A really good little snipit of the Neopets experience. The “Create a Pet” screen will have you choosing between different species, all dressed up, in this game, as if to be ready for a fantastical adventure. But, really, you’re just playing a flash game with extremely minimal interest in presenting a visually striking, well, anything. This game is a visual novel, a really old visual novel that’s closer to the Meet ‘n’ Fuck games in terms of production value than it is to its Nintendo DS contemporaries like Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney and Professor Layton. Which fits, because this game is based on a browser game built almost exclusively on Flash!

I played a lot of Meet ‘n’ Fuck games as a teen— I mean, I played a lot of Neopets as a kid. Recently I decided to get back online to Neopets.com for a little bit just to see what’s been going on the last decade and change. I explored parts of the website that I never understood back in primary school and played a lot of stuff that I did understand but was just really bad at. I took good care of my couple of little guys before I got bored. Virtual pets can kind of be a form of masochism, to attach yourself emotionally to an artificial being as some form of entertainment to the point that, even after it’s outlived its ability to entertain you, you have this gnawing feeling in the back of your skull. Those sad, sad faces. They’re not real! What a terrible fate to befall me. You don’t get that stuff in Pokémon because monster collectors are never about perpetual care, and at least Tamagotchis have the decency to die—or return to their home planet—and put a point of punctuation on the circle of life. Neopets, though, they live forever. Even when poorly taken care of, they continue on, forever feeling a hunger and a sadness that only one person can access the means to end such a pain.

Through my recent experiences I’ve found that Neopets.com, overall, is an entirely convoluted game full of years worth of computer drawings that date anywhere from before 9/11 to after the arrest of former President Donald Trump. Convoluted not only in the sense that there is so much stuff, but so many ideas. Classical fantasy settings, futuristic sci-fi settings. Pyramids, castles, faeries (sic), dinosaurs, ghouls, goblins, space stations, mermaids. There’s also a good chunk of the world of Neopets that leans really hard on cultural stereotypes (this is very present in ‘Puzzle Adventure’, lol). All in all, there is promise of adventure, but really the best things to do on this site are play card games against computer players whose AI was programmed while you were in pre-school. It’s a museum, and because most of every activity that’s ever existed on the website is still in tact there really is SO MUCH TO DO. Not even including all of the forums, website design, running a store!!! Like some users run shops full of rare items with, like, custom HTML— I’m getting carried away, but, really, this shit is a monolith of internet evolution and it’s always been something that’s beyond me. As an adult, the games are still fun to play, but 90% of the site seems really only attractive to a version of me who kept up with this site all these years.

Neopets Puzzle Adventure is somehow published by Capcom, during what I believe was a short time where Neopets was licensed to Nickelodeon so that the brand could expand more. I actually first found the Wii version of this game at a thrift store where I’ve gotten some other gems I’ve reviewed on here before, but I was in fact lacking a Wii. I bought it more as a novelty, being a fan of Neopets, but then I found out there’s a DS version and I just had to. From footage I’ve seen of the Wii version, the handheld version is definitely the better-looking one. The artwork just translates better to the DS game’s limitations, while the Wii version has that weird cartoon cut-out look that some of its worst shovelware bears.

The titular puzzle is also not exactly stimulating, unfortunately, as it’s something you only really have to half-understand in order to stumble your way into beating all of the weird bosses. It actually does feel like a game that would be featured in a few puzzles in the Professor Layton games. The story is actually kind of interesting, and does a good job of feeling like an authentic Neopets story. Unfortunately, due to that poor production design the visual novel becomes a total snore to look at, and I found myself clicking through most of the fluff. Much like the series of Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop games, this little gem is just a borderline flash game with nothing much to write home about passed the fact that it exists within the orbit of a much greater phenomenon of nostalgia that I could talk about for ages.