If you don’t find Boris the boar cute in PQube‘s Adorable Adventures, does that mean you’re in for a rocky experience? No. Despite the protests of the fairer sex in my household, insisting that he is, in fact, adorable, the feeling did not resonate with me. After watching Babe, all I could think of was Rugrats and having a bacon sarnie.
Objectively, Boris is cute, but the actual premise of the game is better. As the fodder to Asterisk the Gaul, we find ourselves in the wild following a fire incident, which leaves Boris, the lil’ boar, stranded from his family. We don’t get a cutscene or a blurb, and instead have a narrator who tells us all about him. The narrator is a decent fellow, as they give you hints on where to go, as well as create a scrapbook to review the characters and wildlife you encounter.
Adorable Adventures is a wholesome experience as Boris doesn’t have a black belt in anything besides their smell sense. Sure, he can jump a little high, and if you’re that way inclined and have the mental age of a three-year-old, you can spin him around on the spot at lightning speed. Anyways, it’s somewhat like Away: The Survival Series where the visuals are very impressive, the character, naturally, doesn’t yap, and there’s a narrator serving as your connection to what is going on. There’s nothing ambiguous about Adorable Adventures, though there are fetch quests to complete. Rather, scent quests.
To find his family, Boris literally sniffs them out. With Mum trapped in a barn, his brother pulling an all-nighter and needing a holistic remedy solution to perk him up, and with no opposable thumbs to speak of, holding down the R1 button will create a bokeh trail that represents a smell to follow. These are colour-coded, and as you approach the point of interest, a.k.a plant life, you will need to hone in on a set number of these to ‘forget’ the scent. Why would you possibly want to forget the smell of fresh linen? Well, the Smells Traffic Highway can get congested, and without an actual map – which would make no scents (get it?) to have one – it’s best to isolate the task at hand.
What ensues is a search for items to solve an immediate problem that brings you closer to your family, and to relocate them when that task is ultimately complete. The scenery in Adorable Adventures is so natural that getting lost isn’t really a thing. The level design, considering there are no platforms, booby traps or secret paths to think of, is very realistic and not copy-and-paste mazes. It’s similar to the recent The End of the Sun in how good it looks, though the difference here is you have something to continually smell. Whether that’s what you game for is a different kettle of fish.
My motivation for covering this title was to play with my youngest as I knew she’d find this cute, but secretly, I always love a wholesome game as a good side dish to a decent rogue-like. From a child’s perspective, who this is predominantly aimed at, it’s excellent. The challenges are spot-on, the pace is good, there are low demands throughout, and… well… it’s cute. All of the above applies to the adults, too; whether you find Boris sweet and innocent or that he should be served on a plate with some chips is irrelevant, and this is a sweet, adorable adventure that is only really lacking in the technology department of not having Smell-O-Vision. Then again, who wants to smell a sweaty boar? I know my wife’s fed up with it.
