My Friend Peppa Pig (PS4)

While I haven’t seen much of it, the Peppa Pig animated children’s show seems like a pretty good fit for its intended young audience. Peppa herself is a curious child, emotional at times and prone to getting bored if things are too simple but someone a child can easily see themselves in. Her short adventures are simple and often close to the kinds of activities a kid could engage in even though all the characters in the show are animals, and all the characters are also fairly easy to draw, their designs even including some line overlap and stick-like limbs so a young fan can easily reproduce what they see on television. That same easy to reproduce art style actually made it fairly easy for Petoons Studio to accurately reproduce it in their multiplatform video game My Friend Peppa Pig, the game doing a solid job of looking like a playable episode of the show even if they only got key voice actors like Peppa’s and the Narrator’s to reprise their roles.

In My Friend Peppa Pig you actually don’t play as the wildly popular children’s show character herself but instead a new kid in town you create yourself. The customization options are simple with the main choice being the character’s species, options like being a mouse, pig, or sheep fitting within the show’s preexisting set of mammalian humanoid characters. This only seems to impact the little animal noise you can make with a button press, your character otherwise a silent companion to Peppa as you accompany her on a few activities that have a small bit of randomization to how they’re presented to you unless they are ones you need to seek out yourself. Peppa can be a bit pushy in trying to get you to head off and find something to do at times, but otherwise she’ll be the one interacting with other members of the cast to learn about the world or gain access to short little interactive segments.

My Friend Peppa Pig is generally a rather gentle and relaxed experience outside of Peppa’s urging for you to go do something, although that does tie well to the energetic attitude of a child eager to take their new friend to entertaining places. Unfortunately, a lot of the game’s interactive segments are incredibly basic, not really valuing the player’s involvement in most cases. For example there’s the option to draw pictures at the schoolhouse that will then be hung on Peppa’s bedroom wall, and instead of having this be a free canvas to draw what you wish, you press X and your character creates a picture from a small set of options the game chooses for you. Most interactions in the game unfortunately boil down to pressing a single button rather than really playing with whatever activity Peppa and her friend have come across. Things like splashing in some mud are made less exciting by it just being about pressing a button repeatedly, although the game can sometimes brush away the blandness of interactions since riding a roller coaster or skiing down a snowy hill are more there for a unique action to look at than one of substance to participate in.

Unfortunately a lot of the action in the game is as basic as approaching something and pressing a button to see an action that could have easily been made more interactive without becoming too complex for children. In fact, visiting Peppa’s grandparents shows exactly how things could have been made a little more involved without excluding the exceptionally young audience from playing this PS4 title. Grandpa Pig has you pick which seeds you want to plant in the garden and Granny Pig asks you to find a few chickens scattered around the area, one valuing the player’s input and the other having you actually move around and perform a task that isn’t just automatically completed when you press a button shown on-screen. The grandparents also do a good job of providing more interesting conceptual topics, teaching Peppa and the player about some less typical concepts like tidal pools and garden compost without getting bogged down in boring details. The game on the whole is very short so the time you spend doing activities with the grandparents doesn’t take up too much of it, but they provide a decent break from more mundane forms of play like holding forward to ride a bike or pressing X to rearrange blocks into preset arrangements.

The visit to the museum also gets a little more creative, Peppa more willing to embrace her imagination while visiting and creating a few outlandish scenarios to interact with. Pretending to be royalty with her or outrunning her younger brother George as he pretends to be a dinosaur are still shallow forms of play that end quickly but the idea of the scene is at least amusing enough compared to household activities or tepid interactions with toys featured elsewhere. Even at its most creative or involved most of the gameplay is still not particularly difficult or exciting for anyone above the age bracket this game was made for, but you can see some moments where the game tried to actually engage its young audience rather than just giving them the barest of interactions to keep them occupied and thus it’s not too much of a slog to see all of the content the game has to offer.

