Hello Kitty Park Adventure Hands-On

Hello Kitty is currently celebrating her 30th birthday, and mobile gamers are invited! That should be the tagline for Hello Kitty Park Adventure, a Series 60 puzzle game that takes place in Hyde Park of Hello Kitty's hometown of London. The park is separated into gardens, each of which contains a number of flowers for the cartoon cat to collect. In each level, Hello Kitty must circumnavigate obstacles that separate her from her floral booty, like bodies of water and, um, roving bands of monkeys.

This is quite a bit more action than Hello Kitty is accustomed to, because she spends most of her days decorating stationery sets and pencil cases. Most of the game's puzzles involve traversing ponds by using a combination of lily pads and floating baskets, which Hello Kitty can move into place. Monkeys will push any blue baskets that get in their ways, but they aren't strong enough to push red baskets. Hello Kitty is truly the mightiest among anthropomorphic cultural icons. In later levels, new complexities are thrown into the mix, like teleportation booths.

Hello Kitty Park Adventure makes no attempt to appeal to a demographic beyond the staple Hello Kitty audience, which primarily consists of young girls. That said, some of the game's puzzles do offer a few moments' challenge, although they're unlikely to keep anyone up late at night.

Hello Kitty Park Adventure is essentially a rebranded Chip's Challenge, a sokoban-style game that was also recently ported to mobile. Park Adventure seems to be a perfectly competent take on this style of game, and it represents a worthwhile effort at reaching out to a demographic that is too frequently ignored by game makers.