If you have a child of the relevant age, Miffy is a character that needs no introduction. The friendly little rabbit with no mouth has been something of a favourite of children, and particularly girls, for many years - and now, after seemingly growing jealous of Peppa Pig's success in the children's game market, Miffy's decided to try her hand at making a game of her own.
Ah, there she is.
When you first load up the game, you're presented with a big, bright, and bold menu, with no fiddly icons, and a voiceover explaining what each button does, so even the youngest children, who have yet to learn to read can find their way around. But while it's definitely a positive thing that the game's so well narrated, it is a bit disappointing, that there's no text in here at all. As an educational tool, Miffy's World would be a lot better if it featured text that the game would then read out, helping your children learn their way around words, rather than simply doing the thinking for them.
Aimed at children between 3 and 5, Miffy's World is a point and click game, that has you guiding the popular rabbit around a variety of differently themed environments. Setting your children tasks to do, from handing out invitations to a birthday party, to finding something you could use as freckles on a snowman, the idea is to get young children's minds thinking, as they complete tasks for the various characters, and solve puzzles throughout the game's world.
The only problem is that, despite the initial impressions, Miffy's World really hasn't been all that well thought out. When you take into account that the voiceover is the only way of telling what you've got to do next, and with next to no on screen prompts, or text for back up, it'd be nice if the narrator used words young children may be familiar with. Instead, the tasks you have to complete are referred to as "quests", and the tutorial instructs children to click on "the desired object". A three year old would definitely understand "want", but "desire" is possibly pushing it a bit far.
Children love playing pairs.
Throughout the game, as you complete the tasks you've been set, you'll be presented with a number of puzzles to do, which are all well aimed for young children. From finding pairs of cards that have the same number of bumble bees on, to putting together a jigsaw, the puzzles are all just about right for the audience Miffy's aimed at, providing a challenge for younger minds, but one that's not too hard - for the most part.
The only problem is, like the rest of the game, there are a lot of illogical things going on here, too. "Try to find all the pairs in this puzzle" the narrator says, before presenting you with ten entirely different objects - five rabbits in various poses, and five pieces of gym equipment. This actually left us sitting there for a while, mentally rotating the rabbits in our head, wondering if any were the same shape, just upside down, until we realised that the game actually wanted you to match the rabbit to the piece of gym equipment it looks like they should be using. If it confused us, we can only imagine what a three year old would be like.
Yep. He's definitely playing that with a bow. Unless he's plucking it with the bow?
Other puzzles ask you to put an item back into a picture (a bit like a shaped jigsaw), or choose the right animal, after being played a call. Again, both games are great for the age they're aimed at, but the one variation, which played us a sound, and asked us to choose the instrument that was making that sound, was a bit illogical too. Making the noise of a stringed instrument being plucked, we logically went for the harp - but apparently, the game was sure it had played us the noise of a cello/double bass type instrument, which was pictured with a bow.
The "quests" you're given to complete, too, are more than a little confusing, with nowhere near enough prompts to help a younger player through. After handing out all of the invitations for a birthday party, the game simply left us to our own devices. We were expecting a prompt as to where we should go next, or who we should speak to, but instead, the game gave us nothing. It's this sort of thing that's likely to leave younger children confused, and unsure of what they should be doing, which leads to them simply getting fed up with playing.
As a game that's designed for young kids, it follows that sometimes, as above, a puzzle may be that little bit too hard for them, or they could use a bit of a helping hand. Thankfully, the developers have thought about this, and included a mode where a parent can play along with a child. Giving you a second, differently coloured cursor, you can press A to put a star where your cursor is on the screen, helping to give your child a few pointers as to where they should go next, without spelling it out for them.
Want to play with Mummy or Daddy? Better pray you picked the right save.
The only problem is, that like the rest of Miffy's World, it's been thought through so little that it's almost rendered as an entirely pointless inclusion. If you want to play with a parent, you have to select the picture of a family (narrated as "Play with Mummy or Daddy") from the main menu. That's all well and good, but what if you choose the other option, to let your child play on their own for a bit, and then they get stuck? Surely you can just "drop in" so to speak, and help them out? Nope. If you've chosen that your child wants to play on their own, they're on their own - and to get an adult to help them out, you've got to quit all the way back to the Wii Menu (there's no way to pause the game, and no way to quit back to the game's menu), and then choose to play "with Mummy or Daddy". To make it even less logical, each option has a separate set of save games, so if your child's stuck on a puzzle that's fairly far into a game, you can't even pick up where they left off - you'll have to start from wherever it is that you last left off when you played together!
As if that wasn't bad enough, we even managed to come across a game breaking bug in Miffy, which practically rendered the game unplayable. Seemingly on a whim, the game would decide that either the top left, top right, or top sixth of the screen would be completely inaccessible to the Wii Remote, leaving many of the puzzles completely un-doable, until the game decided, again, seemingly at its own whim, that you could access the top of the screen again. Bringing up the Wii Menu, we tried time and time again to replicate the problem, but try as we might, we simply couldn't. What we experienced has to have been a problem with Miffy's World - and it's a pretty huge problem at that.
As it stands, playing Miffy's World is simply a frustrating experience. While most of the puzzles seem well targeted for the age range they're aiming at, and could provide many hours of entertainment, there's so much going on here that simply makes it so little fun to play, children are likely to simply get frustrated, confused, or worse - bored, and give up.
With a minimal amount of feedback or guidance from anything in the game world, and a rather large, game breaking glitch in the shape of the problems the Wii Remote has with the top of the screen, it's hard to recommend Miffy. And that's a real shame, as it's a game that had so much potential.
It was a nice idea. Just a shame about the execution.
Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii
