The latest reboot of Carmen Sandiego’s adventures does a nice job of mixing Netflix’s animated series with some of the edutainment aspects of the original games
Have you heard of Marie Laveau, the Queen of New Orleans? Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t. I had heard the name, but not until I played this video game did I ever actually learn what she was known for.
You’d think we wouldn’t really be able to do Carmen Sandiego today like we did in the old days of PC gaming. Today we think we could just Google the info and solve the crimes. But that’s not really what the games have been; the series has really always leaned towards being a lite point & click adventure where we have to explore a bit and find the right clues, and then link those clues together to find the right next steps. Having a pile of trivia is one thing, but knowing which ones are important to the quest is another. The latest Carmen Sandiego game does a valiant job of capturing that nostaliga while also adding in some modern touches and gameplay geared towards the preteen demographic that follows the Netflix show.
In Carmen Sandiego, we play as the titular Carmen and her team, including someone literally named “PLAYER” to give us a more first person detective game and keep us from having to create our own character. In some regards it handles the original’s CLUE and Guess Who? gameplay mashup well, and in others it’s a bit of a reverse of it.
Like that original we have a set amount of days to solve a caper. The first one we jump into is 7 days, with different tasks and travel time taking a specific amount of hours or days. We can explore a few different locales in each town, getting clues from each as to where we need to go or what to do next. For instance finding historical clues in a New Orleans cafe area leads us to find out trivia about specific people. We might see a painting of Marie Laveau and and brush it off, but end up using that knowledge in another area to know where to search. Did the culprit hide a map somewhere? Yes, but the only clue we have is that they were a huge fan of Voodoo — and that’s where learning about Laveau from the painting comes in handy.
The informants we come across all use these historical and geographical questions so we need to look around for clues. Luckily there’s not A LOT of stuff, and everything we need is in the areas we search. The clues aren’t just geographic, either, as they’re also about the culprit we’re tracking. We really need to look at as much stuff as possible and figure out if it’s related to a location or a person, and hopefully before our time runs out.
These little situations that require getting clues, like overhearing a VILE thug, or finding an airline ticket with some letters of the airport missing, are enjoyable and not overly difficult to wrap our heads around. We might come across a safe that we have to crack (with a minigame) to find a pile of money with some missing. Because it’s a stack of Brazillian Real, we kind of put the pieces together of where the operative is heading next. Having a Jeopardy level of knowledge helps, but having a corkboard nearby with strings and rubber bands does as well. That idea is translated into the game with a nice notebook feature that lets us keep tabs on the info we’ve come across. It fills up with details, some helpful and some not, and it’s up to us to narrow things down.
That culprit deduction side is also not super challenging, relying on gathering the details (what food someone likes, are they left- or right-handed, do they like hats, what color hair do theu have, etc) and plugging those into a database. Much like a spreadsheet, this ticks down at the list of VILE folk until we have one or two that match. Select the person, where they’re going to be next, and send the FBI (or whatever) after them for the pickup.
Bam. We close the case, earn some experience points (to both unlock stuff and advance the plot) and we’re on our way.
Carmen Sandiego is a nice way for kids to learn some geography. It’s definitely edutainment, and aimed at the 8-12 year old crowd, but it’s masked well enough that kids may not feel that it’s specifically teaching them. It feels a little mobile game-ish (because it is one ) and it’s not overthinking its design, including a lot of cut & paste stuff that kids don’t really care about anyway. And it’s fun, even for an OLD like me who grew up with the originals.
As a bonus, the 8bit dlc campaign moves a lot faster because it is just the single screen style of the 80s experiece. They even reference the 1980s games a lot, right down to having you “look at the 1985 manual.” I love it. Did I mention I was old?
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for March 10, 2025.
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