Luke Reilly
Revisiting a game series from your youth is like exploring the basement in your childhood home. As you sift through the boxes and shelves, old memories come flooding back — which is exactly what happened as I started playing Carmen Sandiego, the latest game in a multimedia series that spans four decades. When the master thief appeared onscreen in her iconic trenchcoat and fedora, I was eight years old again, my face inches from a computer screen as I used my nascent knowledge of math, geography, and history to solve Carmen’s latest caper. 40 years later, Carmen Sandiego gives me that same thrill of solving puzzles by collecting clues, even if some of the modern additions to the visual novel-esque interface miss their mark.
As a former child gumshoe whose grasp of geography was gleaned from tracking down the world’s worst criminals as they scurried around the globe, I was more than ready to revisit the Carmen Sandiego-verse with the release of this eponymous new adventure from Gameloft. Though it takes some story cues from the animated Netflix series that wrapped up in 2021 — and emulates its cartoony visual style — it’s not necessary to know anything about Carmen’s backstory with the evil organization VILE to enjoy her latest quest. Significantly, this is the first time in the long-running series that players get to step into Carmen’s shoes and don her famous fedora, but it doesn’t make a real difference to the crook-hunting formula.
While the series got its start as an edutainment game, modern Carmen Sandiego is a mix of puzzle-solving, quick-time events, a dash of third-person top-down exploration, and (of course!) the occasional trivia question. In some ways, the newer elements make the world feel bigger and more exciting than its early DOS iterations; there’s more to do than simply click on icons representing key locations, parse through dialogue, and answer questions that wouldn’t be out of place on a fifth-grade final exam. That said, I wouldn’t have missed new activities like hang-gliding and grappling from rooftop to rooftop if they weren’t included.
As you follow VILE thieves from one country to the next, you’ll need to collect two types of clues: those that help them figure out where to go next, and those that help narrow down the list of suspects in the ACME detective agency’s database. In the ’80s and ’90s, Carmen Sandiego games relied on physical almanacs full of geographical and historical facts to help answer the in-game trivia questions and figure out what their clues meant. This time around, all of that information is kept within the game itself.
Throughout the campaign, you’ll find pieces of data like airport codes, exports, national languages, government structures, and more. This self-built almanac comes in handy when you’re on a VILE villain’s tail and need to decide what to do next. Typically, you’ll have a handful of clues to go by — a color or pattern on the flag, the spoken language, or whether residents drive on the left or right side of the road. You’ll use those clues to determine your next city from three provided choices.
Similarly, you’ll use personal information to narrow down the criminal behind each caper. The reimagined ACME Database makes this process smooth and streamlined; you can easily filter out suspects based on details about their hair and eye colors, hobbies, favorite foods, and fears. It’s quite satisfying to whittle down a list of 30-something suspects until there’s only one remaining and issue a warrant for their arrest. Just make sure you have the right person, otherwise it’s game over for Carmen (and time to start over for you).
Clues are found by exploring key spots throughout a variety of exotic locations around the globe, from New Orleans to Barcelona to Singapore to Brisbane, with a few stops in between. This is similar to how the early games worked, but there’s a bit more room for exploration and making choices this time around. In some places, Carmen gets to wander around, question multiple witnesses, and seek out local trivia that could come in handy later. You don’t get to choose which activities happen in which location, but there’s more action involved than there used to be.
Every case has several chapters with individual heists connected by an overarching villain. The cases start out at the scene of the crime, whether that crime is the theft of a Japanese bullet train, or the replacement of a city’s free Wi-Fi hotspots with paid “Vi-Fi” versions. In each city, you can visit three locations to collect clues that bring you one step closer to solving the case.
Here’s how it works in practice: As you visit each of the in-city landmarks and districts, such as Singapore’s Merlion statue, or a viking-themed museum in Reykjavik, you’ll need to complete pre-determined activities to uncover that location’s clues. Sometimes, that means walking around and questioning suspects and witnesses, often picking up some geographical fun facts along the way. Other times, you may have to complete a hacking or lock-picking puzzle or use Carmen’s hang glider or grappling hook.
