The Addams Family: Mansion Mayhem

My first honest reaction to Mansion Mayhem was that it works exactly as advertised, which is a compliment with an asterisk attached. This is a linear 3D platformer built around local co-op, clearly drawing its inspiration from the Super Mario 3D World school of shared-screen, pick-up-and-play design. You pick one of four family members, Wednesday, Gomez, Morticia, or Pugsley, and barrel through themed levels collecting Family Crests, stomping enemies, and hitting an end point. It is not trying to be anything more than that, and for the right audience, that honesty pays off. The four playable characters each carry a distinct weapon-ability that rotates as you progress through the game's four worlds: the Dining Room, Graveyard, Music Theater, and Laboratory. Gomez's Mazurka Saber lets you slash enemies and use a spinning glide to float across gaps. Morticia's Spider Sling shoots webs for swinging and pulling objects. Pugsley's Baller Bomb turns you into a rolling wrecking ball that eats through enemies and coins simultaneously. Wednesday's pet octopus Socrates provides a hover via ink blast. Each ability swaps in at specific trigger points on the floor, and the levels that stack multiple abilities together are genuinely the most fun the game has to offer. On the co-op side, there is no character locking, so anyone at any skill level can reach the end marker, which is exactly the right call for a family title. Where things start to creak is repetition. Each world has enough levels that the theming wears out its welcome before you reach the exit. The camera sits at a near-isometric angle that occasionally hides your character or makes platform landings feel imprecise. Death is almost inconsequential since you respawn nearby with full health, but a known bug can trap characters in a void loop, forcing a level restart from scratch. Combat is a single-button affair with dim enemy AI, so challenge-hungry players will clock out early. The story, a thin premise about saving the mansion from a mysterious buyer, has no voice acting and no real investment behind it. As a solo experience, this is genuinely middling. Reviewers across the board agreed the game was designed with co-op in mind, and the solo version bears that out with an almost flat difficulty curve and none of the social chaos that makes the minigames feel worthwhile. Those minigames, twelve of them according to pre-release coverage, run alongside the main levels and range from coin-race gauntlets to pachinko-style bomb drops. They are simple and short, but they give the multiplayer sessions a bit of variety beyond the linear stage formula. The lighting and environment textures hold up fine, though character models are noticeably low-detail for a 2021 release. This is a game that knows exactly who it is for: families with a controller or two to spare, younger players who want a recognisable cast in an accessible platformer, and anyone who wants a low-stakes couch session that nobody gets frustrated by. If you are a solo adult gamer looking for mechanical depth or a real challenge, the honest answer is to look elsewhere. Grab it for a game night where the youngest person in the room should be able to finish a level without help, and it will do its job.

Alex · Scout Team

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