Adorable Adventures Review – This little piggy went to find his family.

Getting separated from your family as a child is a traumatic experience, and that’s before the terror of living through a forest fire cutting through your home. The baby boar Boris doesn’t let this phase him, setting out to find his brothers, sisters and mum in Adorable. Despite being set after a natural disaster, Adorable Adventures is a pretty chill game with only one part of the map noticeably affected, while the rest of the small world filled with dense forests, open moor, and a mountain to climb and explore.

The primary tool Boris has is his nose. As a boar, he has a strong sense of smell, but given how young he is, it’s not particularly refined and lots of different scents can overwhelm him. You are presented with a checklist of different sources of smell, though you won’t know what they are until you find them. As you are chasing scent trails they do switch depending on what source is closer, mimicking how Boris’ sense of smell is being hit from all angles, but this can be a bit frustrating when you are trying to go after a specific trail – there were also a few times where scent trails would guide me to a wall instead of the path around.

Thankfully, as Boris identifies smells and gets more familiar with them, you can toggle them in the checklist so they can be ignored. Most of the scents will be flowers, though there are some extra items to find as you explore the park, and as you gather items the notebook is filled with a few facts for them.

Following Boris’ nose and finding resources will in turn help with find his family, but it’s not the only only thing you can do. You will unlock races where you are tasked with dashing through gates to beat a set time, there are a couple of tyre swings to jump through which gives the activity of jumping through further swings in a set time, cairns to knock down, and there is a photography challenge too. Boris doesn’t have a camera of his own, but rather finds them within the world and has to set up and move them to new locations to take the picture the challenge shows. These are all optional to do, but I would recommend giving them a go as the main story is fairly short. Doing all the races, the swing challenges, and some of the photo challenges, plus completing the story took me around four hours in total.

The map of Adorable Adventures is well designed and compact, inspired by Cévennes National Park in Southern France, with paths that are generally easy to navigate. The world has plenty of landmarks in the environment so you can figure out where you are with ease, with each area having a distinct look to it. The moor is open with short grass, while the forest is dense with trees, and the area that’s been affected by the forest fire is covered in ash with burnt vegetation. The ash in this section is not just there for decorative purposes, as it impedes Boris’ sense of smell and leaves you to figure how how to pick up scent trails again.

Adorable Adventures is a suitably adorable game, especially as you gather your siblings who run around with you. But siblings can be pretty annoying too, and they can also cause chaos as they charge around with you, knocking into bins or just getting in your way.

I like Adorable Adventures, though there were some small issues I had with the game. Boris sprinting and turning corners looks exactly like how a real boar would do it, but sometimes I would come to a jarring stop because of an unnoticed little obstacle in the environment. There is also a mission where you need to find some baby rabbits and I thought the scent for them would be how you do it, but no, you just need to search for seven small rabbits which do not stand out against the environment.