Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure is a game that feels like it shouldn’t exist. A 2019 release on all relevant platforms it legitimately feels like a low budget remake of a terrible PS1 game. The kind of licensed garbage that came out late in the console’s life and would get a 4 out of 10 from IGN or Gamespot. It looks like a modern, albeit low budget, game, and it controls reasonably well, on par with other third tier 3D platformers like Skylar & Plux, but the level design is incredibly basic and boring and it is extremely rough around the edges. It contains so many odd design choices that I more or less plays like the designer had only ever had video game levels described to him second hand while he was drunk and had a hazy grasp of their principles. It is simultaneously crushingly commercial and wildly idiosyncratic; both a mindless cash grab and the result of someone’s twisted vision. It feels like something of an entirely different time and place and yet there are aspects that are completely modern and it is simultaneously one of the most boring games I have ever played on a mechanical level and one of the most fascinating on a meta level of why this thing exists and what the people who made it were thinking. At least at first.

The Ice Age film franchise has somehow managed to survive for almost 20 years without going extinct. The most recent film came out in 2016 (there’s a sixth one planned) and Scrat’s Nutty Adventure came out in 2019 so this was not tied in to any particular product. It was, instead, a weird franchise tie in put out for $40 by a small development team.

Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure is a linear 3D platformer where you play as Scrat, the voiceless saber-tooth squirrel from the Ice Age films. You leap from ledge to ledge in search of crystal acorns belonging to the Scratazon alien civilization that apparently appeared on some DVD extra on one of the Ice Age sequels. The game plays like it was designed by someone who has only seen two videogames before, both from the first few years of the PS1. It has the linear platforming level design of Croc (though somehow even more simplified) and the tighter controls and movie-licensed nature of A Bug’s Life.

Scrat has a tiny arsenal of moves for a games that was a $40 release. He can run, jump, attack, butt stomp, throw rocks, carry keys, dig in special mounds for the item they hold, climb about a dozen specific walls across the game, and sneak. During the course of the game he gains the ability to double jump, sling himself through floating pink rings found in the environment, and slide certain blocks around the environment using telekinesis. He can also slide down certain specific inclines. That’s the full set. The vast majority of your time is spent running and jumping, which is to be expected in a platformer. Combat is as basic as can be, basically consisting of hammering the attack button until the enemies stop moving, and it feels terrible. The chief issue is that after you hit an enemy a few times they fall over, and while on the ground they are invincible until they get back up, meaning that the combat more or less consists of hammering the attack button in one place while most of the enemies are totally unaffected because you’ve knocked them down, rendering them invulnerable. Sometimes you have to throw rocks at flying bugs or meercats until they fall down. It’s boring and unfun, and there’s very little enemy variety, basically consisting of beetles on the ground, flying insects that spit and swoop at you, meercats who throw stones at you, and a couple invincible enemies who you have to sneak past.

The sneaking in this game doesn’t involve vision cones or guard patterns, but rather holding down a button to make you walk slowly so you don’t wake the stationary sleeping guard enemies, who tend to blend into the background pretty well and then leap out and one hit kill you the first time you run past. This mechanic may legitimately be the worst one I’ve seen in a video game, not because it adds much to the challenge (checkpoints are frequent and generous) or because it’s broken (it works fine) but because it adds nothing to the game and the one thing this game did not need were sections where you have to move slower. The game is about 4 hours long and features 16 levels and a hub, with some cut scenes, meaning that each level is a little less than 15 minutes long. That’s a reasonable length for a 3D platformer level, except that all these levels blend together. There are 4 areas with 4 levels each, and not only do the levels within each area look and play similarly, but all the areas play pretty much the same and look fairly similar too, until the last one, which is probably the prettiest in the whole game. The complexity of your actions does increase slightly over the course of the game, but it’s from a 2 out of 10 to a 4 out of 10, and it never approaches the depth of even the early levels in a game like Super Mario 3D World, let alone something like Bowser’s Fury. There’s some slight variety in the form of the ice slides, rudimentary switch puzzles, key hunts, and some walls you can jump back and forth on, but we’re talking incredibly basic stuff mixed in with rote platforming and combat.

