My good friend Leroy is back to guest review another game!  This one is a whimsical puzzle action game that looks right up my alley!  With a title like Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, how can you NOT click to read his review?

Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake is an indie puzzle adventure game developed by SleepNinja Games and published by Cartoon Network Games. The game is available on mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and PC via Steam. This review covers the PC version (although it appears that the content is the same across all versions).

Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake starts off with a boy (Niko) waking up with his dog (Bazooka) excited to eat his birthday cake for breakfast. But, as you can probably surmise from the ridiculous title of the game, he wakes up to find nothing but a trail of crumbs leading out of his door. Worse yet, Bazooka runs out of the house towards the crumbs. And so, Niko leaves town on a quest to find his cake and his dog.

The gameplay for MAMBC revolves around teamwork and puzzles. In each level, you are tasked with picking up a number of pieces of cake. At first, you will just control Niko, who can push and pull blocks. But as you progress through your quest, several friendly monsters will join Niko’s cause, each with a unique ability. For example, one monster can charge and ram into objects, defeating monsters or breaking weak walls. Another monster can shoot lasers that are copied in mirror blocks and can trigger switches. Each level gives you a specific set of monsters and you will need to swap between all available characters and use all of their abilities to solve each level’s puzzles together.

Most of the levels don’t offer too much in terms of complexity or difficulty, seeing as the game appears to be aimed at younger crowds. Each level does offer some additional challenges though, such as collecting all of the treasures or completing within a set time. Each task in a level earns a “star,” and there are some slightly more tasking levels hidden behind gates requiring a certain number of stars. There are also some Steam achievements that will extend your play time a little if you would like to collect all of them.

Outside of the main puzzles, the game’s main village has a great cast of extremely unique characters you can talk to after major events and engage in some side-quests (most of which are exchanging treasures found in levels for other items such as costumes).

The graphics are simple, but have a great unique art style. Everything in the game (even the bad monsters) are hyper cute. The story of the game starts off simple, but gets increasingly more serious the deeper you get into the game. The music fits the game and it nice, but nothing left an overly lasting impression in the audio department.

Kid Factor:

Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake is very kid friendly visually with bright colorful characters and fun monsters and a lot of fun dialogue. There is some mild language (butts, farts, heck, flippin, etc.), but nothing too extreme. Reading is required and since the gameplay is focused on puzzles and logic, younger kids may need help solving some tasks. There are also a few dark or scary moments (one of the friendly monsters find skeletons of his friends in one scene and mourns and the evil monster king jumps out to attack the characters in some scenes).  –Leroy Capasso

Tags: Reader Reviews!