Garfield: The Search for Pooky (GBA)

If you’re going to get the famously lazy comic strip cat Garfield up for a video game adventure, you really need a good motivation for why he’s willing to platform about and fight some other animals. Having a group of mice take away his precious teddy bear Pooky seems like a personal enough reason for the fat feline to overcome his lethargy, but in Garfield: The Search for Pooky, this quest to save a stuffed animal takes some unusual turns as Garfield seems both intensely invested in the rescue mission while at other times seemingly forgetting he’s on one at all.

When the adventure begins Garfield does seem to be on a single-minded quest to retrieve his lost teddy bear, his desire to do so leading to some actually shockingly mean behavior. When an alley cat gets in the way of Garfield’s mission, Garfield unambiguously threatens to murder him until the cat bribes him with an acceptable amount of food, and later when Garfield’s owner Jon forces the cat to come with him to visit Jon’s sweet old mother, Garfield decides the only way he can get back outside to continue his mission is to be thrown out for tearing up all the furniture in the house. Funnily enough shortly after that he gets sidetracked saving a bunch of chickens for Jon’s brother Doc and then seemingly forgets his goal as briefly the game becomes about Garfield’s quest to get to a Chinese restaurant. At least the food he gets from the restaurant is promptly shared with the alleycat he threatened earlier, but this haphazard plot is definitely meant to be more a silly sequence of events to string along platforming stages than a real narrative to follow.

What makes the cutscenes and levels more interesting is how most of the characters and enemies are images lifted directly from actual Garfield comics. It doesn’t always look the best but Garfield is basically transplanted directly from the colored strips you can still see in the Sunday funnies. Characters or objects that didn’t feature in them are noticeably different in style, but it was still a fairly interesting effort to try and build the scenes like they were comic panels right down to featuring official Jim Davis art throughout the adventure.

When you start playing as Garfield though, everything goes downhill fast. While expecting the lazy cat to be a speed demon would be absurd, when he’s walking through a level he is horrendously slow, making jumping around constantly the best option for travel unless you really want to leisurely stroll up to the next area of interest. Whether you choose to spring around constantly or meander forward at an agonizing pace on the ground, this 2D platformer at least starts tame enough. Early levels will take place inside areas like Garfield’s house or the mall and while there is an unusually high amount of shattered glass on the floor, platforming about is actually more about getting onto shelves or higher places so you can grab optional items. Every level is packed with floating food Garfield can eat. Milk is what Garfield uses to restore his health though, so all the food littered about actually is meant to be collected to earn extra lives, the amount needed to gain one the only difference between the game’s Easy and Hard modes. While the game gives you 9 lives at the start and you can take four hits without dying, this shockingly is not enough as you start to leave the comfortable starting areas and move deeper into the adventure.

In the early stages you can practically beat the level while bypassing all the jumping around for food items, the stage goals simple and mostly restricted to the ground. However, as you get deeper in, levels begin to really test your platforming skills and your patience. Most levels feature three types of flooring: normal, oil-coated, and honey-coated. Oil-coated floor will cause Garfield to slide around if he stands on it, and honey-coated flooring can’t be jumped off of. The game begins to start taking away more safe ground just in general, throwing in plenty of instant death pits that will often be placed so you have to approach them while sliding on oil. Sometimes these pits are adjacent to honey so you have to jump over the honey and the pit in one jump that barely covers the gap, and as you get deeper into the game you’ll find more of these dangerous jumps placed in a row. These can be managed when all the visual information you need is available, but Garfield: The Search for Pooky starts demanding constant blind jumps, these leaps of faith sometimes even deliberately arranged to trick you. Food items sometimes guide you, but other times you’re leaping towards the right edge of the screen hoping that there will be a safe spot waiting for you.

Sometimes you’ll be asked to pick a forward path from two elevations and while the high ground seems safer since you could technically adjust yourself, it’s just as easy to overshoot or fall short of where you’re meant to land since you don’t actually know what’s waiting down below. Eventually large trampolines that don’t always trigger properly will begin launching you high and far to the right as well and again while it mostly tries to put you in the right area, it can deliver you into danger or to your death if you don’t adjust properly after finally getting the springboard working. If you do drop to your doom you’ll be revived quickly after but usually set back to a fairly early area in the level… or a fairly late one, but that usually only occurs in stages where you wouldn’t mind that back-to-start teleport because Garfield: The Search for Pooky also has some obnoxious missions on top of its abysmal platforming challenges.

Some levels in Garfield: The Search for Pooky are just about going from the left side of the stage to the right, and since most of the game’s stages are comprised of three fairly sizeable sections, having such a simple goal for one section is certainly appreciated once you begin to encounter the worse ideas it pursues. In quite a few levels Garfield must first collect a certain amount of animals or items and deliver them to the right spot to beat that particular section. The problem with this arises from the fact that Garfield can only carry one item at a time and delivering such things requires repeatedly traversing the same sections of the level again and again. In the chicken wrangling stage for example the cage is at the very beginning, so every time you find a chicken you need to go back all the way to the start, drop it off, and then continue into the level to grab the next one so you can carry it back. In a single segment of a stage you can do this up to eight times and usually you’ll have to do it around five times at least, and in some levels like the chicken stage multiple segments about constant deliveries are stringed together. Making that stage even worse is its mix of blind jumps over instant death pits and constantly stringing together the various ground types to make it more likely you’ll mess up the constant back and forth.

