If you've ever installed a Carben Sandiego CD-ROM on your parents' secret PC when you were a kid, you might be pleased to hear that Netflix has returned the red carpet thief with its latest interactive information. Carmen Sandiego: Theft or theft draws on the Netflix animated series of 2019, and is currently the only Carmen Sandiego game available. (Apart from Google Earth integration.)
But while the other moments of each game are intriguing, and make full use of the pictures of the best 2019 shows and its standard creative team, the gameplay mechanics technology doesn't serve much purpose. Decisions are not important in the story, for the most part. Although the way many conclusions play out suggests the power of many forms of maturity, the experience is not very realistic.
(Vol. Note: This post contains some light snippets of Carmen Sandiego: Theft or theft.)
Theft or No theft it puts Carmen back in the hands of a bad organization VILE to complete various abductors in their advice, because the bad guys kidnap his friends. Unlike the first PC games, where gameplay was a variety of formats, the choices here entail the viewer to choose the best way for Carmen to unravel the victim. Do you enter the building from above, or do you enter from the ground up? The options are very straightforward, but with few exceptions. Almost always a "wrong" option, choosing it will result in failure. The game then selects the “right” answer that we have been looking for all along.
Given the choice of the past volatility of the VILE operative Tigress or meeting her, for example, I have chosen the option to surround her. But Carmen never mentioned Tigress before finding her place, and events played out the way they would if I chose to clash. This happens a few times, where selections can create more animated sequences, but no new story lines are made, and the wrong choices are never addressed again.
Sometimes, the wrong choice starts the news story system. Because the game is aimed at a younger audience than Netflix's most interactive project to date, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, ACME Leader urges you to return directly to the time you are not mixing. Choosing the expensive concentrate of beluga caviar, for example, instead of going out with it, means that it will be worse when Carmen brings it to VILE's Cleo. Embarrassed, Coco clears Carmen's friends' minds, and the game is over. That way, Theft or No theft
The scenes are still fun in their own right: Carmen dances in the middle of a fancy gala, or groups teaming up with a former rival to build a dinosaur museum. The wrong choice causes him to lower the wings of the airplane during flight, which ends up going wrong, but in fact, it's cool. Theft or No theft is a straightforward game for young viewers, designed to be defeated rather than tested. But it can be so much more, and its sequel suggests how. It offers limited branches on how fate plays out: Carmen can chase her friends ahead of time, or play with VILE for a long time. How well you succeed in these conclusions depends on the past choices of the viewer, especially those that focus on choosing trust or helping specific individuals. End-to-end saves the game from its unimportant decisions; at least here, I heard confirmation of my own decisions.
However, in the end, in isolation, each caper goes on without much of your choice, unless you enjoy seeing the residents tell you that you have failed again. There is not even a handful of masterpieces in the origins of the master thief – what are the trivia questions about geography? Of course the Carmen Sandiego game should test our knowledge of history!
Theft or No theft it is a fun story that takes about an hour or so to complete, and it never requires you to save flowers for every decision you make. That might be a benefit in itself – this is a faster way than a commitment. But the sparks of something cooler than the slog of insignificant options make the game frustrating, showing the ways in which the project can come together in things that always make Carmen Sandiego unique and interesting. At least a version of Google Earth is available to remind fans of the roots of character analysis.
Theft or No theft is available on Netflix now.