PJ MASKS: HEROES OF THE NIGHT

My honest reaction to PJ Masks: Heroes of the Night is that it does exactly one thing well, and that one thing is getting a three-to-seven-year-old to hold a controller and feel like a superhero without breaking into tears. That is a harder design problem than most people give credit for, and Petoons Studio solves it cleanly. The structure is simple: each of the 16 stages opens with a vehicle sequence where you dodge obstacles and scoop up gems in Catboy's Cat-Car, Owlette's flyer, or Gekko's submarine-capable Gekko-mobile, then flows into a side-scrolling platforming section where the game rotates you between all three characters. Catboy handles speed bursts and double-jumps to reach higher ledges, Owlette glides and uses her wing blast to clear smoke obstacles, and Gekko wall-crawls and turns invisible to sneak past threats. Each stage caps off with a button-prompt boss confrontation against Romeo, Luna Girl, or Night Ninja. You cannot fail. There are no health bars, no pits to fall into, no game-over screens. That is entirely intentional, and for the target audience it works. The full TV voice cast is present, which younger fans will clock immediately, and the missions draw loosely from the first few seasons of the animated show rather than inventing generic excuses to run left-to-right. The eight locations, covering city rooftops, Mystery Mountain, and the Moon among others, look faithful to the cartoon art style. Short sessions of 10 to 15 minutes per stage suit the attention spans of the kids this is aimed at, and the whole game clocks in somewhere between two and three hours on a first run. A collectible layer, three hero symbol tokens and 200 gems per stage, gives completionist-minded kids a reason to replay levels, and the achievement list is built around that same goal. The problems are real, though they all land on the adult sitting next to the child. Level design is aggressively repetitive. If you strip away the background art, every stage is structurally identical to the one before it, a complaint that cropped up across every review at launch and has not aged away. The character voice lines loop constantly during play, narrating obvious hints on a short timer until you want to mute the television. There is also a well-documented observation in the critical community that the game shares its structural DNA almost entirely with an earlier Outright Games title, PAW Patrol: On a Roll, down to the level-select layout and the collectible swap from paw prints to mask tokens. That is a legitimate criticism of the publisher's approach to licensed games, but it has no practical impact on whether a five-year-old enjoys the thing. One genuine design miss that affects kids directly is the vehicle section control scheme, which adds vertical steering on top of the usual left-right lanes without clear visual lane markers, causing confusion that reviewers flagged across multiple platforms. As a gateway game, it lands in a small and genuinely useful category. Difficulty is calibrated so a child aged four or five can progress alone without needing a parent to rescue them, the on-screen prompts and voice coaching substitute adequately for reading ability, and the familiar characters provide the motivation to keep going. It is not a Lego game with its multiple unlockable characters and layered collectible hunts. It is not trying to be. Older siblings, parents, and anyone without an active PJ Masks obsession in the house will find nothing here beyond novelty. The DLC, Mischief on Mystery Mountain, extends the adventure with Bamboo Forest and Secret Cave stages and introduces the character An Yu, which adds some extra playtime for households that burn through the base content quickly.

Alex · Scout Team

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