Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (NES)
In the Salad Kingdom, people made of fruits and veggies live together in relative peace. Despite most of the citizenry looking like humans save for their heads being some sort of food, this is not a world free of humans. The humans known as Farmies see no issue against eating the walking, talking people of the Salad Kingdom, and while they are normally kept at bay, the evil Minister Pumpkin sees them as his key to taking control of the kingdom. The first-person adventure game Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is not actually much of the story of Princess Tomato though, the player instead the one who needs to rescue her before she becomes the final part of the pumpkin villain’s plot to secure his reign over the kingdom.
Players assume the role of Sir Cucumber in this adventure, a knight who was promised the hand of Princess Tomato by the late King Broccoli should he be willing to step up and stop the minister’s bid for power. While a knight, Sir Cucumber not only doesn’t really have any equipment for battle, but he rarely seems willing to be too violent, and since he’s quite far away from the minister’s castle, he’ll instead have to rely on wits and what items he can find along the way to outmaneuver Minister Pumpkin’s loyal minions and learn the secrets necessary to save the day. Despite the Salad Kingdom being in a bit of turmoil because of this attempted coup, beyond a few monsters roaming the land, many of the places you come across are pretty peaceful. There may be an overzealous town guard or some sketchy characters lingering around, but Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom actually sees you travel to a fair few pleasant locations and get to interact with regular villagers.
There’s a bit of a fun novelty in seeing what the next location may hold because the game leans so heavily into the idea all of its citizenry are some sort of edible plant person. This can lead to some locations like Peanut Village where the peanut people use their old shells to construct the roads and buildings, but also the less easily understood implications of meeting an onion leek man who lives in a house made entirely of leeks. Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is definitely a game for younger players rather than a game that wants you to ponder on how a leek house is made, but it also doesn’t forget that part of its setting are those rarely seen Farmies and the stakes should Minister Pumpkin’s rule of terror be assured. One of the first things you can even encounter in the game is a place where Farmies are preparing some vegetable people to eat, and while you never see the act, you do get the haunting implications when you realize some of the ones you talked to before are missing later. Essentially, it’s a pretty silly world at times because of its commitment to the theme, but it wants to tell a plot with some danger so now and again you will see the peace and frivolity of the land punctured by this conflict that threatens its cute and comedic tone.
To interact with this world, you will utilize a menu of options that appear on either side of your current view of the area. Almost universally there will be 12 options you can attempt with whatever you see before you, although the depth of the interaction can change. Options like Buy and Fight are meant for very specific situations, Item and Dump are to check your inventory and to clear out any items that are not necessary (the game never letting you drop something important and even having post-chapter purges to help keep that inventory tidy), but the other choices are consistently useful to the point you’ll likely be using or trying them on every screen. Move gets you from place to place, Look and Check are vital to understanding the area and noting important things, Take helps you get the items you’ll Use or Give, and Hit is a way you can interact with an object you see but can’t pick up. Talk and Praise of course relate to characters, but the option that sticks out from what you’d expect in such a list of verbs is Percy. Percy is a baby persimmon you meet early on, the little guy becoming a cute but helpful sidekick for the adventure. When you choose the Percy option, he’ll often make some comment related to the current area, sometimes providing a clue or nudging you in the right direction. At other times though, consulting Percy is the only way to get an important bit of information and he may even perform an action to solve a puzzle you could not otherwise solve without him. The early game does seem to almost frame him as a hint system, his more on-the-nose pointers likely a way to help ease you into a world you’re coming to understand, but generally his important moments make it so you’ll likely want to add Percy to the rotation of actions you take every time you find yourself in a new area.
Your quest across the Salad Kingdom is scored by nice catchy music and takes you to various vegetable cities as well as more dangerous places like a prison or a cave with monsters, but most of the time you’ll need to use your 12 menu actions to feel your way through a location. For the most part, item interactions will be the biggest player, figuring out how to get useful tools from people or scouring the area for items letting you continue your quest be it by convincing others to help or overcoming some physical obstacle. The world of Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom can seem like a medieval fantasy at times with its knights and castles, and then you’ll see an electronics shop or find a machine gun that fires peas. A mix of strangeness and novelty keeps you interested in the new locations even when you’re not interacting with particularly memorable or quirky characters, the character designs often the more interesting element than their personalities. This is partly because the game tries to limit how much people can talk to prevent flooding players with messages and likely to balance out memory limitations as well, the game even breaking the fourth wall at one point when you want to backtrack as it tells you it can’t afford to store that space in memory. The locations, characters, and items do their job in terms of producing some puzzles to solve, although sometimes the logic can seem a little off.
