Hungry Baby Party Treats Review

Hungry Baby Party Treats has a name which evokes pure insanity on the part of the developers, and that’s a sensation which remains throughout the whole experience.

From developer Digital Melody Games and publisher QubicGames, this is a frantic game which is best played when the emphasis is on the multiplayer. You play as one of a wide range of different food items, and the goal is to make your way across a board into the mouth of a baby. But, it’s all about trial and error. Littered across the board, which you must travel across tile by tile, are a whole host of traps and hazards which will crush your treat into a heap of juice, and move you back to your starting position. Whether these hazards be circular saws, a stomp from a giraffe’s foot or something else, you won’t know they’re there unless you pass over their space and watch your character splat into smithereens.

It’s this unknown danger element which brings the party game into this title. With no clear way of plotting a course across the board from the off, the playing field is levelled for all players, and much like in most board games, winning the game all comes down to chance. Failing at some of these obstacles will leave a squished treat in place to help you avoid the same error again, but others, like the giraffe foot stomp, must be consigned to memory. As such, there’s always the sense of an impending restart with every move you make, and things can be particularly frustrating when you see the path you can take starting to take place and then every time you true to progress further than the point you’ve managed to reach you hit yet another mishap.

Then, there’s the concern of getting into the baby’s mouth as quickly as you can in order to achieve a high start rating, and that is particularly difficult in this game compared to other titles which use the same star system as a result of the unpredictable nature of the boards. The more fun challenge is certainly to take on the race against friends rather than against the clock. The game’s campaign mode is pretty short, taking around twenty levels and is a bit a disappointment in terms of its length, but it’s the party mode which provides for the main event.

Party mode features a bunch of different gameplay options, including Last Ice Standing, where players compete to avoid being the final player to reach a box at the centre of the screen; icy race, which is a race around a course where you can use weapons to destroy your opponents but must still watch out for terrain hazards, and Go! Go! Pan!, another race-type game where you compete to negotiate the board and jump into a frying pan. Nope, I didn’t get the premise, either.

The visuals are simple enough, but the game’s music is absolutely on the Crazy Frog level of irritating. Yelling the words Hungry Baby at you repeatedly in a stupid voice, this isn’t a game you want a non-gaming member of the family to burst into the room and find you playing, that’s for sure.

Wacky, trippy and at points completely insane, Hungry Baby Party Treats is one which has a home in the unusual corner of the eShop. It’s not technically bad, but the emphasis on luck and repetition of making a path through the levels mean it’s not a game for everyone.