AMANDA THE ADVENTURER MAKES ME ANGRY

DISCLAIMER: i am not a professional. i probably could not make a video game. this is for fun on my personal blog so don't take it too serious.

i'm a bit sad that the first one of these i write for my neocities is one i am a complete and utter hater but spite has always been my greatest motivator. so. for those not in the known, Amanda The Adventurer is an indie horror game in the "mascot horror" genre. you play as an irrelevant player insert who just inherited their late aunt's house and with it a series of VHS tapes for a children's show called Amanda The Adventurer. i do not at all feel qualified to talk about how the game works mechanically so my focus is solely on the narrative aspect of this game; but to sum it up it's all basic puzzle-solving.

so it's pretty obvious from the title what they're doing. scary dora parody. we've been taking childlike things and making them into horror since the beginning of time, no issue there. and doing this to an educational children's cartoon format is a fairly novel idea, at least as far as i know - zero doubt there's dora the explorer creepypasta out there. but now we get to the part of the game i take issue with.

you put in the VHS tape ignoring your late aunt's ominous written warnings. outside of the walk around puzzle elements, the game has a call-and-response mechanic mimicking the educational children's cartoons it's parodying - point to the item we need to use, what do we do next, what's your favorite kind of pie? etc. and exactly here is where it falls apart for me. the first "episode" you watch is called "In the Kitchen", where Amanda (a 3D-animated little black girl) and her anthropomorphic sidekick Wooly (3D-animated sheep thing) bake a pie. the problem with this is that the formula falls apart immediately.
there is no build-up, no tension, it's frame 1: Amanda is a little murderous creep with an ambiguously tragic backstory. she does a creepy laugh if you say your favorite sort of pie is lamb or mutton, she wants to use a knife and the oven without supervision, gets angry when you get an answer wrong and cryptically laments how her parents aren't around. you do not get the sense that this was ever a real kid's show, or that they're trying to teach you anything: it is a cheap pretense for edgy dialogue and jumpscares.

the game continues like this: you solve a puzzle, get a new tape, watch a new episode. and there is a manufactured sense of "descent" with each tape the things Amanda does and says get a little more violent and absurd - but it doesn't work, because we knew this from episode one. Amanda staring at the screen - at the viewer - and asking us if everything rots doesn't work because it's not a subversion of anything! Amanda killing her sidekick isn't scary, because there's been hints of that since the beginning of the game! there's no shock, no tension, and therefore no scare-factor. it's a game where you walk around and watch not particularly scary VHS tapes of a little girl saying wacky violent things.

it all culminates in a couple different endings: you leave, or a tall spindly grey monster with Amanda's hairstyle kills you, or - if you find all the hidden VHS tapes - the "true ending" that leads into the sequel, where a mysterious masked figure breaks into the attic and needs the player character to help them find something left behind by their aunt at the library where she worked. which leads into the next thing i don't like about this game: the overall plot. i've complained extensively about how the narrative trappings don't work for me, but the story it surrounds doesn't either.

one thing i'll give this game: the hidden tapes you need to find to get the canonical ending are very well-made. they are all live-action, well-acted and well-produced and in my opinion the most interesting parts of the game. but the narrative they serve is incredibly weak. it goes: it's the late 90's, and a man named Sam Colton adopts a girl named Rebecca. inspired by his daughter, he creates an educational live-action (aired on TV or live show? not sure) children's show called Amanda The Adventurer, starring Rebecca. it's a local hit and a production company approaches him with the possibility of an animated adaptation. the fandom wiki (yup) asserts that they are secretly a satanic cult but i don't know how canonical that is. either way; it's an evil company that does evil experiments with Sam Colton's daughter and makes him dissapear when he wants to put a stop to it. the contract he signed makes it so his daughter is now under their custody, and what happens next is vague but presumably her soul is trapped in the show, or something of that nature.
it has the building blocks of something interesting; the exploitation of children on the entertainment industry - especially of black children, as Sam and Rebecca and subsequently Amanda are all black; late 90's satanic panic; a loose pied piper motif. but because this is a game made for youtubers and children to theorize about, none of these plot points lead to anything interesting - it's loose threads for the sake of loose threads so Game Theory can make a video called "The TRUE story of Amanda The Adventurer" while the game itself feels empty and devoid of meaning. Amanda is an evil, sometimes sad little girl. she kills her animal sidekick, isn't that fucked up? but she might have a tragic backstory, so you should look into it more. wait for our next game, we might answer your questions! end of game, here's a jumpscare.

i'm aware i sound extremely cynical, and i'm sure there is genuine passion behind this game. i don't to discredit that, and i don't want anyone to think you can't like this game (though how you even found this if you are a fan of this game is beyond me, this is a neocities page with 1 follower). however, the end result, for me, is unbearable. it made me so mad i wrote one thousand words about it. the catalyst was me playing the recently out Amanda The Adventurer 2 demo, which was fine. more of the same. it reminded me why i don't like it, even if the episode shown in the demo is better than most of the episodes from the original game, IMO. it hints again at a story i would find extremely interesting: the soul of an exploited child lashes out at the world, who poked and prodded her until it she turned into something quite literally monstrous. and we - as the player character, as the audience - are participants in the spectacle of her. but i'm not sure the people behind this game mean for this interpretation or if they would be able to handle it with care. and in the end, Amanda The Adventurer is just a deeply mid mascot horror game i spent too damn long thinking about.