It’s been a long while since anything Carmen Sandiego has brightened computer screens. The Carmen Sandiego titles were always pitched to kids as adventures where a world-renowned thief was on the prowl somewhere around the globe or even hiding in time and history. Players were tasked with tracking her and her minions down before time ran out. As a franchise, Carmen Sandiego was traditionally in the edutainment genre and would teach kids about geography, history, or even mathematics.
Now she is back in a brand new title that is available on all consoles and the PC through Steam. While the Camen Sandiego of old would steal artifacts from all over the world, this new iteration tasks the player with controlling the legendary thief and helping an international organization called ACME capture other thieves. This change of heart follows the storyline of the Carmen Sandiego Netflix cartoon series, which already is on its fourth season. But this is the first time that Carmen is taking the field on the side of good in video games.
Plot Ahoy!
The new Carmen Sandiego game comes in two modes: a story campaign titled A Campaign Most Vile and the ACME Files mode. The story campaign chronicles Carmen Sandiego, now a reformed thief working against the evil crime syndicate called VILE, as she globe-trots the planet to arrest criminals who have stolen priceless artifacts. In the campaign, which is largely devoid of voiced dialogue, you’ll get to experience information from different cultures about the daily lives of the people, their historical monuments, and read Carmen’s various quips with her supporting characters. This isn’t exactly an adventure that’s focused on presenting a story, however, and it largely takes a backseat to its educational gameplay featured within.
Review Notes
Carmen Sandiego features a lot of winks and nods to popular culture, even going so far as to name the characters that players encounter great things like Mel Practice, Elena Handbasket, and Penny Saved. These are character names that would be right up there with something you’d hear in the Ace Attorney series. Players gather clues that let them connect various details about the culprit, whittling down the list of suspects until finally reaching a person that can definitively be issued an arrest warrant. The time limit for arresting the culprit is fairly generous, but if players make a mistake when issuing the warrant, or perhaps finger the wrong culprit, they’ll get away.
Players acquire clues about the thief in question by visiting locations all around the world, and while they may spend a lot of time straight up information gathering by seeing the sights and speaking with the locals, there will be times when they need to engage with some puzzles or minigames in order to proceed. Sometimes players will need to sneak behind someone and pickpocket something from them, may need to do a hacking puzzle, or chase after a suspect using Carmen’s hang glider. These minigames and puzzles do a fairly decent job of breaking up the standard clue-gathering gameplay.
The good news about the time limit being lax is that players can generally go to each location to converse with people to find out more about the land, even if it’s not specifically where the title is trying to direct them and still have enough time to catch the villain in question. Time slowly trickles down depending on what players are trying to do, and you’ll always be able to piece together clues from things that VILE operatives leave behind to help narrow down the list of suspects. That being said, if you really get stuck trying to find out which country to go to next from your list of available clues, it’s very possible that you could run out of time, so anyone young playing Carmen Sandiego should be encouraged to explore because it does a great job of teaching them fun things about different cultures around the world.
There are two main modes in Carmen Sandiego as well. The main campaign mode features well rendered cartoon-style graphics, while the ACME mode plays a lot closer to one of the Carmen Sandiego games that millennials may have played as children. A lot of the gameplay elements are similar across the two modes, but the styles of presentation and what information is needed to be remembered in order to successfully deduce where a villain has escaped will be different.
In the ACME mode, players will be presented with some gorgeous pixel art, and they’ll have to do things like question locals to find out various clues about a suspect. For example, you might learn that the mystery subject was speaking perfect Arabic. Then, when given the next choice of cities to visit, you might need to decide if you want to visit Tokyo, Brisbane, or Cairo. In those circumstances, you could safely assume that Cairo is the correct choice because there is a much higher percentage of Arabic speakers there, while visiting the other two locations might waste valuable time and might help the subject to get away. The ACME Files mode was a tremendous blast from the past, and it lets players get right down into the classic deduction gameplay to find their culprit.
TLDR
Carmen Sandiego is an amazing throwback to the old edutainment games from the 80s and 90s and reinvigorates them for a new group of children and young adults. Your goal is to arrest criminals working for VILE, but the vehicle through which you do this is learning about locations and cultures throughout the world, just like those old puzzle or point and click adventure games. This would be one of those titles that’s ideal for a parent to play with their child, as it would open a lot of avenues to teach various things about the world to them. It could also be fun for millennials who fondly remember the Carmen Sandiego titles from their childhood and want to get a quick dose of nostalgia by figuring out where in the world Carmen Sandiego is going next.
Developers: Gameloft
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Steam, Xbox One