The Adventure Pals

Before Massive Monster made Cult of the Lamb, one of 2022's biggest indie hits, they made The Adventure Pals — a commercial remake of Super Adventure Pals, a free Flash game founder Julian Wilton made years earlier. The pitch is deliberately silly: your dad has been "dadnapped," and you, your pet rock Sparklefists and a giraffe named Sparkles whose tongue doubles as a helicopter set off across a candy-bright world to get him back, fighting through platforming levels, bizarre enemies and oversized boss fights along the way. It launched to a warm reception in April 2018 — Very Positive on Steam, 91.7% of 1,983 reviews, 78 on Metacritic — and reading the available English-language negative sample, a relatively small pool of just 44 reviews, shows a studio that clearly had the art and humour figured out well before the gameplay design that would carry Cult of the Lamb to a much bigger audience four years later.

Charm that survives almost every criticism

Start with what nobody disputes. The cartoon art direction — bright, expressive, unmistakably indebted to the Adventure Time era of animated comedy — draws consistent praise across virtually the entire review sample, including from reviewers giving the game an overall thumbs-down. The humour, while divisive in tone for some adult players, clearly lands for its intended younger audience and for families playing together; several reviews specifically describe finishing the game as a parent-and-child or sibling co-op project, which is a meaningfully different use case than most platformers this site covers and one The Adventure Pals seems genuinely well suited to.

The word that shows up more than any other

Set against that charm is a specific, recurring complaint: repetition. Across the available negative sample, "repetitive" is used more often than any other single word to describe the game, applied to both combat — largely single-button mashing with little depth and few invincibility frames, so getting hit can chain into further hits — and to level and enemy design, which several reviewers describe as the same encounters recoloured and re-skinned across different "worlds" rather than meaningfully varied content. One reviewer, revisiting the game as an adult after enjoying it as a child through a Let's Play years earlier, put it plainly: what felt exciting at a distance didn't hold up to actually replaying it start to finish. This isn't a universal reaction — plenty of reviewers, particularly younger players and parents playing with children, describe the same simplicity as exactly right for its audience — but it's specific and consistent enough, across years of feedback, to treat as a real design limitation rather than a mismatched expectation.

Save bugs that cost real progress

A second, more concrete thread concerns technical reliability. A meaningful number of reviewers report save-corruption or crash issues, ranging from lost progress mid-session to, in one case, a save file "bricked" entirely after four hours of play with no developer response reported at the time. Co-op play, while a genuine highlight for many reviewers, comes with specific friction too: the game doesn't support mixing a gamepad and keyboard between two local players, and split-screen level design has been reported to occasionally strand one player in an area the other has already progressed past. None of this is catastrophic on its own, but for a game whose main audience is families and casual co-op sessions, save reliability and smooth two-player support matter more than they might for a solo-focused platformer, which makes these specific complaints worth weighing seriously against the game's low price.

The debut before the hit

Massive Monster's trajectory since is worth knowing about specifically because it recontextualises this game. The Adventure Pals was the studio's first commercial release, built on Wilton's earlier Flash game rather than an original concept, and by the team's own account its "Saturday morning cartoon" tone was something they deliberately moved away from for Cult of the Lamb, wanting to escape being typecast as a kids'-game studio. That's a useful frame for judging this game on its own terms: it's a first commercial outing from a small team still finding its footing on the mechanical side of design, wrapped in art direction and character work that was clearly the studio's strength from day one and stayed that way all the way through to their much bigger follow-up.

Verdict

6.5 out of 10. The Adventure Pals is a charming, low-stakes platformer that does exactly what it sets out to do for its intended audience of younger and family co-op players, undercut for everyone else by combat and level design that a consistent share of reviewers find too shallow and repetitive to sustain a full playthrough, plus a real history of save and crash bugs worth knowing about before a long session. It's an easy, inexpensive recommendation for playing with a child; a much harder sell for an adult platformer fan who's already played Celeste, Dead Cells or Hollow Knight and wants something with comparable depth.