Review: Juttering Jetpacks Put BLUEY'S QUEST FOR THE GOLD PEN in the Dunny
At the end of May, PM Studios released Bluey’s Quest for The Gold Pen physically and digitally on consoles and PC. The game was developed by Radical Forge and Halfbrick and was already released on Android and iOS.
The team was kind enough to provide me with an Xbox review copy and you can find all of my thoughts below. It should be noted that the game has an MSRP of $39.99 on Nintendo Switch, PC (Epic and Steam), PS5, and Xbox Series X|S or $49.99 on Nintendo Switch 2 with the full game (not a Game Key Card) on the cartridge.
Bluey’s Quest for The Gold Pen has a lot of wonderful aspects and characteristics. It features an original story written by series creator Joe Brumm, voice acting from the original cast, and really fun, charming art inspired by episodes like “Dragon” and “Escape” where it’s the Bluey characters drawing the game characters and creatures, etc.
I have found a lot of enjoyment in exploring the various levels, advancing the story, and seeing the artwork. It’s all very fitting. The gameplay loop is essentially a collect-a-thon.
Each level will have about three different items you’re trying to collect and one of those is mandatory in order to advance to the next level. In addition, different levels have different means of traversing the land such as a jetpack, a boat, etc. In order to collect the items you’ll traverse a variety of lands and solve various puzzles.
The story is a silly one where Bluey and Bingo are inside on a rainy day just doing some drawing when Bandit decides to draw too and steals one of Bluey’s pens before she can finish her story.
Chili decides to join the party and help the girls try to reclaim the gold pen from Bandit (aka King Goldie Horns). It’s exactly the kind of story you would expect and enjoy from the hit animated series.
The nice thing about the gameplay is that there are so many different ways to collect the necessary items to advance the story that you can skip certain puzzles if you don’t want to do them. For example, my 4-year-old would have fun running around the world and collecting various items.
However, they would often say “I don’t want to do puzzles” and they could just move on until someone else decided to go do a puzzle or two or they would likely just find the necessary items without the puzzles.
Sadly, in playing Bluey’s Quest for The Gold Pen, I have encountered some problems. The aforementioned jetpack is not a smooth experience. Many times, when engaged it will cause a sudden shift in character placement which makes it unreliable for many tasks and rendered one particular puzzle literally impossible.
This really turned me off from finishing the game. There was another moment when the game froze up and I had to completely shut it down. After this and the problems with the jetpack, all momentum I had to finish the game vanished.
These are areas that could easily be addressed via updates and I hope the team does actually work on these. Maybe I’ll try to circle back in a month or so. I can’t imagine I was very far from the end.
Another disappointment (but not a dealbreaker) for me was that Bluey’s Quest for The Gold Pen is a single player experience. I was hoping it would be at least a 2-player cooperative game, but it is purely single player. I can understand why this is the case given what happens in the story, but it was still a bummer that I couldn’t play at the same time as my kids.
At the end of the day, Bluey’s Quest for The Gold Pen is very charming and fun for the whole family as long as you can take turns. I don’t know that it’s worth $40, but when it’s on sale I would recommend it to a family that likes Bluey, given the team addresses problems such as the jetpack not being smooth.
As of writing this review, the problems with the game really drag the score down. Let me know in the comments if you’ve tried out Bluey’s Quest for The Gold Pen and what you think of it.
