Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is a retro platformer based on the classic 1990s Nicktoon that combines vibrant, authentic visuals with classic mechanics from the golden age of mascot platformers. It’s another ordinary day in the Pickles residence where babies Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, and Lil are playing in their playpen, supervised by a napping Grandpa Lou. Their play is interrupted by a television commercial announcing the release of a new videogame starring the heroic monster lizard Reptar, including a surprise behind the mysterious Reptar door for anyone who can find all of the hidden Reptar coins. Excited by this mystery, the babies use their imagination to transform the Pickles house into a giant videogame. If they can find all 24 Reptar coins across six levels, they can open the Reptar door, find the surprise, and complete the videogame. As usual, their playtime is menaced by Angelica, Tommy’s spoiled, bullying older cousin who intrudes on their fantasy with her own brand of selfish destruction.

Each of Adventures in Gameland’s six levels follows a design formula. Before entering the level proper, the player character runs through a space in the Pickles house, passing by one of the babies’ parents while they are preoccupied with a mundane adult chore. Entering a portal transports them into a dreamlike realm where their limited understanding of the adult world is exaggerated into an innocent and sometimes frightening wonderland. Tommy’s crib becomes a vehicle to a slumberland filled with leering clown heads and windows opening to reveal roaring mouths. The top of the refrigerator becomes the entrance to a frigid cave filled with frozen snacks and dangerous burners. The backyard’s sandbox becomes a vast desert submerging an ancient, trap-filled pyramid.

Each level is broadly open-ended in design without sacrificing a linear route. The main goal is to reach the level’s end where a playpen gate blocks passage to the level’s boss. The player character must search nearby to find Tommy’s toy screwdriver, the tool he always uses to bypass the playpen’s simple lock, in order to open the gate and complete the level.

As befitting its retro platforming ethos, the player character’s abilities are limited. Their primary ability is jumping. Each level is patrolled by bugs and the unintentionally nightmarish toys designed by Tommy’s inventory dad, Stu. If the player character lands on an enemy’s head, they will stun it. They can also perform a butt stomp in midair. The stomp will defeat many enemies outright and is needed to activate buttons and other mechanisms in the level.

The player character’s other primary ability is to lift and throw objects. This has both offensive and transport applications. Stunned enemies may be picked up and thrown at other enemies, knocking them both out. Blocks may also be moved and stacked to create new platforms, allowing the player character to jump upon them and reach other platforms that were previously out of reach.

These player character movesets, minus the butt stomping, are blatantly lifted from Super Mario Bros. 2 (or from Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic if you’re tedious). Also borrowed are its multiple player characters with varying platforming statistics. Chuckie can jump the highest but has the weakest lifting strength. His counterpart is Phil with the shortest jump and the strongest lifting strength. Between them are Tommy and Lil with similar, middleground jumping and lifting stats.

These differentiated player characters should create situations where the baby I am currently controlling changes my approach to a level’s obstacles. The limited level design fails this concept; there is nearly always only one valid solution to an obstacle regardless of which baby I am currently playing as. Picking up and throwing objects and enemies happens so infrequently that there’s no point in prioritizing Phil or Tommy’s greater lifting strength. Some levels don’t have anything to pick up or throw at all. Jumping, by significant contrast, is always important in every level. The result is Phil gets shortchanged in every way. His sister Lil has the second best jumping stat and can glide briefly thanks to her skirt, an ability which is counterbalanced by no other playable baby (and an idea also lifted from Super Mario Bros. 2). There’s no rational reason to play as anybody other than Lil where possible.

Before entering a level, I choose which of the babies to play as. I am not locked into this choice. I can switch freely between the four from a pause screen at any time. If a baby’s hit point meter runs out, the player character immediately switches to another baby. When a useful baby such as Lil or Chuckie runs low on health, it’s wise to switch in Tommy or Phil until a defeated monster drops a health-restoring baby bottle. A baby’s health may also be restored with a cookie that acts as an extra life, immediately restoring a baby’s health when it empties.

Each level contains three hidden Reptar coins. These are usually hidden just off the obvious path, stashed high above the limits of the screen or beyond a brief platforming challenge. Though the levels are open-ended, they are still linear enough that it’s not difficult to realize where my chosen baby must have passed up a coin and backtrack to grab it. If they do find themselves short a coin, levels are brief enough that replaying to claim the coin doesn’t feel unreasonable. Gathering them all feels engaging and rewarding. 

Each level’s fourth and final Reptar coin is always guarded by the level’s boss. Bosses are where Adventures in Gameland really dives deep into supporting Rugrats characters. Each is drawn from an episode of the cartoon, often from a one-off appearance. A giant sized Mr. Tippy, the anthropomorphized training cup Tommy’s parents briefly used to wean him off his bottle, waits at the end of the slumberland in Tommy’s bedroom. The Dummi Bears, saccharine parodies of the Care Bears, guard the interior of the refrigerator. The deepest cut is Big Boy, the monstrous baby that terrorized Angelica in her nightmares when she learned her mother might be pregnant, who lurks in the depths of the sandbox’s pyramid.

