Adventure Lib Review (PC)

Many games, especially those in the adventure genre, are filled with different puzzles that require different efforts from players, their virtual items, as well as their real-life thinking skills. Some, however, go a bit overboard with their requirements, often resulting in silly objectives or outlandish procedures.

Adventure Lib, coming from Fancy Fish Games, takes this concept and pokes fun at it by switching all sorts of items between them in order to produce all sorts of hilarious combinations. You can be a heroic door or an amorphous Thing on a quest from the royal chipmunk or plunger to defeat fire-breathing pants. The combinations are endless and Adventure Lib wants to ensure that players have a smile on their face every time they go through the short campaign.

Does Adventure Lib manage to pull off a solid parody of outrageous adventure games or do its combinations fall flat? Let's find out.

Story

The main story, without considering the endless combinations of characters and objects, is your basic medieval fantasy plot. A young hero is called by the ruler to defeat an impending threat, obtain treasure, and make peace in the kingdom.

While this may sound like a cliché, the randomized elements, plus the whole tongue-in-cheek feel of the experience, work quite well with the general plot and react in plenty of ways when faced with certain combinations.

The writing retains the aforementioned tongue-in-cheek style, resorting to puns and all sorts of hilarious dialogs in order to critique not only video game tropes but also the actual story. For example, one character, who can range from a plunger to a fish, arrives from the future but gets locked in the dungeon for trying to warn humanity about the impending singularity.

Throw all these things together and, while the story might be pretty short, it's well worth investing a bit of time in it, especially if you don't skip through conversations and listen to the many different things uttered by various characters and objects.

Wacky solutions in Adventure Lib

Gameplay

Adventure Lib presents a side-scrolling adventure experience in which your character moves to the left or right, examines and interacts with objects, while using his inventory, represented by a magical pocket, to store, combine, and use various things.

The mechanics are simple to understand, and while navigating the inventory requires you to constantly move your left hand around in order to press Q, E, or Escape, it's not that big of a deal.

The main claim to fame, as mentioned above, is the randomization system that swaps out objects throughout the many roles in the story. The protagonist may be anything from a plunger to a chipmunk, a potato, or even a fish. The same can be said for the ruler, the impending threat, and the many other characters in the story.

The voice acting incorporates their names in conversations and you'll certainly laugh a lot while hearing and reading the wacky combinations possible in the game. You can use a pineapple to spread a chipmunk over a key, and then a king to break the object in half so that you can please two bickering robots.

In case you get tired with the regular combinations, you can even make your own using the built-in editor and then immediately share them via the Steam Workshop support. You can start by drawing it, record its name, and then play as or with your new object inside Adventure Lib. The whole thing is quite fun and you can expect all sorts of wacky things to get shared by users once the title rolls out to everyone via Steam.

The game is pretty short and the general mechanics don't change, but the whole randomness manages to make each playthrough fun, even if you already know what you have to do.

Escape tricky situations in Adventure Lib

Visuals and Sound

The visuals in Adventure Lib are nothing glamorous but they work pretty well. The colors are good and the animations, reminiscent of a pop-up book, just hammer home the fact that the objects get swapped around every playthrough. Some combinations in your inventory may not always display properly, but this is not such a big problem.

The soundtrack is decent and the effects are pretty well done. The voice acting manages to incorporate the randomized nature by playing it in a deadpan way. The general dialog is read in one voice, while the names of the objects are read out in all sorts of variations, using both male and female voices. While it may not sound that great for all players, I'm sure many will find it hilarious. If not, you can still turn it off.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion