Well, it’s better after than never here on this Video game blog, because this is a review of The Wardrobe: Even Better Edition for the Switch. The Point-and-Click adventure game pays homage to the good old days of the genre and uses a hand-drawn art style. The original edition of the game was released in 2017, and this newer edition was released for the Switch in 2019? To be honest, I’m pretty confused about the timeline, and my quick search for what’s new with this issue didn’t really bring me anything either. All I found out is that the original output was released for the switch, and then deleted when this new edition replaced it.

Anyway, the quick thing with the wardrobe is that you play as Skinny, one half of a pair of childhood best friends who quicklyPass awayd after eating a plum and quickly decomposed into a skeleton while his best friend Ronald witnessed the scene. Cursed in a wardrobe (which looks like a coffin) in Ronald’s room for a while, Skinny realizes one day that he has to confront Ronald so that the two can continue. Skinny has such Timing, though, because the day he chooses is the same day Ronald leaves his house. The situation worsens as Skinny’s cursed wardrobe keeps Skinny “alive” and has to be transported to Ronald’s new residence.

Crazy plot aside, the wardrobe uses Gameplay elements with what you would expect from a Point-and-Click game from that era. You interact or pick up objects to solve puzzles and obstacles, sometimes you have to combine two or more objects to create a new one. You also interact with crazy characters to get clues and important items to progress. When I say “crazy,” I really mean it. The characters here are not only their average living people; There will be ghouls, trolls and famous people from the past to chat with.

I think one of the useless features of the game is to give the same interaction options to almost all interactive things in the game: watch, record, touch and chat. First of all, there really is no difference between picking up and touching something, and in fact, in 99% of matters, you use the pick-up option rather than touching it. True, if you choose an Option that does not favor the interactive element in question, Skinny uses one of the standard “I can’t” dialogs in its Arsenal. By the way, expect a lot of these dialogs when you choose The Touch Option.

Secondly, why, oh, why do I have to exhaust all four options to know who to talk to, especially in a game as silly as this? As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of things in the game that you don’t expect to be conversation options until you choose The Chat Option. An example would be a big piece of dust in the first chapter of the game; I mean, who would have known that? It would have been easier if the developers had only cut out some of the options that were not needed for interactive things, which, oddly enough, did for some of them. However, I was there after I found out that you can chat with a dust bunny, now you are exhausting all the options for every thing I have come across to find out who is talking to Skinny or the “are you silly?”Standard dialogue from him.

My last review of the wardrobe is the lack of clues or a nudge in the right direction. I’ll tell you right away that the puzzles in this game have the darkest solutions, and that’s what you can expect for a crazy game like this (you control a cursed skeleton after talking with dust bunnies and squirrels). But no one, not even Skinny himself, will throw a bone at you if you run out of options on what to do next. Yes, I resorted to a step-by-step solution in the middle of the first chapter to find out that you can chat with a dust bunny, and then I realized that I had to do it again in the second half of the game, right after reaching a point where everything was exhausted.

But not everything is bad. One of the things that captured me about the wardrobe is that it is full of geek references that really dragged my childhood memories. One of the most memorable is the Aku Aku mask, where when you interact with him, you make the noise he makes when you pick up this mask in this PS1 Bandicoot game. Every scene here has at least one reference that you can recognize and appreciate. The developers certainly had a great education like me.

The Wardrobe is a decent Point-and-Click game. It’s short, funny, crazy and sometimes a little difficult to understand. It’s a homage to this Genre and full of cheesy references that everyone who grew up at that time will definitely appreciate.