'Pajama Sam's Lost & Found' (as written on the store page at this time) is barely a game.
The screenshots, I should note, show 2 screenshots of a couple of the bonus games you earn from filling up the bonus meter, and then 2 screenshots of the actual game.
The actual game consists, unbelievably, of Sam riding Otto from the first Pajama Sam game, or later a cart or a forklift or whatever, from the beginning of an infinitely scrolling stage to the end. I say 'infinitely scrolling' and 'end' here because once you go far enough you just get sent back to the start of the stage again, unless you picked up all of 'Sam's Things' and then you beat the stage and it is over.
That's it for the gameplay basically. There's nothing to this game at all, and some stages can even be completed just by doing literally nothing, you just wait patiently and pick everything up because it's all on the ground. You can even beat most stages in this game just by hammering LMB for the entire duration of the level. There's nothing clever, there's no puzzles, there's no real hidden layers or depth to this game. You just watch Sam against a background, moving right, until you beat the stage.
I game overed pretty early on just to see how punishing it was, and quickly turned on infinite lives for this one. THIS game, annoyingly, has passwords, not just a level select screen, so you gotta constantly go back to the main menu then to the password menu just to go back where you were, so I said forget that and just turned on infinite lives. It still gives you a password every stage and I did appreciate that, also that I think many of the milestone stages (every 10 except 90, I dunno) have an actual 5 letter word as the password, like 'NIFTY' which I thought was... nice.
What else can I even talk about here... uh... well, the music on the title screen is recycled. I don't know where I have heard it before, but I recognize it, it's from one of these other Humongous titles. So that's cool.
I think that the inclusion of minigames as bonus games might have been added as a mitigating factor, so like when you look at the game and think "wait it's just a game where you go right" instead you might think "well at LEAST I get a memory card game with it too" - but if I wanted to play that I'd probably just play *that*. Humongous even made a minigame bundle that's JUST minigames, the Putt Putt & Fatty Bear Activity Pack which even included a card matching game that was way better than this one.
I was thinking in fact, Humongous... why didn't they just make a platformer or a puzzle platformer? I mean, this was 1998 right? Games likes Gex 2, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot were making their way onto home consoles or already on there, and Super Mario had been around for like nearly 15 years by that point. I know this game was made for very young children, like 3-8 according to the opening titles of the game, but... to make a game THIS basic and simple? To the point where you can win levels by doing LITERALLY NOTHING? That's not even a GAME at that point, that's just watching a movie.
The graphics too, while fairly good looking I think for the time, it feels like there's a lot of animation in here and a lot of situational animation for a variety of the hazards and things, I guess there's only a few different stages and stage types throughout the game. It's a small positive though, given the game is the important thing here.
The game itself feels incredibly slow. Like, this game feels like it's going at around 15fps at all times, so you move really slowly, the screen scrolls slowly, you jump slowly, gravity feels slow. It's nuts. Don't know if it's an emulation scummvm thing or what, but uh, it sure doesn't help anything with this game, that it feels exactly as exciting as staring at a landscape portrait. And not a cool one, with say Napoleonic soldiers in the distance firing at one another with cannons - no, a boring landscape portrait of an idyllic countryside. I'm trying not to resort to 'paint drying' here.
Anyway, NO I would NOT recommend this game. The little time I wasted beating this game wasn't worth it. Oh, also right at the end basically it felt like the game was insulting me for playing it, because Sam during the ending cutscene goes "but it sure was fun, wasn't it?" and I could only think no, no it was not, and you lampshading it like that isn't helping.
