Think of the Children

I don't usually cover party games. My comfort zone is tracking ADS times and debating whether a 60Hz display is holding back your ranked climb. But a Brisbane indie about keeping six self-destructive toddlers alive while you're simultaneously flipping BBQ patties and icing a birthday cake? That's the kind of chaos I can respect, even if I spent my first three solo attempts failing the park level. The structure is straightforward. You take on a series of themed levels, each running around 90 seconds, across locations like a birthday party in the park, a day at the beach, a zoo trip, and the Australian Outback. In each one, you're juggling two priorities at once: keep your six kids from walking into traffic, getting electrocuted by jellyfish, or teasing wildlife, while also completing a list of secondary objectives like tending the BBQ, laying out picnic tables, or building sandcastles. Your end-of-level score is your task completion total multiplied by how many children survived, which means you can technically ace the setup tasks and still post a garbage score because three kids got eaten. There are two main modes: Story Mode, which frames each level as courtroom evidence in a child negligence trial (the writing here is genuinely funny and worth watching), and Party Mode, which lets you attack any stage freely while chasing high scores and unlocking cosmetics for your blocky, voxel-style parent and kid characters. Here is the part that matters if you're buying alone: don't. Solo play is a mechanical disaster. There is no difficulty scaling, no option to reduce the number of children, and the volume of tasks the game expects one person to handle simultaneously tips from challenging into actually unfair within the first few levels. Story Mode locks progression behind passing grades, which makes the solo grind punishing rather than fun. The controls are simple enough, pick up a kid, call them toward you to herd the group, mash the action button for objectives, but the sheer number of things demanding attention at once means you spend most of your solo runs watching something catch fire while you were handling something else. Repetition also sets in faster than it should. The game has a limited level pool, and once a coordinated group has cracked the task order for each stage, replay value drops off. With two to four local players, the picture changes significantly. Splitting the job, one person herding kids while another handles objectives, gives the game the co-op communication energy it was actually built for. The absurd death scenarios land better when someone else is watching a kid tease a drop bear and screaming at you to intervene. The courtroom Story Mode becomes something you actually want to sit through together. It still has rough edges: controls feel slightly clunky when precision matters, difficulty still doesn't scale cleanly with player count, and the level variety runs thin before long. But the laughs are real and the 90-second rounds keep the energy high. The Steam rating sits at Mixed, which is honest. A focused couch co-op session with the right people makes this feel like a bargain. Loading it up alone on a Tuesday night is a different product entirely. Buy it for the group, not for yourself.

Fred · Scout Team

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