The boss fights are, if anything, worse. There are three of them in the game, with the 3^rd area forgoing a boss battle in favor of having you complete a puzzle that would be average in a mediocre PS2 game like Haven: Call of the King but merits its own achievement in Scrat. The boss fights are all janky as heck and occur, for some reason, in the third out of 4 levels in each region, instead of the last. In each fight some creature(s), like a pair of brontotheriidae or some prehistoric alligators, will attack Scrat and he will have to avoid them in some way while their lifebar is black until they become vulnerable (at which point it turns red) and then you can drain 25% of the lifebar, rinse and repeat. None of these feel good, fun, or natural, and you never know why these enemies are attacking you in the first place (you’d think that it was because they want to eat Scrat, but brontotheriidae were likely herbivores, so that’s not it.) The fights aren’t hard and involve basic pattern recognition or a little patience, and they don’t even represent the end of the level, just a slight break in the action for you to throw rocks at a big thing and then dodge its easily telegraphed attacks before going back to the platforming.

I’ve praised the graphics for looking modern, and they do in terms of fidelity, but the landscapes presented are mostly barren wastelands of dirt or ice, with seemingly endless series of cliffs and waterways broken up only by the ruins of an ancient Scratazoan civilization and the occasional moving platform or enemy. These levels feel incredibly dull to navigate and it’s impossible to differentiate one part of a level from the next. It’s just a long chain of the same beats over and over. There are collectibles in the form of crystal shards, tablet pieces, statues, and health pots, but they do very little to break up the monotony because the crystal shards are scattered literally everywhere and dropped by enemies on death, and the other collectibles are all incredibly dull and visually appealing, and usually found in obvious and easy side areas. One “fun” thing that this game does is hide most of its collectibles in areas that can only be completed with a power you don’t have yet at that part of the game, like putting statues behind blocks that you need telekinesis to move; a power you only pick up after the third region. Even better the part that requires the special power often isn’t at the entrance to the side area but at the very end, so you might trek all the way to the end of the detour only to find you can’t collect anything because you can’t double jump or slingshot yet, and that’s required to get past the final obstacle.

This design is clearly intended to get you to play through the levels multiple times, and the game does have a level select available at the start of each area, but the idea of playing through those areas multiple times is about as appealing as standing in a cold rain and staring at a mud puddle. To be fair I’m not sure I could tell the difference between the levels I’ve already played and new levels, given how samey it all is, but by the time I was done with Scrat’s Nutty Adventure I was ready to never play the game again, even though the last area adds some desperately needed visual variety to the levels (somehow featuring two unique environments, in comparison to the 2.5 that the game’s other 3 areas have) and ramps up the gameplay from ridiculously simple all the way to almost acceptable if it were the first level of the game and you were just learning the ropes. I’m not alone in feeling this way. The game is short and easy, has never been on PlayStation Plus or Games With Gold, and according to achievements and trophies was finished by 23% of the people who played it. About 50% of players quit before the first boss, less than an hour into the game.

It may sound like I’m being harsh on a licensed kid’s game, and what did I expect? but it’s not just that the game is bad, it’s that it’s bad in baffling ways. Picking up crystal shards unlocks concept art and also increases Scrat’s health bar, but both of those max out at 5000 shards. I was there about halfway through the third region, and shards are useless after that. Despite mostly ignoring them for the rest of the game I ended up at over 7,000. Even in the late game many of the little secret paths or detours just lead to shards, which any player will have more than they need at that point. They couldn’t add in a few more pieces of concept art to give you some kind of bonus for finding more? That plus, the horrible layout of the areas you need future powers to get, plus the bizarre combat with enemies invincible upon knockdown, plus the awful visual design of most of the game even though the last area is pleasant, add up to an inexplicable product despite the fact that the fundamentals of how it looks and controls being perfectly adequate. Usually you see games that are either competent in every area or a total dumpster fire. Scrat’s Nutty Adventure is the most lopsided title you’ll see outside of Balan Wonderworld.

