The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition review: Fun, old-school puzzler

Title: The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition
Developer: C.I.N.I.C. Games
Publishers: Gamera Interactive
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PLayStation 5 (reviewed on), PlayStation 4

Do you remember games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis? Or what about Day of the Tentacle? You spent hours walking around, interacting with objects and people and listening to dialogue. Most of the time you had no idea what to do and then suddenly you figure it out. Or you were my dad and printed hundreds of pages of intricate walkthroughs because this was the 90s and everyone printed everything. If you loved those games as I did, then you need to check out The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition.

Best friends Ronald and Skinny are having a picnic when Ronald serves up some beautiful plums. Unfortunately, Skinny is unknowingly deathly allergic and dies on the spot. Ronald runs away and Skinny unexpectedly gets turned into a walking, talking skeleton. Unbeknownst to Ronald, Skinny “lives” in his room in an old wardrobe for a few years. Ronald is moving, also he’s about to meet an untimely end and Skinny has to try and stop it from happening. He’s his guardian angel of sorts.

This is a point-and-click type game that will take you back to the PC days of yore when you had to type in MS-DOS to even get the game to load up. As Skinny, you can walk around, interacting with objects, talking to people and just trying to solve the puzzle on how to save your friend. The hand-drawn style art in The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition is so bright and colorful but it’s chock full of silly morbidity, not to mention decades of pop culture references.

You will find nods to just about everything pop culture reference you can think of. I saw Claptrap, Pinhead, Slenderman, They Live, Spiderman, Futurama, Nirvana, King Kong and Godzilla, The Matrix, Rick and Morty, Pokémon, Ghostbusters and even Jesus. Plus, there were about a thousand more that I didn’t even mention. It was just as fun finding the pop culture references as it was playing the actual game.

The story isn’t all that complicated and you spend so much time on each part of the story trying to solve the puzzles that the story wasn’t really put at the forefront. The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition doesn’t handhold when it comes to solving these puzzles either. Aside from a meta-game mechanics tutorial in the beginning, there are no hints at how to solve the puzzles around you. If I had one complaint about this game, it is that the puzzles were unnecessarily difficult.

Puzzles that take time or trial and error are just fine in games. There is nothing wrong with a game that makes you slow down and think, but the puzzles in The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition are so wild and out there, there may not be a reason for the player to even TRY the action required to progress. Case in point, Skinny needs chewed gum. The chewed gum inexplicably gets tossed into a cement mixer. Okay, that makes sense I guess, now you have quick-setting gum. Now, guess where that goes.

Bet you didn’t think it was going to be the microwave because I sure didn’t. I had to consult a walkthrough just to figure out how to move forward at times because putting cement gum in a microwave wasn’t my first, second or third guess. The difficulty of the puzzles was unnecessary and ruined the fun of the game at times.

The writing was silly, sometimes to the point of slapstick. While I enjoyed the humor, not everyone will. It seems nostalgic to me, like reading a Mad Magazine. Overall, The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition is a fun little romp through the nostalgia of old computer games, even though the original edition of this game was first released in 2017.

You can play The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition and regardless of the difficulty, I do recommend it. Hey, that’s what walkthroughs are for.

The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition (PS5) Score: 8/10

The Wardrobe – Even Better Edition is a colorful and fun old-school puzzle game with colorful animations and silly pop culture references.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.