3/5 ★ – AzulAzuril's review of Putt-Putt Travels Through Time.

I was excited to replay some Humongous Entertainment games, and I remember this title being one of my favorite adventures of Putt-Putt. Upon a replay, I definitely realize that nostalgia had clouded my judgement of this game. Humongous Entertainment games were targeted at certain ages with the Putt-Putt titles being the “introductory” franchise aimed at the youngest audience. Playing Putt-Putt, I definitely found that to be the case, as the game probably was the least humorous and simplest game to play through out of any of the titles I revisited. Putt-Putt is a cute enough lead character, but he suffers from generic bright-eyed “nice” main character syndrome, where he has really no personality traits other than being kind. The plot in this one is at least pretty interesting, with Putt-Putt losing objects to a time machine and having to explore different time periods to get these items back. Outside of this setup though, there’s never any sense of urgency, danger, or even a real motivation to explore other than “you need to.” This is again definitely targeted the most at young kids. The game was also so easy, with the solution to many puzzles being one room away. I think only two puzzles required me to go to a different “time period” to get the item, which was much less complex than I remembered. There are also entire areas of the game that are only used when the items are randomly placed there, leaving whole areas of the map with nothing to do in certain playthroughs. I also was disappointed in the “Time Continuum” theme song used in the game, as some of the other themes are total earworms, but this one is unfortunately not. This is still a cute game, and definitely a great introductory game for kids, I just think that it fails to hold an adult’s attention as much as I thought it might.