I beat Pajama Sam ya’ll! I beat a game designed for 6 year olds! Hurray! Considering that the puzzles were all super simple and walking through them would be super boring, I decided to mix things up and listacle this shit. So here are my top eight takeaways from Pajama Sam.

1. Piggybacking totally works despite the world being a fantastical hellscape! All of the puzzles in Pajama Sam are quite funny and psychedelic, like convincing a boat that wood floats and helping a carrot lead a food revolution (more on that later). However, they are all solved by using common objects in relatively realistic ways so they actually make sense! No chicken with a pully in the middle! No balloon animal Robert Frost! No linking books! After playing Myst, Riven, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, and Broken Age it was very nice to play an adventure game that just made sense. Even better, the world felt cohesive despite the mundane items.

2. The game has jokes for kids and for adults playing with kids! Just about every conversation has a joke that would clearly go over the head of a kid, from a bust of Beethoven that spells Ludvig like a spelling bee contestant, to a gang of trees that call themselves a customs department. The secret to creating great children’s entertainment is to remember that there are usually adults there too, and the adults are the people who pay for everything. If you can keep the adults at least mildly entertained, then the kids get to bond while they play and the adults buy more of your stuff. That’s the secret recipe that’s kept Cartoon Network afloat all of these years as other kids channels have migrated away from animation.

3. The animators had a really good time making this game! All of the sight gags are surprisingly involved and well animated. It’s clear how much the dedication to sight gags shaped the layout of every screen. If there was a weird tree or rock, you could be sure that it had 2-3 unique animations. Even blades of grass would spring to life every once and a while. All of that extra work really made the Land of Darkness pop. I had a nice time trying to get as much nonsense on the screen as possible. The award for best random gag goes to a bun chasing a hotdog like a serial killer might, only to have the hotdog then turn the tables if you keep clicking.

4. The game randomly shuffles puzzles on every new playthrough! To beat Pajama Sam, you need to help Sam recover the three parts of his Pajama Sam costume: a mask, a flashlight, and a lunchbox. Each of these objects can be in multiple places depending on what random seed you get when you start the game. This means that you can’t see all of the puzzles in one playthrough! Just beating the game once doesn’t show you every character interaction or every joke, so there is actually a good reason to replay the game. It’s kind of crazy that a kid’s game is doing something that I haven’t seen in any other adventure game (this could be because of my relative ignorance of the genre).

5. The game lets you skip every animation! If you press the escape button when an animation is playing, it skips to the end. This includes screen transitions. What a freaking amazing feature. It saved me so much time clicking around and it makes playing the game multiple times easy. It also makes backtracking a breeze.

6. This game has a quiz show and it’s excellent! At one point you need to get through a pair of sentient doors who force you to play a game show called the Brain Tickler. The doors/ hosts have a perfect balance of enthusiasm and smarm. The questions are simple, but still feature at least one joke answer for an adult to laugh at. I also love that, after you win, the doors bicker about who gets to read the questions every time you walk by.

7. This game has a musical talking carrot who takes no prisoners! A carrot is my favorite character in this game. You find the carrot wearing Sam’s mask and when you ask for the mask it replies with, “ownership is theft.” That’s right, the carrot is a communist. It is the leader of the “Salad Liberation Front” and its goal is to raise the status of salad. No longer will salad be a mere appetizer, it shall be the main course! In order to get Sam’s mask back you have to take the carrot to a refrigerator in Darkness’s mansion, at which point there is a musical interlude between the refrigerator, Sam, the carrot leader, and the captive carrots. This game is only $7. You should see the majesty of the “Salad Liberation Front.”

8. The game ends with Sam befriending Darkness instead of capturing him! When you finally encounter Darkness, he is locked in his own closet hiding from Sam. He basically tells you that trying to banish him into a luchbox is a pretty crappy thing to do and all he really wants is a friend. So he challenges you to a game on cheese and crackers (tic-tac-toe). The game ends with Sam playing cheese and crackers with a shadow. The game isn't resolved with violence or contrivances, it's resolved by playing games with a stranger. What a fucking good kid’s game!

I’m happy to report that the first Pajama Sam game is even better than I remember. One down and 3 more to go!

What a neat thing! Who knew Humongous Entertainment ("H.E. Entertainment" as I used to misread their logo) put so much consideration in how kids might engage their for-kids adventure games?

Looking forward to your Thunder and Lightning analysis. That one was a staple of my early years.

While I wasn't much of a Pajama Sam guy (I'm pretty sure I've played this one), I played my share of Freddi Fish and Putt Putt when I was young. It's sort of weird to think that these games being made for children (and thus falling lower on the "Adventure Game Bullshit" scale) means they probably hold up better than their contemporaries made for older audiences. The procedurally generated puzzle solutions was one thing I remember quite clearly though, and the idea of making a point-and-click adventure game replayable is sort of brilliant.

Interesting write-up! I remember playing Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam a lot as a kid. I got Pajama Sam 3 in a cereal box when they still did stuff like that. This brings back a lot of memories.

I never played the Humongous games. I'm not sure why... I mean, I was definitely above the target age, but I never had any qualms with "kid's games" at the time. I was playing Wishbone And The Amazing Odyssey and Duke 3D back to back. Seems like I was missing out.

@confusedowl: The only cereal box game I ever got was Chex Quest and that game was amazing.

@arbitrarywater: Its extra weird to see how many games still invest in adventure game bullshit since these games got it right 19 years ago. The second half of Broken Age really showed me how many people consider the obtuse puzzles a key part of the experience.

@jack_lafayette: Yeah they basically did all of the accessibility stuff that I wish the Cyan games did. Its always amazing to see how games designed for kids work since there is so little that they can take for granted.

@shagge: Honestly, I had no idea that these games would hold up so well. I'm a bit dumbfounded.

Pajama Sam and Spy Fox games were and still are dope as fuck.

Yes, this game looks to be a labour of love alright. Good work highlighting the specific design decisions that comes with making a kid's educational game, and I applaud the dev's work for what seems like a very well thought-out execution of the genre. I wonder, where has it (educationnal, not adventure games) gone? Minecraft and angry birds can't have saturated kid's attention by themselves, can they? Hidden among the sea of shovelware mobile apps, I fear...

@kitcatham: I haven't seen a kid's game like this in a while, but kid's TV shows often have tie-in games. I have no idea if they are as good or educational as this one though.

Was the carrot inspired by Alex?

@matatat: I don't think he had the ability to grow facial hair when this game came out.