The small bit of randomization can slow down the experience some though, the amount of random activities not high enough to make this game have the kind of shelf life that will make kids want to return to it and sometimes even forcing repetition into a play session. Sometimes while traveling by car you might encounter road work, and while explaining this idea to young kids helps explore the kinds of things you might experience in real life, the somewhat random nature of the road work scene triggering means you can see it repeatedly in a short time span and each time the characters are surprised by its presence and Peppa needs the concept of road work explained to her again. A bit less annoying are the mild “quests” that crop up, things like Daddy Pig losing his glasses or Peppa’s brother George losing his dinosaur toy giving you a short term goal. This short term goal is often completed by going to the next screen and finding something or approaching the right object and pressing X a bit, hence why actually needing to find the chickens for Granny Pig registers as a stand out activity to participate in. A few of them are meant to be humorous rather than involved activities though, and doing everything culminates in a trip to a theme park that provides a finale to the play date with Peppa so you can at least tell when you’ve exhausted the game’s small amount of unique content.

Interestingly enough, My Friend Peppa Pig includes a parental control option that is contextualized in the game as the children needing to sleep. Parents are able to set a play timer, and while 5 minutes is definitely too short to even get much of the game’s basic activities done since the game also moves at a pretty relaxed pace, the other options can provide the interesting interruption of the kids getting tired from their day of play and laying down for the night. Continuing after isn’t hard so it’s more like a reminder for parents watching a kid play than a way to stop the child from continuing, although the game doesn’t tell you this is the parental controls activating either so you could just mistake it for part of the course of events. It can interrupt one of the “quests” and you can’t do multiple quests at once either, but they will pop back up later if you wander around the relevant area.

THE VERDICT: My Friend Peppa Pig is a rather short adventure that doesn’t often value its young audience’s input, instead mostly giving them little actions that only ask them to press a button for a bit to complete. Sometimes it can frame these as interesting learning experiences or a look into Peppa’s imagination to keep them a little interesting though, and the low pressure experience does look like an interactive episode of the show with quite a few places to go. Some randomization of things you encounter can lead to repetition like the road work scene constantly cropping up, but while it does often offer shallow interactive segments, young children might enjoy it as if it were an episode of the show but with the player controlling a bit of its progression.

And so, I give My Friend Peppa Pig for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. In the game’s marketing the phrase “BE CREATIVE” is put forward despite the game so rarely allowing the player to do so. It has its little moments of creativity like the fanciful imaginings of Peppa at the museum and the grandparents do provide moments where the player’s input is valued a bit more than usual, but otherwise you’ll do things like run a race at the schoolhouse by hammering a button but everyone gets a trophy anyways or ski down a slope where you only influence how quickly it happens rather than having any freedom to guide yourself or do interesting actions like hit jumps. Naturally some of this tameness in design is to keep things somewhat rooted in the series’s commitment to having activities close to what a kid might experience in real life, but even then you aren’t given the room for involved play with your participation boiling down to pressing buttons to do as instructed. My Friend Peppa Pig did have moments like the drawing that could have shifted into a moment of more free form expression and play, but the game focuses more on activities where you are more of an observer than someone who can guide events. Despite its flaws it probably will still amuse its intended audience, although the amount of content not even really reaching two hours even when you include the somewhat random events does make it hard to justify buying it for a kid. Perhaps a rental would let them see the unique Peppa content, but since the interactions are so shallow it’s not likely the gameplay will hook them. Kids can be addicted to anything admittedly and this probably hits the same notes as watching an episode of Peppa Pig over and over but with the ability to break away a bit from the script, the game capturing the show’s characters, tone, and situations well visually and conceptually even if the play isn’t doing much to support the experience.

My Friend Peppa Pig will probably end up being a bargain bin game at some point and a kid who loves the show will probably be satisfied enough with it if you can snag it for around 5 dollars, but at its release price of 40 dollars the interactivity definitely feels lacking. At any price it still isn’t doing much to entertain when it comes to its gameplay and most of the interaction is either slow-paced travel or performing tasks that are basic in both what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. The spot-on adaptation of the show’s look and approach is commendable but it fails to provide the kind of long-term play options that would make it a good video game to occupy young players with while also being dull for anyone who isn’t a fan of the Peppa brand. Its merits beyond being an extension of a recognizable franchise are few, but it is essentially a mildly interactive episode of Peppa Pig and at least provides a decent selection of basic activities rather than miring the player in empty repetition. If you have a young child you probably already know if they would want this and it’s probably harmless enough to get them it but the quality of its interactive elements won’t end up being the reason they might enjoy it.