Adorable Adventures Review: Bringing Home the Bacon
You never really know true panic until you are a baby wild boar separated from your family by a massive forest fire.
That is the exact situation you wake up to in Adorable Adventures, a cozy exploration game developed by Wild Sheep Studio. You play as Boris, a tiny piglet who discovers his mother is trapped inside a building. You lack the sheer strength to break her out alone. To save her, you need to go the whole hog and track down your scattered siblings across a beautifully lit forest. Once you reunite the family, you can combine your power to ram through the gates. It is a simple premise that trades survival mechanics and combat for relaxed exploration and pure charm.
Following Your Snout
The entire experience revolves around your nose. Scent tracking is your primary method of navigation in this interconnected world.
Instead of relying on a traditional waypoint system, you follow a visual scent trail that leads you to flowers, acorns, and your missing family members. Naturally, the forest is full of overlapping smells that can easily distract you. Once you track down ten copies of a specific plant, you gain the ability to filter it out. Turning specific smells on and off becomes a light puzzle mechanic. Before you start running in circles, you will need to learn how to manage your senses. You might need to reactivate a honey scent you previously ignored just to find a clue related to your missing sister Belle.
Sneezing Through the Ash
The environment occasionally fights back against your snout. When you enter sections of the forest damaged by the fire, the leftover ash interferes with your senses. Boris will sneeze and temporarily lose his tracking abilities. It is a clever little environmental hazard that forces you to rely on your eyes instead of your nose for a few minutes.
A Forest Full of Distractions
The map is absolutely gorgeous and packed with side activities that give the world plenty of personality.
A park ranger named Max narrates your journey and gently guides you through the valley. As you explore, you will stumble into time trial truffle races, help a rabbit reunite with her babies, and take photos of scenic spots to recreate specific images. If you collect enough extra flowers, you can even wear them as customized hats. The physics engine shines during these quiet moments of exploration. It is incredibly funny to watch Boris headbutt a stray soccer ball across a field or interact with human trash cans.
Sploots and Drifts
The animation work is easily the highlight of the entire game. Boris has a tangible weight to his movements. When you sprint around tight corners, his back legs slide out in a hilarious piggy drift. You can use a dedicated snort button or just sit down and sploot in the mud. The whole thing feels like a playable storybook.
Lost in the Woods
Before you get completely lost in the scenery, you need to prepare yourself for some frustrating technical quirks.
The biggest hurdle you will face is the map. It does not feature a location marker or an index explaining any of the icons. You are essentially flying blind. This becomes a massive headache when combined with the game's worst feature. Before you click the "unstuck" button after clipping into a rock, realize that it will teleport you all the way back to the starting spawn point of the game. Without a working map to find your way back, retracing your steps is an absolute chore.
The scent tracking can also bug out. When trying to track down a sibling near a broken beehive, the scent trail can get caught in an endless loop that keeps leading you back to a barrier you cannot open yet. I also highly recommend plugging in a controller if you are playing on PC. The keyboard controls feel janky, and Boris tends to get stuck on invisible geometry if you sprint too much.
The Verdict
It took me about four hours to roll the credits. If you want to grab every sticker and flower hat, you can easily stretch that playtime closer to ten hours. The twenty bucks price tag feels a tiny bit steep given the abrupt ending and the frustrating map design. However, the sheer charm of the world and the relaxing nature of the scent tracking make it worth picking up. It is a boar-derline brilliant adventure that just needs a few technical patches to truly shine.
Score: 7.5/10 A charming little romp through the mud that occasionally trips over its own trotters.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
