Every now and again, you’ll be peacefully going about your day, minding your own business without a care in the world, then out of nowhere: BLAM! Here’s a reminder that you’re middle-aged, going greyer by the second, and are not the kid you used to be. Thanks for that, Lan Party Adventures.
A love letter to the year 2000, you’ll be neck deep in CAT 5 cables and PS/2 wired keyboards, setting up beige, behemothic PC towers whilst investigating the whereabouts of your missing friend, Pedro. A first-person puzzler with a heavy dose of PC building simulation, LAN Party Adventures holds you by the hand as you build your new PC in your room, piecing together your parts from the electrical adapter in the wall, all the way to a wired trackball mouse before you are let loose to string together various locations full of seemingly ancient electronics, all in the aid of finding your missing mate.
For anyone with even a passing memory of the clicks, bloops, bleeps, and general cacophony of a 56k modem, Lan Party is a trip down memory lane. From the visual presentation of the story and on-screen operating system (simple pixel art framed in a chunky Windows 3.1 graphical style) to the sun glasses wearing pizza slice character on the loading screen. The kids are all suitably attired for the late 1990s/early 2000s, all backwards baseball caps and Adidas tracksuits, (bonus points for the inclusion of a retro Korn t-shirt). Nostalgic posters, CDs, consoles, and more have been suitably altered to dodge any lawsuits (a quick level or two of “GOOM” anyone?) making for a strong sense of time and place that I imagine quite a few people would look back on as happier, more innocent times.
Moment to moment, LAN Party Adventures has you moving PC parts around the room to cobble together the titular concept. Whilst this is fun for a while, it soon gets a tad repetitive as you find that wires don’t quite reach as far as you might like or that you’ll have to conduct a scavenger hunt around locations to find missing parts required in the assembly of the LAN before you can even get started. If things aren’t working out, you’ll have to take everything apart before moving it all to a new position to try again. Realistic maybe, but it’s a little tiresome on the twelfth attempt. Add that to the fact that you’ve spent ten minutes looking for a missing mouse in every interactive cupboard and drawer before finding it hidden behind a picture and patience can soon be tested.
There are some puzzles introduced to keep things interesting. From the simplicity of matching coloured wires to connect ethernet cabling to finding hidden passwords in the world to access secure files, there’s certainly been an attempt to keep your brain active in between bouts of menial assembly but in the end, it’s just not enough to hold my attention. Even the narrative of your missing friend seems a little drawn out and loses a little tension for it.
With the rise of simulators over the past few years, I had high hopes for LAN Party Adventures but it lacks the satisfaction of a sparklingly clean wall or freshly mown lawn. Building PCs is fiddly by design and LAN Party Adventures makes me glad of the simplicity of modern Bluetooth living. A game that seems to straddle the line between puzzler and cosy simulation game, it lacks conviction in being quite enough of either genre to truly stand out.
LEAP Game Studios has successfully captured the beating heart of the times but have unfortunately brought along some of the minor annoyances of the early 2000s with it. Sluggish movement, awkward hunt the part minigames and overly simplistic storytelling don’t quite gel with the relaxed noughties vibe that LAN Party Adventures wants us to connect with.
