Carmen Sandiego Review

Even since I was a child, I’ve been a fan of the Carmen Sandiego series of educational games. Following Brøderbund’s original Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? in 1985, the franchise has followed the ACME Detective Agency’s attempts to thwart the titular master thief and her V.I.L.E. organisation. The series has changed hands over these past 40 years, inspired multiple television shows (including game shows), and maintained a dedication to teaching children about geography, history, maths, and other subjects through the joy of videogames. This year, the simply named Carmen Sandiego, developed by Gameloft Brisbane, seeks to continue that trend.

In a first for the franchise, Carmen Sandiego asks the player not to catch the famous thief but to play as her. Taking a variety of character design and plot cues from the Netflix cartoon of the same name, the game follows Carmen as a retired thief, now working to stop her own former organisation from enacting their current master plan. Interestingly, she notes that V.I.L.E. hasn’t done anything of this magnitude since the ‘90s, a clear reference to how the last Brøderbund title was released at the tail end of that decade. Helping Carmen in her quest is Player, a young and highly experienced hacker who made his first full appearance in the Netflix show. The two share an easy friendship with plenty of banter, and while you primarily control Carmen, a few moments will see you controlling the capable hacker’s hands.

At the start of Carmen Sandiego, Carmen further teams up with ACME, getting in touch with The Chief, a long-running character that here uses her Netflix show design, and Agent Hyde, a character who appeared in two properties titled Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, one a game show and the other a 1997 remake of an earlier title of the same name. In these past instalments, Hyde had been one of Carmen’s underlings, though here she is merely a Sandiego superfan who’s read up on all of Carmen’s old cases. Several of the V.I.L.E. operatives Carmen is sent to take down similarly return from prior titles, like Fast Eddie B, a croquet enthusiast who made his debut in the original 1985 game, and Paper Star, who makes shuriken out of origami and who held a recurring role in the Netflix series. All of these returning characters meld together well in the scenes they share and, alongside a wide variety of easter eggs and other little nods to past titles, show off Gameloft Brisbane’s dedication to rewarding longtime fans with plenty to reminisce over.

The plot takes some interesting turns from there, featuring a few different self-contained plots where Carmen must track down two V.I.L.E. agents responsible for major thefts before finding a given ringleader who orchestrated the prior crimes. Each arc does a good job of feeling distinct from the others by spreading the overarching villain’s charming personality all over the place and introducing new wrinkles in the story. Sadly, the fourth — and presumably final — act is not currently available to play at the time of writing, so I can’t tell you if Carmen Sandiego sticks the landing, but what’s there is an entertaining ride.

The gameplay itself is a solid reimagining of the classic Where in the World gameplay, featuring a series of logic puzzles where you must investigate areas around famous world cities, gather clues about the thief, and decipher who they are and where they went based on those facts. On the “who” side of that equation, you’ll learn the suspect’s hair colour, favourite foods, hobbies, eye colour, fears, and even whether they’re left- or right-handed. Then, you can narrow down a list of known V.I.L.E. operatives until you’re confident you’ve got the right culprit and order a warrant for their arrest. As an aside, I’m very thankful that Gameloft Brisbane took the time to make every single thief’s name an amazing pun. We’ve got Tex Fraud, Lotta Cash, Miss D Meaner, and many more. Plus, each suspect also comes with a supposed alibi and, sometimes, a background profile that goes over who they are. Lotta Cash, for instance, is a true crime podcaster who just so happens to cover crimes the police don’t know about and has fantastic audio special effects to the point you think you’re actually there, hearing the crimes being committed.

On the “where” side, you’ll learn different facts about where the suspect went, from easier-to-check facts like one of the colours on the nation’s flag to more specific details, like whether they wanted to visit a specific landmark found near a given city. Then, once you’re confident you’ve found all you can, you’ll hop on a plane and select one of three cities to fly to and see if you’ve figured it out. The “where” loop then repeats until you reach the end of the chain and must then find the thief, hoping you were correct in your “who” deductions. All the while, you have only so many days to catch the thief before they escape and every action you take will spend those precious hours.

On the whole, this is a good, classic system. It slowly teaches the player about a variety of different locales, giving them key information to recognise them by while providing ample chances to find out new facts that might push a curious player to do more research on their own time. Tying these educational aspects into a detective game format and throwing in whodunit elements is a fantastic way to keep anyone engrossed in the experience and actually focused on the learning process as an important part of the game.

