Humongous Entertainment’s Pajama Sam 2 Thunder and Lightning Aren’t so Frightening is the follow-up adventure to this company’s award winning release of Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. Pajama Sam 2 was designed with the purpose of easing children’s fears of thunder and lightning in a creative and imaginative manner.
This game begins with Sam sitting in his living room watching his favorite cartoon called Pajama Man. A thunder storm erupts outside and Sam finds himself frightened. He then realizes that he must try to put a stop to the scary weather. He finds his cape (with help from the player) and heads to the attic to begin his adventure to the sky.
Pajama Sam next finds himself outside of World Wide Weather (the control center of the world’s weather). The player’s objective is to help Pajama Sam break into WWW (a rather odd thing to be promoting in a children’s game) because the guard will not let him into the building since he is not an employee. Thus begins a series of problem solving adventures for the player. Once inside the building, the player finds through trial and error that he must help Sam find four missing pieces to the weather machines that must be put back into place.
The player then faces the task of searching through various rooms and machines to find the missing pieces. Each room offers many clickpoints which are entertaining in themselves, but may not always be very helpful in offering any aid to find the machine pieces. The rooms include offices and also weather machine rooms. Sam and the player can actually run some of the machines which can be helpful in Sam’s search if the player can figure out how and why to use them. In each room the player talks to various employees of WWW who offer the player help in Sam’s quest or else need Sam’s help.
This game has great animation, entertaining characters, and creative effects. The clickpoints are very fun to play with through the game alone. Another interesting point about this game is that it has some games within the main game. As Sam searches for the missing pieces of the machine, he also may stumble upon missing pieces of his very own puzzle that the player gathers and places together on a separate puzzle page.
The troubling thing about this game is that it mentions on the packaging that it is intended for children from the ages 3 to 8. I don’t know many 3 or 4-year-olds who could figure out some of the problems posed in the game, such as expecting them to know that they are supposed to use a crow bar to pry open a crate and break into the WWW. Still, younger children could get some entertainment out of the many clickpoints in the game, but would probably have some difficulty in solving the scenarios on their own.
Don’t buy this package expecting a science lesson about the weather. This package is aimed at promoting entertainment, problem solving, and looking at the weather in an imaginative world that is aimed at lessening kids’ fears about violent storms. This game will promote the use of problem solving and memory skills in older children. It may prove to be nothing more than entertainment for younger children who don’t have the skills to figure out what exactly they are supposed to be doing in this game.