This collecting aspect really drags down the experience and is definitely padding, backtracking over familiar ground feeling more like it’s meant to make you accidentally slip up and lose a life instead of truly challenging your abilities.  There is a password system so if you lose your lives you can jump back in, but the password also saves your lives count so even if you do overcome a level like the chicken stage you might be running low for the next stage which might also feature agonizing item fetching requirements. It’s legitimately surprising that the level where Garfield needs to instruct Odie the dog on where to dig in search of Pooky that Odie will conveniently teleport to the areas once you reach them, which is made even stranger since this is one of the levels that features Garfield’s familiar “Odie kick” as an attack method that could have been used as an excruciating method of dog transport.

Speaking of that particular kick, Garfield’s attack options are strange and unreliable. His main means of dealing damage is waving his arms around to his sides to presumably slash up anything close enough to claw at, and while this works well for ruining furniture, hitting enemies is another story. You can keep it active as long as you like, but whether a foe will be hit by it is hard to determine. With something like dangerous butterflies though you can usually count on it to work or at least Garfield won’t get hurt when the attack whiffs for no clear reason, but against the game’s bosses its inexplicable failures can lead to you taking the damage instead. The bosses don’t often require much thought beyond running up and doing your arm flail over and over while making sure to move if they do start to attack. Sometimes though Garfield will have his grounded attack vary such as the kick that has similar issues in actually determining if it will land or the newspaper he uses in the spider-filled attic that requires a little finagling to even swing properly and after that it likely didn’t kill the spider anyway.

While Garfield: The Search for Pooky probably has just as many tepid and straightforward stages is it does grueling quests to collect things in levels packed with death traps, there are also two levels that break from the formula for something entirely different. Garfield takes two car rides during the course of the game, the stage select actually doubling back on many stages to reuse some settings and ideas. The two car levels have Garfield leaning out of the vehicle as Jon drives, the player able to move the car up and down as they please while trying to snag food from passersby so Garfield doesn’t get too hungry. Grabbing a bomb or soap bar will hurt Garfield or increase his hunger, so you mostly just need to watch and make sure you only grab pizza and ice cream from pedestrians who all look like Jon’s love interest Liz. The traffic is easy to dodge so there really isn’t much peril in these stages and you can often ride right next to the sidewalk without worry, so rather than fitting into the plain but inoffensive side of things or agonizingly repetitive and hard side, these car levels are so basic and easy they might as well not exist for how little they add to the experience.

THE VERDICT: A slow and unassuming start and some nifty use of actual art from the comic strips belies the true nature of Garfield: The Search of Pooky’s awful platforming. With attacks that struggle to register, instant death pits placed in slippery situations, and constant use of blind jumps with immediate failure if you didn’t predict right, this unassuming Garfield game starts to become needlessly difficult and practically cruel in the traps it places. Once these all come together in the stages where you constantly need to retread the same absurdly dangerous ground to slowly deliver one object a time, the quest to save this cartoon cat’s teddy bear becomes an unbearably monotonous showcase of incredibly poor level design.

And so, I give Garfield: The Search for Pooky for Game Boy Advance…

An ATROCIOUS rating. The chicken level alone in Garfield: The Search for Pooky would be enough to drag down many a game, but it’s not even the only stage that repeats the same terrible ideas and tedious goals that are hard for the wrong reason. Leaping towards something you can’t be sure is safe doesn’t work in a game with limited lives and instant deaths for if you fail, having to repeat those jumps again and again to slowly deliver items or animals is made even worse by the slippery and sticky ground they involve, and then when you’re actually fighting an enemy you can’t always count on even hitting them when you attack within reasonable range. The car stages don’t bring anything to the table but at least are negligible in that way, but even when you’re in a level that just asks you to get to the end you’re probably only going to be hopping around to grab food for lives or charging past the platforms to take that easy win. When Garfield: The Search for Pooky wants to challenge the player it goes way too hard and doesn’t even do so in an interesting way, mistaking the need to do things over and over again for difficulty.

This certainly isn’t a case of just rushing out a licensed game for cheap and having a poor product as a result. It required active planning to decide that Garfield should only be able to carry one item at a time and needs to deliver each one, retreading the same space over and over again to do so. It takes active planning to place instant death pits as mean gotchas for doing a leap of faith incorrectly when you had no clue until you missed the jump what the correct course of action could have been. Even if you don’t hop around to get through a level in a reasonable time frame, that ridiculously slow walk isn’t going to help you better figure out how far a trampoline jump will take you nor can it make it more likely you’ll hit with your unreliable attacks. If this is the kind of adventure Garfield goes on when you can actually get the fat cat out of his bed, then perhaps this lasagna-loving feline is justified in just staying home and telling simple jokes instead of going on action-filled adventures.