exactly how I felt when I saw four games aimed at children at Gamescom 2023. For the sake of fairness, I will talk about the one I thought was decent first. Paw Patrol World seems a decent age-appropriate romp. There’s not much game to it, you are a Paw Patrol dog, and you run – or drive – around town sorting out people’s problems, and picking up collectibles to unlock different goodies. Everything is voice-acted, as well as having the text on screen which would help with reading development. There is also a co-op mode so you can play with your kids, which I felt was a nice touch.

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The game skews to the younger end of Paw Patrol’s audience – if your child is 4 or above it might be pushing it – but is a great way to interact with your toddler and help them build motor skills, reading, socialization etc. Switching between dogs and cars is very easy, and I think very young kids will get a kick out of that, even if they never manage to complete a single side quest.

It was when we aged up in games that the cracks really started to show. I will continue going from best to worst. Transformers: Earthspark - Expedition is bad. However, it is the least bad of the other three children’s games I saw. It had a decently sized open world with a nice variety of design to it. You could turn into a car and speed around it. The map also seemed to have a decent amount of objectives and things to do. However, it has a number of issues that can’t be overlooked.

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The screen-tearing is egregious and makes it hard to see what’s going on. Your attacks have a tiny reach meaning you have to be right up in the enemy’s face in order to strike. Enemies have no telegraphing of attacks making them impossible to dodge. Essentially it was a mess technically, and the combat was disappointing. Young children are capable of doing real-time combat, look again at Mario, Kirby, Pikmin, or Zelda, but this isn’t going to impress them.

Next up is Jumanji: Wild Adventures and now we’re getting into the ‘no redeemable factors category’. This is an isometric 3D platformer featuring the cast from the Jumanji remakes. The level design is poor, with enemies thrown around wherever, and there are a number of things that shoot fire and explode. Worse than this is that there is a lives system, and there is friendly fire. Friendly fire, in a game for 5-year-olds. I ended up murdering my partner several times by mistake, and they then had to sit by and watch me play alone for the next 10 minutes. This is not something a kid would be able to suffer through. Ten minutes to a child might as well be their life span in terms of patience.

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We aren’t even on to the worst of the bunch, which was actually the game I had the highest hopes for. The Grinch: Christmas Adventures features The Grinch who is cool, and is a 2D platformer, which is also cool. However, the game is irredeemably bad. The platforming is horrendous. Your jump is both short and slow, while the platforms move very fast. To combat that they have put checkpoints all over the place. However, dying still doesn’t feel good. When someone who plays games like Super Meat Boy for a living, can’t clear an early game jump within three tries, you know that something is wrong. The saving grace is that it comes with the original book How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which is a cracking read. However, the book is likely cheaper than the game to begin with.

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If you only take one thing away from this, it’s that children deserve better. You can’t just slap a known face on a game and then put the minimum effort into developing it because “it’s for kids”. Children are smarter than you give them credit for, and they know a turd when they see one even if it’s dressed like the Grinch. This message of course goes out to the parents, and grandparents, not the kids themselves. When you see a game with a familiar face, check online before picking it up. More than likely your kids would rather play a Kirby game even if they don’t know the powerful pink blob yet.