The main thing likely to trip up a player of Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is its puzzles that take place across multiple locations. Most chapters of the story limit how many places you can go, making it so you can at least eventually bumble into an area of importance if you can’t figure out what to do, but beyond just needing to sometimes repeatedly check something until Sir Cucumber finally makes note of what you’re meant to find, the greater impediment to progress will be when an innocuous action triggers a change elsewhere. Sometimes this is done reasonably. A character requests a donut, you go and find that donut, but when you come back he’s gone and the area has changed, so you at least can reasonably adjust your plans to observe the differences and learn where to go from there. At other times though, sometimes things change elsewhere without a direct connection or throughline. In the prison for example, part of your escape plan is to find a paper lantern to blend in with the guards. You check the storage area, it’s not there, but when you enter the room of Lt. Pepper and tie him up so he can’t recapture you, suddenly the paper lantern has appeared in the storage area. Perhaps the idea is the lantern belonged to Lt. Pepper and he will no longer patrol with it, but his office is the adjacent room, you didn’t see Pepper going between them, and it never seemed like he was anywhere but his office. There are some more egregious cases where it feels like you just need to go back and root through all areas again in hopes something is different after you’ve reached the end of your options, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom often slowing down and losing steam when it feels like you’ve gone from exploring with purpose to running through all available options in case something has undergone a shift since last you looked.
Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, despite having a Fight option, doesn’t truly have much violence to it, the worst case being a Nut Bomb you use to clear out one monster, that machine gun even remaining on the shelf ultimately. Instead, the battles of this adventure are handled through rock-paper-scissors. When a character or creature obstructs your path, you can challenge them to a quick game, and thankfully, this fight system isn’t just a case of random guesswork. Each enemy you face in rock-paper-scissors will have some quirk or pattern to uncover. Maybe they never throw scissors, or maybe they alternate their choices, but after you’ve won a game of roshambo, they’ll change instead to a guessing game of trying to predict where they’ll look: up, down, left, or right. Again, the same rules apply, they behave in ways you either uncover through play or learn from a hint before battle, so you can eventually figure out the way to beat them. If you do lose during the process though, it’s usually not an issue. When the enemy wins a round, they get an extra life, and when you win, you destroy one of those lives. Once they’re out of lives, they’re defeated, and you can continue on. Oftentimes these battles take place in mazes where you actually move about more freely compared to jumping from important location to location, most of these mazes thankfully small despite their basic visuals so that you can eventually find your way through and grab whatever important items are littered about. Finding items does require standing right on top of them unfortunately and some like the compass that helps orient you in a maze would be a shame to miss, the mazes and battles not exactly thrilling in the end but tolerated since they help add some action to your exploration of an intriguing and charming world full of plant people.
THE VERDICT: A cute thematic world and a pleasant soundtrack make Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom an easy adventure game to commit to even if some of its gameplay choices provides a few hitches down an almost delightful road. The mazes and rock-paper-scissors battles aren’t really the most exciting injection of action and some of the interaction puzzles don’t connect well, leaving you wandering around in confusion for a bit. At other times though, walking around, seeing the sights, and figuring out how to get people to help you is a pretty breezy and interesting process, and once you’ve figured out some of its gameplay quirks, you’ll be better able to enjoy its quirky setting.
And so, I give Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
An OKAY rating. While it does take a few moments to remind you that the edible populace are at stake, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is mostly a surprisingly cheery adventure and it’s easy to get swept up in those vibes. Heading to a new town, seeing the strange fruit people running the local stores, seeing how they react to a bit of praise or a needless hit, it gives the game a good energy of exploration even when you’re often just going down the list of your menu interactions until you have enough information to take a more intentional action. Puzzles aren’t often particularly deep, but it’s often the process of figuring out what needs doing more than what is done that gives this adventure its appeal, figuring out how something works in this world of vegetables and fruits keeping your interest until it starts tripping on trying to connect things together. It’s not a good thing that its more involved moments of action, the mazes and roshambo battles, are best described as easy enough to push through, but it’s likely those moments where the game doesn’t do the best job guiding you that start to weaken your appreciation for it. You start to learn to check most objects at least three times, you are sometimes left going back to every previous area in case a character is suddenly willing to help despite you not doing anything relevant to trigger it, and there’s no real satisfaction in breaking through that progress barrier because it wasn’t about figuring things out, it was about just happening to be in the right place. These breaks from logic are not too common but will slow the game’s adventuring pace, a lot of its charm coming from seeing something new and possibly having a silly little interaction with it.
Cleaning up Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom wouldn’t make it a good game per se, and at times, it does feel like this is meant to help younger players take steps into the world of adventure games. Most puzzles aren’t complex, the menu options make sense, the world is colorful and fairly friendly, and even individual chapters are condensed well, passwords offered between them making it so you can return to the game later. Perhaps having a few points where you’re wandering around confused is a bit of an accurate introduction to the kind of adventure games that came out before it, but if considered on its own merits rather than as a starter for people curious of the genre, its setting and your travels through it do have a pleasant charm to them that won’t fade just because you get stuck for a while figuring it out.