Between 1992 and 2001, the American video game developers Humongous Entertainment cornered the market in point-and-click 'edutainment' computer games aimed at small children. They gave the world Freddi Fish, Spy Fox, Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam, selling over 15 million copies of the games. The games released in the company's heyday have proved so enduring that they're still finding a new audience today, having been re-released on Steam.
In 2001, Humongous' owner ended up in financial straits, and over 40% of its staff were laid off, and the company was sold. The new owners tried their hand at releasing one more game, Pajama Sam 4: Life is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff, which came out in 2003, around two years after the previous Humongous game was released. It does not have a very good reputation.
(Sidenote: There was another game released post-takeover as well which also went down badly, but Life is Rough... came to be seen as emblematic of what went wrong with the takeover, which is why it's better-known in Humongous fan circles. No more point-and-click games were released afterwards, but the company did continue with its Backyard Sports series of sports-simulator games.)
Some of the reasons for why it's so badly remembered are the natural and unavoidable results of the gap in production and change in staff: Sam's new voice actor didn't go down well, for example. They try, actually quite valiantly, to retain the way the previous games looked, but it seems some new graphics engine was being used that stops that from being entirely successful. However, there are other factors at play... ones that definitely were under the makers' control.
One of those is the lack of story branching. Every previous Humongous game had a random element. There'd be a couple of different items you needed to attain, and on each playthrough those items would be different, or would be hidden in a different place, with certain areas and items only appearing in certain paths. Perhaps the best way of demonstrating this is with the first of this article's several visits to the Cutting Room Floor Wiki, a website dedicated to hidden or removed content in computer games. Check out the debug screen for the third Freddi Fish game, The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell; there are three different golden pipes, and eight different locations they could be hidden in on each playthrough, with each pipe having a different puzzle to solve (split into three different difficulty levels, so with each game you'd get one 'easy', 'medium' and 'hard' puzzle each). Not only that, but if one of the pipes was trapped inside a clam, then one of the items needed is a lost wallet, which then needs to be returned to its owner; the owner could be one of three different characters. There's also a puzzle concerning a phrasebook on that path which has eight different solutions. On top of that, there are three other elements shown on that screen that will change on every playthrough; the placement of the Purple Sea Urchins the game uses as currency, the identity of the thief at the end of the game, and the setup of the Terrific Tumble Tubes mini-game. And there are even more that are too minor to make it onto the debug screen; if one of the pipes is in the darkened cave, there are several random positions it could be placed in. The point is: these games had replay value, and Humongous used that very effectively.
Life is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff has no random element at all. The game is the same on each and every playthrough. Some of this seems to be due to the game's makers rushing things through to meet a deadline; the game's page on the Cutting Room Floor has a few examples of possible different branches that ultimately weren't used. For example, you always find the peanut in the same place, but at one point there could have been a second place it was found. There's also an alternative version of a puzzle which got far enough in the process that dialogue was recorded for it. There are other examples of things being cut from the game, such as a location that was meant to link two other locations together, but it was cut and consequently makes a real mess of the game's geography and transitions. All of this rather supports the theory that the game was released in a bit of rush.
Now, the lack of replay value might not have been a deal-breaker. The final game Humongous produced before being bought out was Freddi Fish 5: The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove, which has noticeably less randomisation than the other games; instead of lots of little alternate branches, there's just one big one. However, that game was considered Humongous' best production, for things such as trying a change of pace compared to the others, and several other choices not seen in previous games. But crucially, it's still a really good game, which understands its target audience very well. Some of the decisions made in Life is Rough... are baffling, and perhaps suggest some contempt for the target audience. Here, for example, is the fiendishly difficult dresser minigame in its entirety (NB: not uploaded by me). Later on, when trying to figure out how to reach something that's underwater, the solution to the puzzle instantly appears on the very same screen, when a giant man in a bloody diving helmet strolls into view. That's not representative of all of the puzzles in the game, but none of the other Humongous games feature anything like as trivial; even the 'easier' puzzles were at least slightly more complicated, and Life is Rough... matches those at best, without even trying to replicate the difficulty of the harder puzzles. The game can't have been released in so much of a hurry to result in this, can it? It feels more like whoever was behind the game didn't understand the target audience as well as their predecessor did.
Perhaps this is best represented by the trading card collection sidequest. All four Sam games featured such a quest; in the first one it was finding socks, in the second jigsaw pieces, in the third it was boxtop vouchers, and in the fourth it's trading cards. Where the fourth game differs from the others is by having a trading card on every screen, not just some of them, and also by making most of them trivially easy to spot. (It would've taken less time to make had there not been a card on every screen, obviously, so this isn't something we can put down to being done in a rush.) The socks sidequest in the first one is actually pretty difficult even if you're not a child, as the artists did their best to place them in unusual places and have them blend in to the background, as well as having several screens you can't stop on and have to find and click on the socks as you're passing through. Life is Rough... simply doesn't show the understanding of what made the previous games such a success; it consistently tries to make things too easy, which is the exact opposite of what the previous games did.
On top of all that, there were also a number of bugs that could accidentally render the game unwinnable (if you skip one of the cutscenes then an item doesn't appear), and a change in the game's save system so it autosaved to the hard drive every time you changed screen made for five seconds of loading every time you moved. But those could've been easier to overlook if the game had shown the same level of time, creativity and not underestimating its audience that its predecessors had.
Conclusion: This is somehow the second full-length article I have managed to write about these games
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