Free-to-play simulator

Amanda the Adventurer is a free-to-play simulation from indie developer James Pratt. Don’t be fooled by its supposedly child-friendly premise and its retro, low-quality 3D graphics. It’s a horror game that doesn’t rely on jumpscares. Instead, it uses a slow-burn approach to bring you a quick yet memorable fright. It also effectively uses a found-footage trope to complete this experience.

Amanda the Adventurer is a definite must-try for fans of indie, horror, or retro games despite its use of dated design choices and its simplistic gameplay approach. It’s a worthy competitor for Our Lady of Sorrow or Harmful.

Don’t lower your guard

The first thing you’d notice with Amanda the Adventurer is its use of dated graphics. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it caters to retro players who grew up playing first-generation consoles a few decades back. It uses low-poly 3D graphics and solid colors. In terms of premise, it’s quite misleading. What looks like a children’s educational show is actually a cursed videotape.

Without spoiling the game, it’s important to warn that the game contains mature references that young players might find frightening, or worse, disturbing. It looks accommodating and fun at first. You get to experience your run-of-the-mill child-friendly animated episodes showing everyday stuff. Still, it doesn’t take away anything from the fact that it turns into a nightmare. How it happens is for you to find out.

Lastly, it delivers a legitimate scare, but it has limited replayability. There are only two paths you can take, each takes about 15 minutes to complete. After this, there are no more secrets or easter eggs to unlock. Still, the endings are wildly different and make the entire experience worth it. It manages to leave an impact on players despite being an indie game with limited content.

With secret tapes and different endings

To solve the mysteries and learn the game’s lore, you will have to look for five hidden tapes — these are the Orange, Turquoise, Green, Red, and Purple tapes. Each one shows a different part of the story, and you need to collect all of them to piece together the entire storyline. Collecting these tapes is no walk in the park, however, as you have to figure out tricky puzzles or play mini-games.

All in all, there are five endings you can try to attain. You can only try to gain access to these by activating the robot Blabbot in the beginning, which can be done by figuring out how to crack its keypad code. Doing so requires the player to do a few steps — once Blabbot is activated, it can then become a reliable companion that provides the player with codes throughout the whole game. 

Is Amanda the Adventurer a real TV show?

Simply put, Amanda the Adventurer is not a real television show. However, Amanda’s character is said to be largely inspired by Dora the Explorer, seeing as there are some parallels between the two. There are similarities between the two titles’ names as well as Amanda and Dora having animal sidekicks. However, besides that, there are no more instances of resemblance.

Some technical improvements

Since the game’s release, multiple improvements and patches have been made for it so far. All of these are based on the players’ submitted feedback, which is highly vital in ensuring that the improvements made are going to be beneficial. Some of these include fixing the bugs in the Everything Rots alternate version so that the clips will work smoothly on the machines. Lines in the Polish and Korean text translations are optimized, too, removing unnecessary characters. The issue about corrupted saves has been fixed as well. Plus, re-mapping mouse-bound controls is removed from the settings.

Misleading yet satisfying

The best value that Amanda the Adventurer offers is in how it transitions from a seemingly innocent child program into a full-blown nightmare—and it’s for the player to find out. It uses low-poly graphics that takes away from the realism of the found-footage genre but caters to players after nostalgia. If you’re after a quick scare, then this game is for you.