Review: Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection (Switch) - A Janky Compilation Carried By Nostalgia

Time to put these to bed

Back in the day, it was pretty well understood that seeing a popular show or brand on a licensed video game didn’t necessarily mean that you were in for a great time. Though titles such as DuckTales or GoldenEye 007 broke through as exceptional titles for their respective eras, the majority of licensed games were usually the sort of passable chaff that eventually made its way to the bargain bin to be forgotten about when the generation passed.

Yet, video game preservation is an increasingly discussed topic these days, and with nostalgia always being a reliable means of making a decent return on investment, many publishers have been investing more into collections that preserve legacy content by offering it to a new generation.

Enter Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection, a middling basket of old platformers and mini-game collections whose main selling point at the time was that they were related to the popular Nicktoon. Now available on modern platforms, you can experience ‘memorable classics’ like Rugrats: Studio Tour and Rugrats in Paris: The Movie in all their janky glory, with save states and scans of original manuals to sweeten the deal.

Suffice to say, you’re not missing out on much if you choose to pass this one up, but it may hold some value to you if you played any of these games when you were a kid.

Six (technically eight) of the licensed Rugrats games are included here, covering the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and PlayStation. The headlining game is Rugrats: Search for Reptar, joined by Rugrats: Studio Tour, Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, The Rugrats Movie, Rugrats: Time Travelers, and Rugrats: Castle Capers. That’s a lot of Rugrats content and… well, none of it is really that good.

Let’s start with the 3D titles, which demonstrate some basic, fun ideas marred by the severe technology and design restrictions of the generation in which they debuted. In all too fleeting glimpses, the mission-based level design, simple mini-games, and charming atmosphere reveal the bones of an enjoyable 3D action game with some unique protagonists and objectives.

How many platformers place you in the role of a baby who can’t jump and needs to figure out how to navigate a house by figuring out how to crawl and climb on various furniture objects? That’s interesting, and a great basis for something that could be innovative and distinct.

Yet it’s difficult to get drawn too far into it, as you’ll be constantly fighting for your life against a primitive camera that’s more challenging to manage than any of the game content. Similarly, navigating the environments with sluggish and unresponsive controls makes it feel like you’re constantly wading through a shallow pool.

I’ll grant you that it’s kind of ‘punching down’ to criticise a 3D game from 1998 for having odd controls and a poor camera system, but such foundational issues severely undercut the fun factor of these games before they can really get any traction.

The 2D entries fare a little bit better, offering up some serviceable platforming action. These are much simpler in nature and adhere more closely to tried and tested 2D platforming conventions—you move through set stages, nab collectables while avoiding enemies, and aim to get the highest score you can.

Each game is only a couple of hours long at most, and on the whole, I would say that they are more enjoyable than their 3D counterparts simply by virtue of how competently they’re made. Few would seriously contend that any of these deserve to be topping any ‘best of’ lists, but they at least offer decent challenge, minigames, and level design—none of which prove to feel too frustrating or unfair.

Across all titles, modern emulation features are included to help round out some of their rougher edges, giving you tools that can enable you to brute force jankier sections much more easily than you could in the past. Dropping a save state before a tough race can save you tons of time spent watching loading screen, while you can feather a toggle for a rewind feature to quickly undo mistakes and practice difficult manoeuvres or minigames with minimal consequence.

These tools are far from a new idea in modern retro game collections, but it’s still nice to see how seamlessly they’re integrated here and how well they can cover over the uglier aspects of some more antiquated game design.

The developers saw fit to also include a bit of museum content in here, with hi-res scans of all the original boxes and manuals available for you to peruse and a soundtrack feature to listen to tracks from across all the games. Compared to the developer interviews, concept art, and extensive marketing materials included in other retro collections, the content here feels a little thin, though perhaps this could be due to limited rights issues over the Rugrats IP.

Conclusion

Looking at the whole package, Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection is the epitome of a release that’s carried solely by nostalgia. If you happened to love the show or any of the games in this collection in younger years, there’s certainly a case to be made for picking this one up just to take a trip down memory lane and remind yourself of the simpler times. Yet when you take that aspect away, you’re left with a weird amalgamation of mid-tier games that exemplify many of the game design shortcomings and limitations of this era of the gaming industry.

At their worst, these games are janky, difficult to control, and relatively thin when it comes to meaningful content. At their best, they’re inoffensive and passable distractions that you’ll probably never feel like playing again after you put them down. There are much worse games out there, but Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection makes an unconvincing case for why it’s worth both your time and money. It’s a cool novelty and I think fans of the original show or games will get a bit more out of it, but this isn’t something that I can recommend as something you ought to pick up. If you must, I’d suggest you at least wait for a sale.