DobbyxEscape: Pirate Adventure

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

DobbyxEscape: Pirate Adventure is a family-friendly Graphic Adventure released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game puts players in the role of a young boy who goes on an adventure with the spirit of Blackbeard.

I should note that we’re only given the most rudimentary introduction to the characters here – the boy really likes pirates, and Blackbeard is about as family-friendly a take on pirates as you can get. It’s nothing particularly inspired, just a way to get you into the gameplay, which is firmly in the “point and click” style – players will have to play the game either using the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen, or moving around a verrrrrry slow cursor.

Yeah, one of Pirate Adventure’s biggest problems is how user-unfriendly it is for a game seemingly made for younger players. There’s no option to adjust cursor movement speed, and you can’t exit out of zoomed-in views with a button press, meaning that if you’re going to inspect a series of objects, you have to slooooowly move the cursor to the object, slooooowly move the cursor to the “X” at the upper-right to dismiss the box, then sloooowly move to the next object, and so on. Even worse, this game doesn’t have any way to reveal “hot spots”, meaning you’re clicking around in the environment hoping to find something to interact with.

In addition to this, some puzzle solutions make zero sense. Early on, you have to order colored orbs on a globe, which clearly correspond to similar orbs viewed outside the window… but how to order them? It’s not based on where they’re located left-to-right, it’s not from biggest to smallest… no, it’s apparently from smallest to biggest, something the game gives no indication of. Not long after, you have to solve a puzzle on the side of a treasure chest involving columns of purple pegs, and the game gives absolutely no indication what logic it’s using to determine the solution – you just have to use one of the hint functions to be told the answer, apparently.

I suppose there is one element in this game that isn’t absolutely terrible, and that is the colorful, cartoony 2D visuals. They’re not anything special, but they’re appealing enough to make this seem like a game youngsters might enjoy… at least until all this game’s issues frustrate them and they lose interest. Oh, and the game’s extremely repetitive (and clearly public domain) music is annoying – you will grow tired of it within a few minutes of playing it.

In the end, DobbyxEscape: Pirate Adventure manages to be better than its predecessor, DobbyxEscape: Spooky Adventure, but only just barely. This is still a terrible Graphic Adventure game, with horrible controls, frustrating nonsensical puzzles, and a disposable story and characters. You have countless better options on Nintendo Switch, do not bother with this.

tl;dr – Pirate Adventure is a family-friendly “point and click”-style Graphic Adventure that has players taking the role of a young boy going on an adventure with a cartoony version of Blackbeard. This is a pretty terrible Graphic Adventure – the plot and characters are disposable, the gamepad controls are excruciatingly bad, the lack of hotspots makes hunting for interactive objects a chore, the puzzles sometimes feature nonsensical solutions, and the annoying repetitive music will have you muting the game within a few minutes. Do not waste your money on this game.

Grade: D

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