The Grinch: Christmas Adventures (PS5)
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is one of the most enduring Christmas tales people return to every time the holiday rolls around, the original book and its film adaptations a staple of seasonal celebrations. While it has been adapted into video game form before, it’s no surprise this well was returned to, especially since those adaptations are over a decade old by now. However, you’d hope some new ideas would be brought to the concept if the Grinch was getting another video game, but The Grinch: Christmas Adventures from Outright Games fits into the familiar soulless mold of a 2D licensed game platformer that is a concept even older than the previous video game adaptations of the books and films.
The Grinch: Christmas Adventures is an adaptation of the original Dr. Seuss book primarily, to the point this short 18 level adventure is split up by scenes featuring the book read aloud. In fact, perhaps the best thing this game offers is the full illustrated text of the original book, available from the main menu’s extras section right out of the gate so you can do a virtual read along. The main adventure sometimes struggles to place the actual storybook pages in line with the plot, the irritable green Grinch still slinking around Whoville even when the book has him atop Mt. Crumpit with his sleigh of purloined gifts. You will play through his Christmas theft at least, although after quite a bit of tromping about in a cave and mountainside to pad out the available spaces presumably so this adventure from a short children’s storybook can have a bit more breadth, and there is a nice little touch the game makes that aligns it with the delightful rhymes of a Dr. Seuss story. Whether it’s tutorials or the unfortunately abundant warnings of upcoming hazards, the game makes an effort to rhyme and do so whimsically. You can’t skip the sometimes constant interruptions, instead needing to hold X to fast forward at best, but it is a little charming at first to see the game trying to match the Seuss writing style even in its smaller moments.
Sadly, the platforming levels of The Grinch: Christmas Adventures are incredibly unimaginative and full of recycled elements. This side-scrolling platformer starts off with the Grinch not even able to do much, just jump and push things primarily, his abilities oddly locked behind the collectible puzzle pieces found in each stage. After finding enough and completing a very basic jigsaw puzzle, you can unlock things like a double jump, a candy cane lasso used for crossing gaps, and even a jetpack, although sadly your expanding abilities don’t come with new challenging levels. At best you’ll experience the challenge of your candy cane lasso sometimes not snagging the attach point because otherwise stages rely on the same few enemies and ideas throughout. Slow moving platforms require you to wait and jump across, enemies patrol simple paths and aren’t truly that dangerous even before you do the puzzles to unlock extra health. Rather amusingly, your initial health meter is a heart that is two sizes too small although it can at least take two hits, but ample checkpointing means the sometimes blind jumps you might make looking for secrets like the puzzle pieces are at least not too risky to take.
Even by the end of the game’s first cave world things will have already gotten rather rote, especially since its attempts to introduce new ideas are incredibly basic as well. The Grinch: Christmas Adventures allows you to play as both the Grinch and his dog Max, two-player even being an option with the second person permanently assuming the role of Max. If you’re on your own, you instead can swap to Max for the few moments he is needed, and these are almost never complicated and often instead annoying interruptions because they are so simple. You might need to have Max stand on a switch or crawl through a small space to grab something, but that’s the extent of the interaction. You swap to the dog and do the thing often unopposed or without any thought involved, but calling Max back after the task is a bit sloppy since you need to hold the swap button rather than Max simply returning once you’ve moved away from where you left him. At least spiders and marching nutcrackers ask you to jump or time your movement, these Max sections just slow things down with no risk or real interesting elements in the task you’re asked to perform.
Sneaking around houses is almost more interesting, the game shifting out of 2D when you enter specific residences. Here you are essentially playing a stealth game, the Grinch able to run around the house scooping up presents or puzzle pieces but needing to avoid the residents who will show him so much love it actually hurts. Presents are entirely optional while the puzzle pieces are important for upgrades, but likely after a few house invasions you’ll start to realize that the Whos and giant Gingerbread Men within aren’t really that threatening. You are faster and more maneuverable than them and they’re easy to lead around, but if you do need to shake them you can do things like hide under tables and pianos or enter wardrobes to lose their interest. The animation to enter and exit is a bit annoying after you’ve seen it tens of times, another reason to just run around and risk taking damage since you will get healed as you enter and leave a house anyway, but this type of play also fails to evolve much over the adventure so once you’ve done it a few times in the caves you’ll have grown tired of this empty gameplay formula.