From there, however, Carmen Sandiego decides to expand on that formula. In the campaign, Carmen can take a variety of different opportunities to gain information in more interesting ways than simply selecting an option on the screen. For instance, she can walk around beautifully rendered areas based on real-life locales for some simple point-and-click style gameplay with plenty of chances for fun dialogue. There are also options like stealthing your way up to a V.I.L.E. grunt by holding down a button and then picking through their pocket while avoiding detection, looking around a crime scene with goggles that can reveal crucial information, hang gliding, and rhythmically dodging lasers to break into a V.I.L.E. safehouse and steal information. Some of this can become a tad formulaic, but there’s a good variety here, and it avoids becoming stale.

There are a few more puzzle-focused approaches as well, like safe-cracking, disentanglement puzzles to rewire machinery, pathing puzzles where you have to reach a goal after crossing through every square once in order to hack into computers, and more. These and the higher-scale activities above do a fine job of holding the player’s attention and keeping their brains engaged while looking for clues. They act as an effective update, providing the player with a neat change of pace in case they’re struggling with the main investigative thrust of the game.

In addition to the campaign, there’s also a more arcade-style mode called ACME Files, which features increasing difficulty gated by a levelling system. Within each stage, you can play through randomly generated capers that act the same as those in the campaign, though they replace the larger events (like walking around or hang gliding) with simpler decision-making events. Thankfully, the smaller puzzles are still around, and some of these choices can make for fun puzzles on their own.

However, while offering rather humorous writing, these little decisions can get a bit repetitive. As an example, there’s one event where you must solve different maths equations, but each question comes from a very small pool of options, so you’ll quickly be able to memorise the answers once you figure them out the first time, rather than having to actually learn any maths skills. Many events follow similar trends, incentivising the player to speed through everything they’ve seen before and making each experience more of a chore than an entertaining diversion. On the whole, the ACME Files are still a neat way to keep the game going even after you’ve finished the plot (particularly since it uses a fun pixelated style most of the time in a throwback to the original game), but they’re definitely missing a sense of variety.

Another aspect of Carmen Sandiego that feels a bit underwhelming is the vocal performances… or rather, the lack thereof. Not every game needs voicework, and what’s there in this one is actually pretty decent (there are little generic voice clips for when people talk, and the opening scene has some fine performances in it), but there are a variety of moments where you’d expect to hear someone speak where they remain weirdly quiet. Namely, in every cutscene after the opening! In each of them, the characters are fully animated and doing a variety of things, including talking to each other, represented by subtitles — yet no dialogue is ever heard, which feels rather disorienting.

There’s also a bunch of stock scenes, playing at the end of the less-important campaign cases, where the only thing that changes is which V.I.L.E. thief is in prison. Even the dialogue and animations are exactly the same, which wouldn’t be as bad if the scenes were shorter or actually voiced. Even then, all of this is fine… just disappointing. Similarly, the fact that most of the plot is stock cutscenes is a bit frustrating, especially since the overall plot could have used a few more interesting events or character moments. There’s a very fun twist by the end of the current storyline, but it could have been even more entertaining with more setup.

On the other hand, the Deluxe Edition comes with a few nice bits of added detail. It features a neat artbook with tons of fun details, the game’s excellent spy-inspired soundtrack, an alternate costume for Carmen to wear, and an extra ACME Files level called “Where in the World”, where Carmen herself is added to the list of suspects and you instead play as an ACME Agent, with another costume unlocked upon catching the famous thief. It’s all very fun, though it does seem a little light for the digital version’s asking fee.

Additionally, playing through Where in the World made me realise one last frustrating detail about Carmen Sandiego, though it is an edge case. Within this mode and a few times throughout the campaign, certain main characters are missing, like how Carmen is no longer the player character in the Deluxe-exclusive mode. However, some stock interactions, like Player telling Carmen that it’s time to leave when she’s found all the clues in a city, still play as normal regardless, even when Player, Carmen, or both are missing. This isn’t a major fault, but this little bit of sloppiness can pull an otherwise engaged audience out of the experience, which is rather frustrating.

Still, even with these faults, Carmen Sandiego is a solidly fun and educational experience that both maintains a lot of the original’s best qualities and makes a variety of fun updates to bring it into the modern era. As much as I can’t say everything about it is peachy, this is still an undeniably great time, whether you’re hoping to learn a little bit more about geography or want to play as a detective.