Some of these gameplay elements are more fun than others. Completing puzzles to hack safes or boost wireless signals was satisfying, but the more physical activities are mostly on rails and not particularly thrilling. I have a particular beef with the grappling hook mini-game, which requires a simple button press as icons align on your screen. The problem is, those icons sometimes move erratically, so grappling is either way too simple or frustratingly obtuse. There’s also a hang-gliding activity that’s perfectly… fine, but I’d rather have fewer gameplay elements that are more fleshed out than some forced action that feels like filler. I would have been perfectly happy with more brain-teasers instead.
Though not as unforgiving as the 1985 iteration, it is possible to fail cases in Carmen Sandiego. The clock is always ticking. You typically have five or seven days to solve each case, and all of your activities take time — as does flying from one city to the next. If you missed a critical clue and ended up flying to Singapore when you’re supposed to be in Buenos Aires, you just wasted 11 hours. If you run out of time, the thief gets away and you have to start the case over. However, I never really felt the time crunch in the main campaign; I typically had at least a day left over, if not several.
There are other ways to fail cases in Carmen Sandiego, and these represented more of a threat in my playthrough. If you’re pickpocketing a VILE lackey and get noticed, you’ve just missed out on a key piece of evidence. Missing one clue won’t blow your case, but do that a few times and you won’t have enough information to make an arrest. Most of the time, I could pinpoint the exact moment when I blew it — I was too slow when following a mark, I didn’t pay close enough attention to actions that required precise button presses. Other times, I found myself at the end with several suspects still in my database and no idea where I missed a clue.
Though I did make some mistakes, the main campaign isn’t exactly what I’d call challenging. But considering the series’ history as a children’s educational resource, I may not be the target audience. I could see parents and kids playing through Carmen Sandiego together and having a great time as children build critical thinking skills and parents brush up on elementary-school geography. And though it’s on the simpler side, Carmen Sandiego never feels dumbed down.
For my fellow olds looking for more of a challenge, you’re in luck. Aside from the main campaign, you can explore the ACME Files for what we’re told are cold cases dating back to the ’80s. These cases have adopted the modern systems for filtering out suspects and jetting around the world, but they’re presented in a retro, pixel art style — and injected with questions that might make you feel like you’re back in school and your teacher just slapped a pop quiz on your desk. Quick, what’s the biggest island in the Caribbean? Which country was the biggest producer of wheat and rice back in 1985? What’s 4x13x80? (Thankfully, despite what my teachers told me, I do have a calculator in my pocket everywhere I go.)
The ACME Files use a simplified interface that made me feel like I was back in front of my family computer in the early ’90s frantically paging through a physical book to find the answers. This time around, Google was my almanac. That might make the retro cases seem easier than those of the campaign, but they’re actually more difficult, particularly the time crunch. I actually did run out of time in the ACME Files, and watching those last few hours tick away filled me with a determination to do it better next time. Overall, these cases are a smart addition that add variety to the experience and provide some comforting fan service.
The historical cases pull from the same list of cities as the main campaign, and it’s only a few hours before you’ve seen everywhere in the world that Carmen Sandiego can visit. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have expanded her global reach in the main campaign, but it results in every environment feeling a bit repetitive after a while. Still, there are often new facts to find upon revisiting, so every city is always worth another look.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia goggles, but none of these shortcomings bothered me enough to make me want to stop playing. Each chapter is paced really well, so it always feels like you’re making progress. I love games that make you think your way out of problems, and for the most part, that’s exactly what Carmen Sandiego demands of the player.
It’s a shame, however, that the campaign ends rather abruptly. There’s another caper coming in a free DLC release later this year, but it was jarring to gear up for the final mystery and see “Coming Soon” in the menu of a completed, publicly released game. The story doesn’t feel like it’s reached a natural conclusion yet, but there’s still a good 15 hours of content between the campaign and the ACME Files — even more if you complete all of the cold cases from way back when. After my initial confusion, I took this as an opportunity to explore more old cases and await the day when I can complete Carmen’s adventure.
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