Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Year: 1997
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

Something that’s been a lot of fun as my kids continue to grow has been revisiting games from my childhood. The most recent one has been Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal,” a point-and-click adventure by Humongous Entertainment. In the first Spy Fox game you play as a spy (who happens to be a fox, as it says on the tin) that rescue the world’s cows and stop William the Kid (a goat) from stealing the world’s supply of milk. Like everything else by Humongous Entertainment, this was a delight to revisit with my kids.

The game features the great art and animation you would expect from the studio. Everything still looks great today and the only real bummer about the current state of HE releases is that I do think they would look better at an even higher resolution. But at the same time I feel like that risks being twisted into something awful and we get an AI upscaling everything, so I’ll happily settle for how they look from the 90’s.

It’s also been fun seeing how carefully HE rolled out adventure games for children of all ages. Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, and Fatty Bear were created for very young kids, 3-8 year olds, Pajama Sam is advertised for that age group too but I would argue is for an age range that is one year old, and Spy Fox is for 5-10 year olds. It’s just a tad bit more difficult than the rest of their adventures but roughly follows the same format and there being a core goal you complete through adventure game solving, one or two mini games you can play on the side, and possibly a real time sequence. I personally think the timed reaction sequences aren’t great and would remove them, but I think the rest of the game works.

The puzzles are trickier than what you would see in Putt-Putt and makes the game take longer to complete, but I don’t think it’s anything impossible for older kids. I think the only bit during the puzzle solving that doesn’t work for me is that Spy Fox has a limited inventory space for gadgets and to try other gadgets, you need to return to your HQ to swap out what you have for other gadgets. It’s a slog. I get why this approach was taken, the alternative is to just get everything and the HQ becomes a lot less interesting after that, but I maybe would have had other reasons to return to HQ and just let them have it all. Other than that though, I think the puzzles are interesting and it’s kinda fun that they start to introduce the idea of note taking to kids in this game.

Anyway, it’s a good game. I don’t know if I would recommend it to grownups to play by yourself but my kids loved it and I had fun playing it with them.

Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal” is available on Steam, Switch, PS4, and mobile platforms but ScummVM support means you can play it on basically everything.