I typically play games for one of two reasons: to enjoy a story or to simply relax and unwind. Billed as a “relaxing third person adventure game”, Adorable Adventures puts you in the hooves of Boris, a curious wild boar who’s trying to reunite with his family. Despite the cosy premise, I unfortunately found the game anything but relaxing thanks to a mix of awkward handling, obtuse navigation and repetitive mechanics.
Boris himself is quite sweet: he’s a small boar piglet (I’m not a zoologist, I assume baby boars are piglets), and although he doesn’t speak there’s a cheeky air about him. After a devastating forest fire tears across the national park he calls home, Boris finds himself separated from his siblings and mother. You’ll journey with him to find his siblings, join up with them and then use their combined power to rescue mum.
It’s a pretty game at times, with a lifelike look to everything without feeling hyper-realistic. Boris’ little legs carry him along at a jaunty trot and the less-scorched parts of the park are full of life and colour. Your adventure is narrated by an unseen park ranger which almost makes it feel like a documentary at times, and is accompanied by subtle but enjoyable music, with my personal highlight being the fast-paced drums that kick in when you and your siblings start a stampede.
Each sibling needs to be found before you can add them to your pack, and this is where the game’s core mechanic comes into play: scent tracking. Boris has got a surprisingly powerful nose, able to pick up the smell of a single dandelion from halfway across the park. By following your nose you’re able to find everything from plants and trash to your family and other wildlife. While a fun idea, it’s annoying in practice as he can’t tune out any smells until he’s found and located multiples of that particular item.
For example, if you find a mushroom, you can’t choose to ignore the scent of other mushrooms until you’ve found 4 more, at which point you can toggle them to “ignored” in your scent menu. There are at least a few dozen smells in the game, and Boris will automatically switch to whichever one is closest to him, so the game feels artificially padded out by making you whittle down the number of smells bombarding his nose so you can actually focus on finding your family.
Your siblings are all in need of some form of help, with one that needs medicine brought to him while others are trapped in dark caves or simply contemplating the devastation of the fire and need cheering up. These tasks are never particularly tricky, but they are unnecessarily frustrating as the solutions often aren’t nearby and the game has no real navigation tools barring a static and abstract map. It doesn’t show where Boris is in the world, and despite being full of icons there’s no key, so I found it no use whatsoever for getting around the park.
As you add siblings to your pack, your stampedes get more powerful which lets you knock down barriers and move between areas. It’s a good system and one that encourages you to explore after you’ve added a new boar piglet to your party. You’ll soon find that you can traverse the entire park without stopping as it loops back on itself, and doing that a dozen times while trying to follow scents or look for objectives helped me learn the world better than the map ever could.
You’ll spend a lot of time charging so you can get across the park quickly, and while Boris handles like a dodgem on an ice rink, it’s still quite fun speeding across bridges and down trails with three other piglets matching your speed. It’s just a shame that you regularly get caught on geometry, bringing you to a stop and killing the vibe set by the drumbeat.
Despite the cute premise, Adorable Adventures unfortunately just didn’t relax me in the way I had hoped. The combination of constantly trying to manage scents while not having any real map to navigate the park just frustrated me beyond belief at times, especially when objectives were obtuse. Boris is undeniably adorable but this is an adventure you may want to let pass you by.
