One of the most popular and curious trends in the world of video games in the last decade has been horror games inspired by children’s iconography. To the enormous success of FNAF They were followed by titles such as Bendy y Poppy Playtime that became phenomena in their own right, but there are dozens—perhaps hundreds—of games with similar ideas that fail to stand out as much, although some do achieve some viral popularity and become works of cult. one of them is Amanda The Adventurer, which came out for PC in 2023, then came to Nintendo Switch and is now finally available on platforms like Xbox and PlayStation. It’s time to take a look at this curious title in this review.
In this world, Amanda the adventurer was a popular children’s educational program (clearly inspired by Dora the Explorer) issued in certain parts of Ohio. In it, an African American girl named Amanda and her friend Wooly the sheep taught children about food, animals, and more… but there was something weird about that show. The episodes began to touch on increasingly darker themes, the protagonist became violent and some of her viewers disappeared without a trace.
Can describe Amanda The Adventurer like a ‘escape room‘very elaborate. We have to watch the VHS tapes and use the clues we get from watching them to find more. Some allow us to advance the plot and reach one of the five endings it has, while others reveal details about the mysterious plot that surrounds this children’s ‘show’.
The entire game takes place in an attic with a television on which we play the video tapes and many other objects with which we can interact to solve the clues they give us, such as a toy kitchen, a huge clock and a water leak. . These puzzles are not necessarily difficult and most tell us exactly what we have to do, but there are a couple that don’t have much logic. They made us wander around before tempting us to look at a guide on the internet.
Despite those few obstacles, we progressed very smoothly in the adventure and in less than three hours we had already completed all the main endings. Getting out all the “secret tapes” and the final ending required another hour and a little hint from someone who had already beaten the game and pointed us in the right direction. Given the limits that the game sets and that the solutions to everything are found within a single room, it is not an impossible task without help.
For a horror game, Amanda The Adventurer It didn’t scare us much. In one of the endings we can see a creature with a somewhat terrifying design (although not necessarily original) and there are a few “sudden scares”, but nothing that prevented us from sleeping at night. Of course, there are some slightly disturbing scenes and we suffer a lot for poor Wooly, who does not deserve the hardships he had to go through… Or maybe he does?
More interesting was discovering details about the “lore” or mythology behind the story. If we just go for the endings, we won’t find out what’s really happening. But if we pay attention to all the details, read the documents we find and show curiosity, we are going to reveal a dark plot of… it is better not to say more, it is a ‘spoiler’. This is the kind of game that serves as bait for that industry of YouTubers that was born with FNAF and who are dedicated to analyzing even the smallest detail of a game to discover its hidden history.
We cannot deny that it works. We found almost all the secrets it keeps Amanda The Adventurer in one sitting because we were intrigued. However, it is not the best experience in the world. The PS5 version of the game is plagued by localization errors into Spanish, we found important elements for the plot that were untranslated and even some writing errors.
As if that were not enough, the way the cursor works is very annoying. This is always present in the middle of the screen and gets in the way quite a bit when we don’t need it. Also, trying to move it using the control sticks is quite imprecise. We also encountered several bugs—one of which caused us to lose several minutes of progress—and constant glitches that made moving objects around the attic a pain.
It must also be said that it is not a particularly “pretty” game. The graphics in the attic are quite generic and the children’s show itself is in the same style as the early CGI animated series of the 90s, which look pretty bad today. This is no doubt done on purpose to reflect a certain era and evoke specific emotions, but it also has the advantage of being cheaper to make.
Amanda The Adventurer It’s a fun and interesting distraction, but ultimately it’s just one more example of the piles of titles that caught on to the popularity of FNAF and his imitators. It’s the kind of game that becomes an obsession for a couple of days while we find all the secrets and watch videos about its lore on the internet. A sequel is coming that may put the spotlight back on Amanda and Wooly, we hope the poor sheep doesn’t suffer so much this time.
This review is made with a digital copy of Amanda The Adventurer for PlayStation 5 provided by DreadXP. This game is also available for PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, mobile, and PC via Steam and itch.io.
