I'm actually so very glad that I never had this game as a kid because I got to enjoy the first three excellent Pajama Sam adventures in ignorant bliss as this title completely misses the mark set by those games. It is to the point that I just cannot recommend this game. The other three are classics, and this one is just a cheap imitation not deserving of the title.
Ok, that last bit was pretty harsh, but let me explain...Those first three games were made in what I would call the 'Golden Era' of Humongous Entertainment back when they were putting out some real bangers. Now, not long after the third game was released, there was a massive shakeup with the company with the founders and several of the core staff leaving, and then not long after that a bunch of corporate shenanigans occurred with H.E. being sold and traded around. This culminated in nearly half of the remaining staff getting fired....I went into this more in my review for [url=https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198007603462/recommended/294700?snr=1_5_9__402]Putt-Putt®: Pep's Birthday Surprise,[/url] which happens to be the last traditional H.E. point and click adventure game. That, like this game, was done under the Atari brand as part of a merger/acquisition, and the funk of that corporate deal is as much all over this title as it is that last Putt-Putt game.
I mean, in all fairness, I can tell that the team that was left [i]really[/i] tried...they just fell short...really, really short.
Most notably, this shortfall begins with, in my opinion, the most important element of these games: the voice acting. This isn't the first H.E. game to have a protagonist change voice actors (see the history of Putt-Putt), but it is very noticeable how this one's just didn't fill the shoes of the previous one (Pamela Segall Adlon), who did an excellent job with the character in the previous titles. It would be unfair, though, to suggest that the problem falls entirely on the voice actor for Sam. No, there are numerous other characters throughout this game who sound like they are voiced by random people given a script and certainly not voice actors that do this for a living. No doubt this is further consequence of the corporate goings on with H.E. Beyond that, part of this comes down to the writing and even the recording of these lines. There are several times where Sam or some other character's soundmixing is just off. They'll trail off a bit, or their voice will just get quiet mid-sentence. This isn't unique to the voice acting, either. There are sound effects and other poorly looped audio tracks that are painful to listen to and just sound cheaply produced. This is not to say it is all bad, though. There are some songs and other bits that have some charm. It's just overall not up to the quality it should be.
Speaking of quality, the animation and actual performance of the game is just not great. You'll look at the screen and just see certain elements are blurry as if someone didn't do a great job matching clarity in Photoshop or something. Likewise, many elements of the world will have completely different resolutions. It makes everything look so cheap, and that's not helped by the many, [i]many[/i] little characters and things sporting these completely static, one-expression faces until you might interact with them. They don't blink, move...nothing. It makes everything feel so artificial and unfinished--AND that's before you get to the actual dialogue sequences and other cutscenes where mouth movements barely match the voices and hardly any inflection or emotional performance is ever carried over to the animation at all. You might as well be looking at cardboard cutouts being shook around by someone holding them up half the time, because that's how it often looks.
...and then there's the general performance issues. This game lags. It glitches. I had no choice but to laugh at a 'bug' I encountered where these "fireflies" overlayed my entire screen when I opened the Options menu. They just floated there, doing their canned animation, playing a looped audio of some discordant chimes, while a small music sample also looped over and over, which was made all the more painful to hear given how the track didn't end with a transition back to the top. It just ended, and started over. Look, the game clearly was put out in a state of development not befitting the history of the company--probably, I imagine, to meet some deadline enforced by the new corporate overlord of the time.
All of this really sucks because I love Pajama Sam as a character and those three original games. There are elements here of a proper Pajama Sam game, but they're just not enough. Conceptually, this would be a fine inclusion in the franchise, but in execution it just ends up being this lackluster, half-baked, cheap imitation of what came before. Because of this, I just cannot recommend introducing this game to anyone's kids. Stick with the original three and maybe those game packs.
If you end up getting this via the Pajama Sam Complete Pack or the Humongous Entertainment Complete Pack, both bundles that I recommend acquiring on sale, then even in that case I would say to just not bother with this title. Again, stick with the others. Stick with the classics. This one just ain't it.