Each boss has an original design, not even faintly resembling what the babies will face in any other level. Mr. Tippy stands on a tower over a pit, pelting the baby with milk bubbles while they try to bounce high enough to use their butt stomp with the help of the rubber teat to a baby bottle. The Dummi Bears attack the baby in a multi-level arena using multiple weapons which each require a different approach to be countered. Big Boy, a dark reflection of Tommy, uses the babies’ own butt stomp against them before falling into a pit, where he grows to even more colossal size and tries to knock the baby down with falling rubble. Each boss is original and engaging and serves as a fitting conclusion to each level.

It isn’t too strenuous a task to find every Reptar coin hidden in a level. The ultimate prize the coins reveal doesn’t feel worth the effort. Inserting twenty-one of the twenty-four total coins into the Reptar door behind the Pickles’ family television lets the Rugrats enter Gameland, the final level. Instead of a Reptar-themed funland, as hinted at by the commercial that sparks the babies’ imaginary flights, Gameland is an amalgamation of all the previous levels strung together into one long marathon. Rugrats is a show about babies using their imagination to go on fantastic adventures. Adventures in Gameland culminates in a level with no imagination. As a final level, it’s tedious. As the climax of a Rugrats videogame, it’s a total failure.

Adventures in Gameland feels aimed squarely at fans of Rugrats’ original run, before it was revived following its unexpectedly phenomenal performance in syndication. Chuckie’s stepmother Kira, stepsister Kimi, Tommy’s little brother Dil, and other characters introduced post-revival are nowhere to be found. The most overt reference to any of the movies is the Reptar Wagon hanging from the ceiling in the Pickles’ basement. If you’re a fan who maintains that everything went downhill starting with The Rugrats Movie, Adventures in Gameland seems to have been made with you in mind.

This fanservice extends even to the first level’s design. The first screen has the baby use bursts of air from a vacuum cleaner to claim the first Reptar coin. In the next screen, the baby must jump past robotic cats of Stu’s design. A few screens later, the baby’s progress forward is blocked by Grampa Lou sleeping in the armchair, whose footrest must be raised so the baby can crawl beneath it. In the final screen, the baby claims another Reptar coin just as the front door opens, revealing Stu and Didi. All of these platforming obstacles recall elements that appear in the Nicktoon’s iconic title sequence.

Visually, Adventures in Gameland does a great job recreating the exaggerated proportions and unusual colors of the original show. The animations of the various player characters are especially detailed, capturing them jumping, tossing, and crawling in ways that feel pulled straight from the cartoon’s most  elaborate and impossible action sequences.

Cutscenes are intentionally limited, economically using two or three second clips of high quality animation to depict the most important action then segueing into text boxes where static heads talk to each other to convey exposition. The dialog also feels authentic to the show. The babies innocently mispronounce longer words—videogame becomes bibeo game and Angelica tries to coerce the babies into being her sub-orby-ants in a game of Bizniz Lady—and the adult characters’ familiar catchphrases are used to good effect. None of the original surviving cast reprises their roles here but I can still hear their voices performing this dialog.

This lack of audio is where Adventure in Gameland’s authenticity begins to break down. Despite the dialog in cutscenes and the many platforming foibles that would prompt a baby to grunt, grumble, or cry out in pain, this is a disconcertingly quiet videogame. A few stock clips taken from the show would add a lot of life to the sound design, though even these are sadly absent. The only accompanying noise is a cheap digital soundtrack that endlessly drones a soulless recitation of Mark Mothersbaugh’s title track. The notes are all in the right order and on beat but the digital instruments chosen sound like cheap imitations. Every second I experience this soundtrack mires my playtime with the sensation that I am playing something imitative and cheap.

The simple platforming and sub-par soundtrack give Adventures in Gameland the feel of something I would play on Newgrounds in the early 2000s. That wouldn’t be a problem if this was a fan game made with Flash played in a web browser twenty years ago, but this videogame costs $24.99 on current storefronts. Adventures in Gameland looks phenomenal in screenshots. In action, I don’t feel its budget going into its design. Most of its price tag seems to be going towards its license fees.

Adventures in Gameland may be finished in about an hour and there is little reason to revisit it beyond pure entertainment. The Rugrats need 21 of the 24 Reptar coins to access the final level and reach the ending. Making the extra effort to find the remaining three coins offers no discernible reward. The only slight mixup offered is a hard “Big Kid” difficulty level that requires me to complete levels with just one of the babies. Despite Adventures in Gameland’s brevity and abundance of extra lives, this requirement does add real challenge to the campaign that is mostly absent from the default difficulty. It is the only attractive reason to play Adventures in Gameland more than once. Completing it with only Phil would be a formidable self-induced challenge. 

Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is made with obvious reverence for its source material, particularly the episodes from its first run as one of the original Nicktoons in the early 1990s. Graphically, it goes to great strides to recreate the series’ distinctive visual style. It’s a feast for fans to behold, especially in screenshots. As a platformer, it’s overly imitative of Super Mario Bros. 2, copying most of its mechanics but not copying its great level design. Most of the platforming obstacles the babies overcome are obvious in their design, the only challenge they provide coming from unfairly placed enemies with ranged attacks. The sound design is the worst of all, a great script that sounds like the show let down by the absence of even stock clips from the original. The videogame is forced to rely on a MIDI soundtrack that sounds cheap and feels fake in a way its graphics do not. Overall, Adventures in Gameland is a disappointing Rugrats throwback that in no way justifies its outrageous pricetag even to the most passionate fan.