If you are a “Peppa Pig” household and you have young kids discovering video games then it might be worth pressing play on a pretty impressive little title based on the franchise. After all, I’m a Daddy Pig myself and as he says on the show “I’m a bit of an expert”.
My Friend Peppa Pig is a game that was released in 2021 and given very high scores by critics at a time when games like Battlefield and Call of Duty were getting panned. In fact, the Peppa Pig game is as close to being the perfect game, based on the target audience.
When I was a kid I enjoyed playing story-driven adventures on an old PC. Games like Sam and Max Hit the Road and even Day of the Tentacle. These were adventure titles with puzzles to solve in order to progress the story. This game borrows from that genre to create a game for younger kids to enjoy while teaching them the basics of gaming.
The game starts with the player creating their own animal character to play as. So while you don’t play directly as Peppa Pig, she becomes your guide to hold your hand throughout the adventure.
The character creation process was very simple as you choose the basic outfit and rather than choose to be male or female the game provides a sexless approach letting you simply choose if you wear a dress type outfit or not. You also choose which animal you will be, we chose to be a Fox but you can also choose from mouse or sheep or other types that appear on the show.
Once the character is created, the show begins as the narrator tells the story and takes you through a quick tutorial to learn the basics of jumping, movement and interacting with the environment.
Although the controller can be quite daunting to a first-time gamer, My Friend Peppa Pig uses very little of the features keeping it as a simple “one button for everything” approach. So all you’ll really need to do is move and hit a single button.
The game also has subtitles to follow along with and is also explained through the Narrator and characters so there is no requirement to know how to read. If you miss what to do they will always tell you again so you can get back on track with missions after a little sidetracking.
You’ll start at the most familiar place in the series, Peppas house, and although the game will guide you to complete missions it’s also perfectly ok to explore and enjoy the sandbox world around you. Some of the places you can visit are Windy Castle, Potato City, The Museum and Peppas Grandparents house. At each destination, you’ll meet characters associated with those areas like her Grandparents pet parrot “Polly” sitting on a perch at their house and giving you instructions.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Peppa game without her amazingly entertaining family. Mummy Pig is there, Daddy Pig and of course, George is wondering about raving about “Din-o-saurs… Raaah”. One of the first missions you’ll come across is to find Daddy Pigs glasses, it is really easy and gives kids a sense of accomplishment straight out of the gate, before completing other taskings like collecting Grannys Chickens.
This game is not one that you will pick up after the kids go to bed and is definitely targeted at that younger audience. My daughter is 3 and has picked up some of the movement quite well. She gets distracted easily so gets just as much fun out of taking the character to the nearest muddy puddle for a jump rather than play the missions of the game. This frustrated me for a brief moment until it clicked that she was having fun and that is really what games are all about so I just let her go and do her own thing.
Parents who might be concerned with screen time can breathe a sigh of relief. The game has built-in parental control. This allows you to set how long your child can play for. It doesn’t just abruptly end either (cause we know that would end in tears). It lets the child down gently by taking the character back to Peppas house for a sleepover. It’s a great feature that is more subtle than most consoles versions of parental control, some might think it a little too subtle but I thought it was a nice touch.
My Friend Peppa Pig is a wonderful recreation of the television series for kids in an interactive format that is as simple as games come. It’s designed to engage first-time video game players and is relatively educational without being overt about it. The look on a child’s face and sounds of enjoyment as they see characters they’ve become to know come to life and interact with them on screen is just priceless.
The game is available on Playstation 4 & 5, Xbox Consoles, PC, Stadia and Nintendo Switch. It was reviewed on a PlayStation 5. If anything that is the only regret with this purchase, I should have gotten it on the Nintendo Switch where the controller is more manageable for tiny hands.
This article originally appeared here and is republished with permission