Amanda the Adventurer Game Online · Play Now

Do you have a soft spot for old rag doll cartoons and horrors alike? If so, welcome to Amanda the Adventurer! The name of the game coincides with the name of the fictional kids show from a dusty video tape you find in the attic at the start. Once you put it in, you’ll be carried into a world that’s equal parts cute and creepy, with characters talking to you from behind the fourth wall, wacky puzzles to solve with all the interactive stuff lying around in abundance, and some rather disturbing stuff suddenly outbreaking on both of your screens to give you hiccups. So, turn your VHS set on and let’s play!

Things lurking in the attic

The story starts pretty eerily already. You are this girl named Riley who brings in her mail in the morning and goes through the letters – only to be startled with one from her dead aunt. It says something about the attic that you need to check to… You can’t make it out. It’s all hints and clues, so you just have to go there yourself and see it through. The attic is choke full of stuff accumulated and gathering dust for generations. It takes you a while to get to the thing of interest – an old TV set with a box of tapes, one of which says ‘Amanda the Adventurer.’ This is just the one you need. But you have to think twice before watching it, cause there ain’t gonna be no way back!

On the surface, it’s just a kids show, with cute puppets, and paper cut props, and fun episodes teaching children to do stuff. But as you get deeper into the game, you’ll realize the characters are not that simple and innocent. Amanda turns out to be quite a little maniac, swinging her toy knives in a rather ominous and threatening way, and Wooly is a depressive, conspiracy theory type, preoccupied with the paranoia of being locked in the program. A pretty shady company to keep, but nothing to do about it!

Not quite kid-proper kids show

At its core, the gameplay in Amanda the Adventurer is relatively straightforward. Players must scavenge for clues in the tapes and the surrounding environment, which can then be utilized to solve a variety of puzzles to progress through the game. It goes like this: you pop in a tape, you watch the episode, you do the things Amanda asks you for – and if you nail it, you can get access to the next tape.

One time she will teach you to make an apple pie, and you have to repeat all the manipulations with toy fruits and dough, using an oven that’s naturally toy too. Or you might be challenged to solve a word puzzle with play cubes or something. Success? Get a new tape! Only watch out for the jump scares, cause sometimes the game will throw in something out of the blue and downright creepy!

It’s not that there is any danger to you in the game. You won’t find yourself needing to engage in any combat, hide from enemies, or run for your life. However, you will quite often find yourself twitch a muscle or two when the attic door suddenly slams open and another nightmare bursts in. Aside from this, the game is very successful at building a tense and foreboding atmosphere. The combination of eerie sounds, cartoon graphics from the 90’s, and the stark contrast between what you expect to see and what is really happening, all contribute to creating the type of creeping unease that horror aficionados crave.

Cute and creepy all right!

As for the graphics, they’re not gonna blow your mind or anything, but that’s not really the point in Amanda the Adventurer. The animated sections with Amanda herself look poor, but on purpose, like they’re supposed to be from the early-to-mid 90s when CGI was still in its awkward phase. But when it comes to the attic itself, the graphics are just average, nothing to write home about.

The sound, on the other hand, is pretty good. Unlike other indie games, this one makes a more humble use of special effects. And the noises that come from a video tape being loaded really nail it, with glitches that can really jump you. Amanda and Wooly, her friend, have the perfect voices for their characters, and when they start switching into horror mode, it can be downright disturbing. But let’s be real here, this game isn’t that scary. It’s more creepy than anything else, with a great atmosphere and some cool puzzles to keep you engaged. Go on and see for yourself!