A site I stumbled upon
when doing a search for freeware adventure games on the Internet
was Curiosoft. The bright colorful graphics
caught my eye and I noted inventory items in the screenshots. Surely,
here was an adventure game! I downloaded the demo and started to
play it when my five-year old son, Dakota, asked if he could have
a turn. Well, that was the last I got to use the computer that evening… I
emailed Curiosoft the next day and they were kind enough to allow
me the opportunity to play their two current completed games, Jr.
Vet and Jr. Doctor.

The games are similar in their design from what I can see of having
played Jr. Doctor and the demo of Jr.
Vet so much (or even all) of
what I write here applies to both games. However, for the sake of
this review, I have only played through Jr. Doctor to the end.

As the name implies, this is a game targeting children who are interested
in pretending to be a doctor. This would have to be about ninety
percent of children, at one time or another, in my estimation. The
game is set in a hospital but the interesting variation here is that
the hospital is in Fairytale Land. All of the patients are fairytale
characters with humorous ailments: Humpty Dumpty has a concussion,
Jack took a tumble off the beanstalk, and so on. There are a variety
of patients and children will enjoy the predicaments that they are
in as they relate to the well-known stories.

Anyone familiar with point
and click adventures will be able to pick this up and run with
it. Inventory items are scattered throughout
the hospital and easily selected from the inventory section at the
bottom of the screen. There is a doctor figure that provides advice
about what to do and also a book that can be collected and used to
identify the patients’ ailments as well as the items that are
collected. There is plenty of help for even young children to be
able to play. The game has three difficulty levels relating to children’s
ages too, so selecting appropriate difficulty is intuitive.

The game starts off very easy but gets progressively harder as upper
levels are accessed. The layout is more like a school than a hospital,
with many corridors, each with a number of rooms off them. In later
cases, patients have more than one ailment that must be treated.
This may require application of bandages first and then medicine,
for example. If the wrong item is selected, the player must once
again present the items in the required order. Once a patient has
been treated successfully, there is often a simple arcade game in
which the player must remove all the bacteria in a simple Space Invaders
type game. Failure here means only that the player must attempt the
game again.

Successive levels can
only be reached once all three patients are treated on any given
level. There are four levels, which are reached
through the elevator, after which a fifth level presents the player
with a certificate of achievement as a “junior doctor”.
It is a shame that there is no indication that a level has been completed.
The player can only be sure be going in the elevator and trying the
next floor up-if it doesn’t work, there are still more patients
to cure!

The game’s graphics
are simple two-dimensional images but are likely to engage children
with their bright colors. Children
will enjoy the simple animations as successful treatments are applied.

The music is light and lively and voiceovers are easy to understand.
Much of the dialog is repeated to help children to remember. There
is no text option, which could have been paired with the voice to
encourage early reading as well as allowing hearing impaired children
to experience the game. I found the voiceovers to have an echoing
quality, as though they were recorded in a box or a small room but
otherwise they were adequate for the job.

The game is small and
easily downloadable from Curiosoft. It worked to some extent in
Windows 98 but is intended for Windows XP and Windows
2000. I experienced freezing after a period of about fifteen minutes
almost every time I played it. This was unfortunate as the game only
saves on exit from the elevator. Any freezing results in having to
restart the level. I am uncertain whether it freezes any less frequently
under the intended operating systems but the game has a “safe
mode”, which is intended “if the game freezed”,
a rather unfortunate grammatical error considering this is somewhat
educational in nature. Perhaps Curiosoft might consider a patch if
they can figure out what causes the freezing. If not, try emailing
[email protected] for advice.

This is an entertaining game for children but there is only limited
longevity in it (perhaps an hour or two) for adult players. Despite
that, I imagine that children would enjoy playing it again and again
because of the intuitiveness of the interface, gentle humor, and
bright colors. I am doubtful about the relative educational value
of the game but Curiosoft makes no bones about this. It is marketed
as inexpensive entertainment and in that regard it succeeds very
well.

This game deserves a C+ for adults or A- for children.

Final Grade: C+ (A-
for kids)
(find out more about our
grading system)