Holly Hobbie is fairly new to me. Well, at least this one is, because after doing a little research, I remembered one particular poster of one of the classic Holly Hobbies with her oversized hat and patchwork apron. Holly Hobbie & Friends is the newly-launched version of the brand, where the new Holly is supposed to be the granddaughter or classic Holly.
In their videogame debut, Holly and her friends bring a series of mini-games to little girls everywhere.
The game’s story takes place during a summer camp where the girls get together in a series of activities ranging from sports to cooking, grocery shopping or picking out clothes. Oddly enough, on the first day of summer I was put in an awkward situation: the first task of the game is a quiz about Holly Hobbie and her friends. With questions like how many layers were there in someone’s birthday cake, or what’s the name of someone else’s horse, I thought I’d never get past day one.
But even being totally unaware of Holly Hobbie’s world, you can just snoop around the manual to find some answers, or you can tap the stylus on the picture frame to read about Holly’s friends, family and their pets.
The game is played through the calendar, where each day will represent a different activity. There are 14 mini-games in total, so after a while they will start repeating themselves, only gradually increasing difficulty.
The activities offer a range of different tasks, mostly played with the stylus, some with a bit of D-pad control. You can participate in a skating race, or ride a bike collecting flowers and avoiding obstacles (Paperboy style) by dragging the stylus around. You can play a rhythm/dance game either by pressing the D-pad in the right direction or by touching the arrows on the touch screen at the right time. You can go shopping for ingredients or pick an outfit by matching your clothing with the model provided. there is another Cake Mania-inspired game where you run a little fruit juice stand and must serve drinks to customers as they order them.
My favorite were the cooking games. You get to make sandwiches, prepare fruit salad, make pizza and bake cookies. For fruit salad, first you gather the ingredients you need in a bowl as they fall from the top of the screen. Then you move on to the cutting board, where you need to cut the set amount of pieces required. The cutting motion was frustrating though, it just didn’t seem to respond very well to the stylus. Finally, you put it together by adding the portions as needed. You lose points for putting in the wrong ingredients or more than needed.
To make pizza, you also need to gather and cut the ingredients, place them on the pizza as you like, then bake it. For the sandwiches, you gather and cut your ingredients, then layer them in between slices of bread. To bake cookies, you grab a piece of dough, put it on the baking tray and wait for them to bake to move them to a bowl. Don’t overcook them though, or you lose points.
There is a coloring activity where you are given a palette of colors and a poster with a few drawings to fill in. You can swap between the top and bottom portions and color in whatever way you want. There is a sort of treasure hunt called Attic Treasures, where you look around the attic searching for a particular list of objects (shown on the top screen), and a memory game where you flip heart-shaped lockets to find a pair of matching images.
A few flaws like the sluggish camera in Attic Treasures and strange controls when chopping ingredients make these mini-games a bit frustrating. Also starting the game with a quiz may not have been the best start. I think that instead, there should have been an indicator to look at the photo frame to learn some Holly Hobbie trivia first, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the franchise.
I also wish the journal would have a little more than just your game scores. Since you do an activity every day, we could find a simple score table but also journal entries with little comments such as “Today we made a bunch of sandwiches for our picnic, and I made the most!”.
Ok, so it’s not really an in-depth story-driven piece of software, but it’s designed for young girl gamers and it doesn’t assume that their world revolves around clothing and makeup. It’s actually very similar to EverGirl, which had plenty of good examples for little girls.
Holly Hobbie & Friends is a simple and entertaining collection of mini-games for girls, and it will especially make the delights of those who are already Holly Hobbie fans.
Special thanks to Gracie Leach and Majesco Entertainment for providing a copy of this title.