So far I’ve ignored the game’s story and sound. The story is virtually non-existent. Scrat goes after a nut and ends up in a temple of an ancient civilization where he is tasked by some kind of spirit with retrieving 4 crystal nuts and is sent off to find them. That’s it. You’re communicated to via text and there are some almost amusing, if disjointed, cut scenes similar to the Scrat shorts that precede the Ice Age films where he tries to grab a crystal nut but instead ends up causing some kind of catastrophe that he barely survives. That’s it.

The sound effects from jumping and hitting enemies are fine, if a bit cartoony. The music is actually really good, and of high enough quality that I think it was ‘borrowed’ from one or more of the movies. It definitely sounds like a film score, and doesn’t quite fit the game, but it’s impressive and enjoyable all the same. The composer has a bandcamp album with the music so it’s possible it’s original. If it is and wasn’t adapted from the movies then bravo. It’s fantastic stuff.

I wanted to test my feeling that this seemed like a PS1 remake so I downloaded and booted up my PS3 copy of the PS1 “Classic” A Bug’s Life (which got a whopping 2.7/10 from Gamespot) and played through the first third or so. Scrat is a much better game in its basics, from graphics and camera to control and visual clarity of what you’re supposed to do. But there was something about the way that Flik moves in that game that really does remind me of Scrat, especially his berry throw attack that’s a lot like Scrat’s rock hurl, and somehow that 1998 $40 budget release has more level variety in both mechanics and visual design than the $40 2019 game. Every level in A Bug’s Life is distinct, featuring new mechanics, enemies, and visual motifs, in comparison to Scrat’s monotony. The first boss fight in A Bug’s Life is also way more polished than any boss fight in Scrat, and since A Bug’s Life features clips from the Pixar film it also has much more of a story. Setting aside graphical fidelity, where Scrat has an obvious massive advantage, I’d say they’re about on par with one another. Scrat has more solid fundamentals but everything it does with them is boring. A Bug’s Life is messier but more varied and interesting. I could easily imagine them being contemporaries.

When I started playing Scrat’s Nutty Adventure I found it amusing. I expected a semi-competent tie in game that was worthy of its 55 Metacritic rating, bland but inoffensive, but what I got was much weirder than that. A game whose vast empty levels and strange design decisions seem totally unmoored from the last 20 years of development history. This is a kids game made by a small team, but it’s not bright and colorful or fast paced and fun. There are lots of kids games that are fun for all ages. I really can’t imagine this being fun for anyone, and that shows in the trophy and achievement percentages.

By the time I finished Scrat’s Nutty Adventure, which took me 6 weeks because it was difficult to play for more than 20-30 minutes at a time without becoming hopeless bored, I was just sad. This is an exploitative product built to sell games to kids via their mothers and fathers and uncles and gam-gams who remember the Ice Age games and maybe have fond memories of licensed games from their youth (like A Bug’s Life) and want to get something for Little Cody or Jackson or Brie. It was made by competent developers with about as much passion as a Taco Bell ‘chef’ puts into microwaving your burrito after she’s assembled it. It’s a by the book product and it cost $40 (I paid $15 and regret it) and in many ways its boringness makes it worse than something messy and interesting, even for kids. The Spyro Reignited Trilogy is kid friendly and better in every way. New Super Lucky’s Tale is out on every platform, and that game isn’t wonderful but it’s way more fun than this. If you want an example of what a modern low budget 3D platformer for kids should look like, there it is. Even Skylar and Plux, bare bones as it is, is a better choice.

We don’t need this kind of thing anymore. It may be kind of interesting to weirdos like me, but it’s of almost no value to anyone else. Scrat’s Nutty Adventure had a tiny development team and I respect that they put together a game that looks and runs decently on a technical level and controls well enough. But the level design and the game’s various forms of jank (I haven’t even gotten into the weird cinematics, or the fact that some of the late game sliding sections unceremoniously dump you into a pit if you’re not perfectly centered) make it not worth playing. This industry should be better than churning out this kind of thing for a quick licensed buck.