The Shrekoning: Shrek: Ogres & Dronkeys (DS)

In a mid-credits scene after Shrek 2 the world was introduced to the hybrid offspring of the wisecracking Donkey and his accidentally seduced mate Dragon and the existence of those unusual children was played off mostly as a joke. However, soon the lead of the series was considering fatherhood in Shrek the Third, the gruff but lovable ogre ending up with a set of triplets that at first were part of him developing a sense of responsibility and later cause a midlife crisis for him in the fourth film. The babies all served their roles in the narratives well enough, but for infants often depicted as deliberately gross, they didn’t seem like they’d be the perfect fit for a child raising sim on the DS, and yet one was made anyway. With Wayforward Technologies attached to the unusual idea of taking care of these babies, the Shrek universe received an even weirder video game idea than learning phonics with Shrek: Ogres & Dronkeys.

In the context of Shrek: Ogres & Dronkeys you are not playing as any of the infants’ parents but instead a babysitter needed for them after Shrek and Fiona are called away to perform a royal tour of the kingdom. Donkey had left his five children in the care of Shrek and Fiona at the time they get this summons but luckily the player is present as an unseen but often spoken to person who is entrusted with the care of the eight children, although thankfully the game has you pare it down to taking care of only two of them per play session. The player is free to select which of the eight children they want to babysit each time they resume play, there being three ogre children who are not referred to by name and instead called Ogre Boy, Ogre Girl, and Ogre Jr. while the five fairly similar Dronkeys go by Parfait, Cocoa, Debbie, Peanut, and Bananas. There is no sort of affection mechanic or progression tied to any single infant so swapping them out incurs no penalties and all the ogre babies behave similarly to each other while the Dronkeys have their own set of unvarying Dronkey behaviors. It is the sort of freedom a young player might appreciate, but it also means any attachment potential is made a touch shallow when every baby is interchangeable.

Once you have your two babies of choice you enter the Playpen, and at first there is very little to do. Your two babies of choice don’t have many interesting behaviors unless you start tossing in some stimuli, so once you pop open your toy box you can begin throwing playthings to the babies for them to amuse themselves with. Balls, letter blocks, balloons, masks, dolls, buckets, hammers, toy carts, and more can be acquired for play, but many of these options aren’t actually played with in different ways nor does any single object have many interactions the children can perform. They can throw, kick, and attempt to stack any toy you give them and they don’t have many unique reactions to what you are providing them to play with. If the balloon didn’t float around more after being thrown the baby might as well be playing with a wooden block, and they’ll even attempt to stack balloons in the same way they do the blocks and almost every object in the toy box. A few objects do have expected interactions at least, the babies will put on masks and hats sometimes instead of kicking them around, they’ll actually hit things with the hammers, and they’ll play instruments you give them. Besides basic babbling and the implied attitude behind a kick though your baby doesn’t seem to have many emotional reactions to their playthings even if you’ve handed them something like a mask with their father’s face on it. However there is a spider toy that actually evokes some rather cute responses as they are startled by it and treat it more harshly due to how it unsettles them. If the babies had more varied and specific reactions to toys like they do to the spider then playtime would be more interesting to watch and participate in, but even if you use the stylus to toss the ball back and forth with one of the children it doesn’t seem to excite them more than any other playtime activity.

Playtime is complicated by an idea that sounds interesting on paper and actually gives the game some progression to aim for. You’ll be given a checklist of activities that can be performed with the toys currently available in the toy box, the game giving you points you can spend to buy more toys any time these are completed. The actual substance of these tasks is often very basic and at the same time very specific, such as the game rewarding you if a baby stacks the B letter block on the C one but not the other way around. Unfortunately, a lot of the tasks are focused on stacking items, and since you have no control over the babies while in the Playpen, you just sit back and hope they’ll eventually amble over and perform the right tasks to earn those points. Some tasks require your babies to stack, kick, or throw food items they’ll usually try to eat instead, and sometimes the babies might take a considerable amount of time to consider kicking an object only for the other baby to run over and interrupt it. To discourage improper combinations of items you’ll probably thin out the amount of toys out at once as well, leading to a fair bit of play being the player sitting back and waiting for the babies to finally perform an unexciting action that just so happened to be on the checklist. This is necessary for unlocking more content both in terms of affording toys and going to other Playpens, but what could have been a nifty baby book feature to track interesting activities instead turns into waiting for your ogres and Dronkeys to finally do an uninteresting action simply because it was mandated for progress.

Between waiting for them to play with toys correctly there are at least elements you’d expect to find in a child care or pet raising game. If an infant is starting to feel uncomfortable they’ll come towards the screen and indicate their issue, a thought bubble eventually appearing in case it was still unclear what the problem was. A shelf in the back of the Playpen contains tools you can use to help them, the player using the stylus to rub their faces with a toothbrush, rub their heads with a hairbrush, rub their ears with a cotton swab, or hand them a bottle they take a quick swig from. It’s fairly shallow but not intrusive at least, although the diaper changing does face an issue where you need to change them by dragging the diaper onto the infant but you can also hand babies clean diapers and sometimes the game struggles to figure out which action you’re trying to do. Dronkeys don’t need diaper changes and instead leave their mess on the ground that you scoop up and dispense with, but both baby types do eventually just get generally dirty and a bath is required. Bath time is just as basic as the other actions but actually requires you to go to another room for it, the player turning on the water and just dragging the stylus around to sponge up the baby until a meter is full. At least you will know when the baby is fully clean compared to the hair, ear, and teeth problems where there’s no clear indicator you’re done besides less gunk coming off as you work, but these problems don’t crop up enough to feel like a focus so the primary point of play is still the baby activity checklist.