The last type of play in The Grinch: Christmas Adventures is at least used sparingly, there being three levels where you are either snowboarding or sleighing and need to dodge oncoming dangers. Some of these will have you needing to outpace the world’s quietest avalanche which just involves holding Circle, but you do at least need to avoid falling in pits or hitting objects and there are presents and puzzle pieces to collect to make these lightly involved albeit just as easy as much of the game. By not wearing themselves thin this might at least amuse younger players better than the rampant repetition during other forms of play, those stages not even able to excuse away their rehashed elements since even an inexperienced player at least wants to see new things even if they’re easy to overcome when they encounter them. Beating the game tacks on a Mirror Mode which lets you play every level but now right to left instead of left to right, which really just seems to further embody the game’s intentions of running concepts into the ground by refusing to introduce new ideas, even the jetpack just a slightly bigger jump and later enemies not so subtly just being newly themed iterations like dangling stockings replacing spiders.
THE VERDICT: With a 2D platformer this lifeless and repetitive, the Grinch can at least delight that his video game adaptation The Grinch: Christmas Adventures will ruin a few Christmases as unsuspecting children find this uninspired slog under their tree. A few fun touches like rhyming tutorials and so-so snowboarding are momentary reprieves from recycled obstacles and interactions that weren’t entertaining to start with but not nearly enough to add some holiday cheer to this by the numbers exploitation of a beloved Christmas story.
And so, I give The Grinch: Christmas Adventures for PlayStation 5…
A TERRIBLE rating. The Grinch: Christmas Adventures gets old by its third level and unlocking things like a candy cane lasso do little to shake things up further down the line, the skill essentially just making jumping a little slower when it already mostly requires patience. Dangerous elements often lazily guard a spot you again mostly overcome either through waiting or leaping over it with ease, and with most levels made up of side-scrolling jumping, it was really the area of the game that needed constant iteration to remain fresh. Instead, you go through the motions and maybe poke around the obvious side paths for puzzle pieces, bothered when the game forces Max the dog into things or slightly less annoyed when you enter a house to scoop up presents. At least the present snatching stealth sections are short and less common despite their simplicity and occasional slowness, but it’s hard to say making the danger during them legitimate would improve them since they’re too basic as is. It is understandable you don’t want to overcomplicate the design of a kid’s game, but with The Grinch: Christmas Adventures already pretty liberal with its checkpoints, it also could have gotten away with moments that at least require some thought or decent reflexes to clear. Instead it’s a slow and repetitive plod through caves and snowy mountainsides, and even when you reach Whoville, their supposedly overblown Christmas celebrations sadly don’t make hopping around rooftops much more interesting. The lazy recycling of the same few elements can’t even be labeled as remixing familiar elements, you often just face the same trial in a new level and its at best a reordering of the obstacles you already didn’t struggle with on first blush.
I usually like to append a takedown of a terrible kid’s game with some recommendations of games that are either better for kids despite being flawed or outright good games that still appeal to children, but The Grinch: Christmas Adventures is part of an unfortunately long trend of making barebones cookie cutter Christmas trash. Few kids would be happy to receive something like the unexpectedly good Grinch game for Game Boy Color due to its age, so instead we’re just left to accept that once more a game company felt they could earn easy sales by making a Christmas themed title rather than one enjoyable on its own merits. Rather than trying to get a kid a Christmas-themed video game as a present, make their holiday better by purchasing a standard family-friendly title and rest easy knowing they’ll enjoy it a lot more than this sorry attempt to bring the Grinch back into gaming.