Adorable Adventures Review: A Cozy Rescue Mission in the Mud
You wake up as a tiny piglet separated from your family by a massive forest fire and must track down your siblings to save the day.
Adorable Adventures comes from the team at Wild Sheep Studio. You step into the muddy trotters of Boris, a baby wild boar who discovers his mother trapped inside a building. You lack the sheer strength to break her out completely on your own. Saving her requires tracking down your scattered siblings across a beautifully lit forest. Reunited, your family can combine your collective power to ram right through the gates. The game focuses entirely on relaxed exploration and pure charm to carry the experience.
Following Your Snout
Scent tracking serves as your primary method of navigation in this interconnected world. You follow a visual scent trail that leads directly to flowers, acorns, and your missing family members. Naturally, the forest is packed with overlapping smells that can easily distract you from your main goal. Finding ten copies of a specific plant grants you the ability to filter it out entirely.
Turning specific smells on and off transforms the tracking into a really fun light puzzle mechanic. You might have to reactivate a honey scent you previously ignored just to find a clue related to your missing sister Belle.
The environment occasionally pushes back against your snout. Entering sections of the forest damaged by the fire introduces leftover ash that interferes with your senses. Boris will sneeze and temporarily lose his tracking abilities. It acts as a clever little environmental hazard that forces you to rely strictly on your eyes for a few minutes.
A Forest Full of Distractions
The map is absolutely gorgeous and filled with side activities that give the world so much personality. A friendly park ranger named Max narrates your journey and gently guides you through the valley. As you explore, you'll stumble into time trial truffle races, help a rabbit reunite with her babies, and take photos of scenic spots to recreate specific images. Collecting enough extra flowers even lets you wear them as customized hats.
The physics engine really shines during these quiet moments of exploration. Watching Boris headbutt a stray soccer ball across a field or interact with human trash cans is incredibly funny. The animation work easily stands out as a major highlight. Boris carries a tangible weight to his movements. Sprinting around tight corners makes his back legs slide out in a hilarious piggy drift. You can press a dedicated snort button or just sit down and sploot right in the mud. The whole thing feels exactly like a playable storybook.
Lost in the Woods
A few frustrating technical quirks do pop up as you wander around. The map completely lacks a location marker or an index explaining any of the icons. You are essentially flying blind. Getting stuck on a rock and clicking the unstuck button makes this issue much worse. The button teleports you all the way back to the starting spawn point of the game. Without a working map, retracing your steps turns into an absolute chore.
The scent tracking also bugs out occasionally. Trying to track down a sibling near a broken beehive sometimes traps the scent trail in an endless loop that keeps leading back to a barrier you can't open yet. I found that playing on PC definitely requires a plugged in controller. The keyboard controls feel rather janky, and Boris tends to get stuck on invisible geometry if you sprint too often.
The Verdict
Rolling the credits takes about four hours. Grabbing every sticker and flower hat easily stretches that playtime closer to ten hours. The twenty dollar price tag feels a tiny bit steep given the abrupt ending and the frustrating map design. The sheer charm of the world and the relaxing nature of the scent tracking make it totally worth picking up anyway. It stands as a wonderfully 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.
