Game Room: Laura

Today we're going to be looking at a game aimed primarily at children, and I will be keeping that in mind as I review. Said game is Laura, which released for the Game Boy Color in 2000. I tried out this game because of the strange name and screenshots that told very little about what it actually was. I wound up finding a game that was meant to be played by young girls, and it was inoffensive enough that I plowed through the whole thing in two days. Read on for details.

 Laura is an adventure-type game focused primarily on fetch quests and minigames. The dialogue is simple, the gameplay forgiving, and the difficulty fairly low. Laura is the main character - that's her on the title screen. In an interesting method of licensing, all of the characters in this game are Playmobil figures. Laura is a rich girl who lives in a big fancy house with her parents, grandfather, two brothers, a maid, and a cat.

One day, Laura stumbles across a fancy medallion with a large center gem and five holes around it for additional smaller gems. Her grandfather tells her the story behind it - he found the medallion in his youth, and learned that the land's fairies had been imprisoned and that this medallion was the key to freeing them.

You save the fairies by doing menial chores.

Not kidding, the medallion is powered by kindness. Laura, being a little girl probably around seven years old, is pretty much limited to doing simple good deeds to bring the medallion to life. She spends the game helping everyone in the house with various tasks as they prepare for a big anniversary party for her parents, such as gathering ingredients for the maid to make cookies with and taking care of the baby so her mom can focus on getting herself ready for the party.

Gameplay rotates back and forth between wandering around the overworld finding items and playing minigames. The minigames include sliding-tile puzzles, memory match, 2D platforming, playing with a jump rope, and catching falling nuts, among a few other types. The music is pretty decent and the graphics are quite good for an eight-bit game. Whenever the player needs assistance, talking to any NPC will give Laura directions for where they should go next.

 

There is no save feature, but every few minigames you earn one of the five gems and a password to go with it. The game takes about two hours from start to finish and ends with the freed fairies becoming Laura's "friends forever" and giving her a wand that grants her wishes - she wishes, naturally, to be a princess. Oh, and the anniversary party was a hit. Overall, a cute, simple game that would probably do its' job of appealing to little girls.

I didn't write this "in-character" because I didn't have any ideas to make it worthwhile, but I'll still assign Laura and any future reviewed games a mantid rating.

Laura earns three mantids for providing a simple, competent, and solid experience children would probably enjoy.

GAME ROOM SCORES:
Review 1: Final Fantasy: Four Heroes of Light (Nintendo DS): 5/5
Review 2: Golden 20-in-1 (Sega Genesis): 1/5
Review 3: Rolan's Curse (Game Boy): 3/5
Review 4: A Week of Garfield (NES): 0/5
Review 5: Growl (Sega Genesis): 2/5
Review 6: Robot Legions (Xbox Live Indie Games): 5/5
Review 7: Laura (Game Boy Color): 3/5