Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland looks promising, but its demo is lacking

Despite being at the proper age for it, I never caught on with Rugrats. I don’t think it really aired much with my cable provider. I do, however, know the NES quite well, and I can confirm Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is an NES game.

This is despite the fact that the game will also have an HD art style over top of the 8-Bit backbone (not available on NES) that you can toggle on or off. Allegedly. That’s not actually in the demo. All you get is a taste for is the NES version, which strikes me as an odd decision. I personally love the NES and don’t have much interest in their “HD” visuals, but anyone who prefers fidelity won’t really have much to chew on just yet.

On the other hand, there’s enough here to tell us that Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is at least shaping up to be a good NES game.

Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is heavily inspired by Super Mario Bros. 2 (the US version). You select from one of four toddlers: Chuckie, Tommy, Phil, and Lil. They have different jump heights and lifting speeds. You can do a butt pound on enemies, which wasn’t part of SMB2, but if they look comfortable enough to bop, you can also stun them to pick up and throw at enemies. 

The demo consists of one level, which proceeds through a variety of areas and concludes in a boss battle. Along the way, there are a couple of hidden areas that you need to work your gamer brain to get into. This rewards you with a Reptar coin, but what they do is a bit of a mystery at this point.

The whole demo takes about 10 minutes to complete, but judging from your typical NES game, I wouldn’t expect the whole experience to go far past one hour. But, combined with the lack of features present in the demo, it’s pretty damned underwhelming.

There is also supposedly 2-player simultaneous, and that’s maybe not a good choice. The toddlers are 24 pixels wide, meaning three sprites per child. The NES can handle eight sprites in a vertical line before some of them need to flicker. Two players would leave room for two sprites eight pixels wide. Most of the enemies in the game are at least 16 pixels wide, meaning you have already used the NES’ capacity and anything else added is going to cause flicker.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. A lot of games just accepted that they were going to flicker a whole bunch and just left us to deal with it. However, if the level in the demo is any indication, they’re planning on trying to avoid too much flicker. That means that levels are going to be rather sparsely populated to accommodate two players. I just don’t think that’s worth it. Leaving so little room for anything other than background tiles is going to hamper the challenge and make the game feel slow and lacking in dynamism. Without a greater threat to take on, what even is the point of having two players? At that point, you’re just platforming next to each other.

Of course, I couldn’t test multiplayer because there is no support for controllers. I’m not sure what kind of monster likes playing 2D platformers on a keyboard, but I’m not one of them.

What is in the demo of Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is pretty solid. It feels solid, which isn’t always guaranteed with modern NES titles. I can see it being pretty enjoyable when it gets released.

However, a lot of signs are pointing to it not being very spectacular. It kind of feels like the developers are allowing themselves to be hampered by the NES limitations rather than getting inventive and trying to push things. They seemed satisfied with Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland just being an NES platformer and don’t have ambitions beyond that.

Which is fine. There are worse things out there than just being solid. Typically, that’s enough to convince me to pick up an NES cartridge. And maybe the HD art style will add more to the experience aside from just a different way to look at things. 

However, as of now, the demo isn’t really demonstrating much, which might be concerning since Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is set to launch next month for PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and NES.