Hey everybody, I finished Pajama Sam: Thunder and Lightning aren’t so Frightening and since the last listacle went so well I’m going to run that format back again. So here are the top 7 things about Pajama Sam 2!

1. You can select which puzzles you play! One of the big surprises I found in Pajama Sam 1 was that the game has some randomized elements. Each of the core three items you need to beat the game can be hidden behind one of two puzzles. That means that Pajama Sam is one of the only adventure games with replayability baked in. In Pajama Sam 2 there is a menu option to select which 4 of the 8 potential puzzles you encounter in your playthrough. You can either leave the puzzle randomization completely up to the computer, select a subset of puzzle combinations for the computer to choose from, or you can manually select which puzzles you see. That is a really cool level of control for completionists and it removes potential repetition that the old, random system produced.

2. There is a save menu! Pajama Sam 1 required you to press the S and L keys to save and load the game. That’s not the most unintuitive UI in the world, but it also isn’t the most user-friendly for young kids that were raised on graphical user interfaces. So Pajama Sam 2 fixes that problem by adding save and load options to the old quit button. The S and L buttons still work the same way, but now the game has an additional interface for those who need it.

3. There are way more mini-games in Pajama Sam 2! You may have noticed the fun button on the save menu. That button starts up a Candyland-like mini-game with a colored spinner and some weather themed pieces. It is just one of a few “just for fun” mini-games in Pajama Sam 2. There is a photo-hunt game, a snowflake maker, and a tic-tac-toe board that you can play with as well. The mini-games aren’t great, but they seem like fun distractions that might hold a kid’s attention and add further replayability to what could be a short game. In addition to those games, a few of the puzzle solutions require you to solve things like visual mazes and filing systems, rather than simply following the old “use item on thing” adventure game convention. I personally prefer the adventure game solutions, since the writing is usually pretty funny; but, I can see why they branched out into mini-games. These games are for kids and a lot of the jokes I enjoy would be way over a kid’s head. There’s a nice compromise between “just for fun” mini-games, mini-game puzzle solutions, and traditional adventure gameplay.

4. Thunder and Lightning are pretty great characters! Lightning is a spaz and Thunder is a calm, mother figure. They show up every time you complete one of the game’s major puzzles and their skits are pretty funny. I especially like when Mother Nature shows up to check in on them.

5. The board room is a solid gag! Pajama Sam 2 is set in a world where weather is controlled by a bureaucratic corporation, like the afterlife in Beetlejuice or Grim Fandango. The “natural system as bureaucracy” subgenre is always funny, and it’s nice to see a boardroom full of boards (who are actually recurring characters from PS1) and a chairman who is an actual chair. You gotta love anthropomorphic furniture. The only thing that the boardmembers ever discuss is who gets to be on the board and the color scheme of the executive washroom, but I feel that is appropriately banal discussion for a boardroom.

6. The Eathquaker!

7. The Carrot is back! Everyone’s favorite communist carrot is back with a vengeance! In this game he has infiltrated the weather company as a snowman’s nose to study the working conditions of its employees. You see, he’s taken an economics class at Cauliflower University and he will not allow labor exploitation to continue. Like last game, the Carrot is the best thing in the game. Listening to him explain the US economy (“It’s like a wild horse… man”) and Giffin’s Paradox is amazing. You can even make him one of the board members, at which point he starts to bend the weather company to his will.

With that, I’ve reached the end of the Pajama Sam games that I’ve played before. From here on out it’s all new territory. I can’t wait!