Adorable Adventures is a baby wild boar simulator/adventure-platformer kind of thing. One thing is for sure, baby wild boars are indeed adorable and this is quite an adventure. The only thing I can compare it to is Away: The Survival Series, another gentle, charming game featuring a cute creature and some deceptively clever and challenging gameplay.
Playing as boy baby boar Boris, your main tasks are to search for and find your six siblings and rescue your mother. Other tasks include finding baby rabbits, chasing down adult rabbits, extinguishing fires, tidying up litter as well as some challenging checkpoint races to break up the exploration.
As you can see from the screenshots the Unreal Engine does an excellent job of supplying a rich, organic and varied landscape in which Boris lives–the flowing water being particularly eyecatching. Boris's movement is beautifully animated, oozing character and boar-ish mannerisms and movements like snorting, scratching and sneezing.
Boris probably sneezes because he's always sniffing out new flowers, plants and other, less charming items (like poo). You make him sniff scent trails by pressing 'RB', and tracking the required number of flowers etc. is quite a task. Scent trails of different things obviously mix and cross over, and this can complicate tracking down the one you want–it's a clever mechanic but can be confusing.
New areas are unlocked by finding your brothers and sisters (as the group grows it allows you to charge down bigger barriers and catapult to higher ledges), and the landscape varies from leafy woodland to rocky hilltop and a post-forest fire ravaged area that's all ash and dust–which obviously makes Boris sneeze and complicates tracking down a scent. In a moment of sheer genius, the developer allows you to roll boulders in order to clear the ash in front of Boris so you can sniff out items in this apocalyptic area accurately.
Boris can get into trouble and get stuck in some really strange places. I'd love to say this is typical of a baby boar but it's also down to Boris clipping through scenery and being unable to find his way back through. This is quite common if you explore a lot, and the developers supplied a reset 'Unstuck' option in the pause menu, which returns you to where the game starts.
One thing I'd like to commend the designers for is that, once discovered, all six of your siblings run around with you rather than just being "found" and invisibly added to your party like SO many lazy RPGs. This adorable, clumsy gang can create utter mayhem, breaking plant pots and tipping garbage bins over, meaning you have to tidy up after them.
Adorable Adventures is priced at £16.99, and while the game isn't the longest (3-5 hours) I think its fun gameplay and heartwarming nature will keep Mums, Dads and Kids happy. There's even a handy game save that actually saves your progress exactly where you are, so no trotting back over previously covered ground. It's difficult to imagine how Wild Sheep Studio could have given Boris more things to do without giving him wings, and the action never really loses its charm as just making Boris sprint around a bend (I can testify that his legs skedaddle just like a real domestic piglet) will make you smile‐unless you're a sad, soulless miserable git, that is.
Wild Sheep Studio, PQube and PressEngine