You can, however, take one baby out to play in the yard, the player gaining full control of the infant for this portion and the areas changing based on the Playpen. Shrek’s swamp actually has two exterior areas to explore while you can also end up at the brick house belonging to the Three Little Pigs, Donkey and Dragon’s castle lair, or the Gingerbread Man’s house, all three of them having their own unique outside space. The space isn’t really a place for the baby to play so much as serving as a vessel for more important task completion, the actions here mostly coming down to collecting floating objects that are required to see the game’s ending. You can find some toys outside as well though, and usually a few things are kept behind making sure your baby has the proper skills. Skills are of the lock and key form where they’ll use them if they have them to overcome a simple issue, and teaching a baby a skill is usually as simple as getting a baby to hit a barrel with a hammer in the Playpen to learn they can do that outside too. It is an idea with potential but the actions are all simple and the game usually tells you exactly how to make your baby do the task required to learn a skill, exploration outside mostly a brief collectable grabbing affair until an adult shows up.

Adults like the ogres’ mother Fiona, one of the pigs, or the Gingerbread Man might drop by their yards to set up a minigame you can briefly play. These offer an alternate way to earn points for the toy shop besides the activity checklist but aren’t exactly a faster method to do so and many of these are pretty simple in concept. You might run around grabbing fireflies, run around eating sweets and taking breaks to brush your teeth, or burning haystacks hurled into the air by easily tapping them on the touch screen. Bowling at least has the variance expected from the sport and more room to need to perform well to make it more of a challenge, but most of the minigames are too straightforward and plain to want to come back to on their own merits. The minigame where you try to rebuild the Three Little Pigs’ houses before the Big Bad Wolf can blow them all down does have potential though, partly because it ramps up in difficulty with the goal being continued survival rather than hitting certain benchmarks or doing a basic task within a time limit. Like many things in this game though, it hardly feels like a strong enough area of play to really devote much time to, the crux of the experience in the end being watching two babies as they hopefully receive that odd spark of inspiration needed to place broccoli onto the B block.

THE VERDICT: While giving the player a list of baby activities as a form of guidance for this child rearing game was a good idea in theory, Shrek: Ogres & Dronkeys doesn’t have the substance to make this actually interesting in the long run. Interactions with toys are similar and basic and yet you need to pull them out and hope the babies will stack objects correctly or kick them around to get the points needed to buy new things or go to new areas. Exploring outside the house is often rather plain as well and actually caring for the babies often just involves dragging some object across them to increase their hygiene, so most of the experience ends up the mind-numbing wait for the babies to play as you need them to. There are cute moments to be found with the way the unusual infants interact with some things like the spider, but having more structure to the play both helps and hurts this babysitting game as it gives you clear goals but makes completing them up to chance.

And so, I give Shrek: Ogres & Dronkeys for Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. Organizing things with the activity checklist does make Shrek: Ogres & Dronkeys more than an endless cycle of child care minigames and you feel a little surge of satisfaction when the baby finally does what it is required by it, but it certainly feels like the concept was made too strict. If it was some long term goal you were hoping to hit like the babies learning their first words it could be something you work towards gradually and you wouldn’t expect immediate results, but if all the babies need to do is put on a hat and they just keep kicking it around or playing with a different toy it makes it feel less like tracking the baby’s life and more like a list of chores. The comparison I made to a baby book is partly because I feel like that would be the better approach. You could get little milestones as you play with the babies and introduce them to new experiences and hopefully such reactions could be made more meaningful and varied if you were aiming for helping them grow rather than having them be robots meant to stack toys just so. Surely if a player is booting up the game with the genuine hope of finding some cute moments from the ogres and Dronkeys they will find some, that spider still standing out in a game where you otherwise quickly grow accustomed how the baby ogres grip the air when they want to play catch or the funny way Dronkeys kick objects away with a flourish. The animations and actions are recycled too much and too many toys are played with in a similar manner, even when it doesn’t feel like the infants should reasonably do so. If some of the moments like exterior exploration were expanded or the moments of baby care were made into proper minigames then things could hold together as you could find more deviations from watching and hoping your babies play right, but as it is the game does demand a bit too much structured play without the structure really adding to the enjoyment.

Still, for a game based on taking care of two deliberately gross and unusual baby types, Shrek: Ogres & Dronkeys tried to mix in the Shrek franchise’s embrace of grossness without being absurd. You wash the ogre babies in swamp water, but the game still tries to make both of the abnormal offspring types adorable for people who do like the designs. The gameplay, shallow baby AI, and limited options for interactions do make it rather boring still, but the unusual game concept does make an attempt and the checklist feels like it could have been a better way to structure a babysitting sim if not for the strict and arbitrary requirements it features.