Dora The Explorer: Barnyard Buddies

My daughter and I took a step back in complexity after Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey to play another game from my childhood. Thanks to a couple of DVDs from the library, my daughter has recently taken an interest in the original Dora The Explorer show, so I introduced her to a game I had played many times over. The combination of a recognizable character and the farm animal theming in Dora The Explorer: Barnyard Buddies immediately hooked my little girl. Likely because she only needed to use one button for every action this time around, she was suddenly confident enough to handle the buttons all on her own, relying more on the instructions from Dora than from me. She even took a few turns with the joystick this time! While she knows in her head how the stick works, she is still having a little trouble translating that to actual thumb movements. She's getting close, though, and every new game seems to be another step forward!

Dora The Explorer: Barnyard Buddies is structured like eight simplified episodes of the show squished together into one long marathon. Eight farm animals have escaped their pens and gotten lost, so Dora and Boots call on you to help them save the missing animals. Each animal gets its own segment with the familiar singing Map, and you'll need to follow his directions to each landmark in order to perform your rescues. Along the way, you may encounter familiar faces from the show, like Tico or the grumpy troll, and you may even need to stop Swiper from swiping!
 
Most of the locations that you visit on your way to finding an animal have some sort of puzzle for you to solve before you continue. Many of those puzzles involve finding hidden items. It may be many smaller things hanging out in the open, or one important tool hidden in a haystack somewhere. Either way, once you are successful, the infamous thieving fox will make an appearance and try to swipe the thing you just found. Stopping him is as simple as pressing the action button once he appears on the screen, but my daughter did act too late one of those times and we ended up needing to go and find the item all over again. Failure is mildly inconvenient, but my girl got a kick out of stopping Swiper every subsequent time he appeared.
 
Despite its simplicity, Barnyard Buddies is very good at capitalizing on the joy that children feel in just doing something. As someone who tends to prefer explicit rewards for my effort in games, I was not thrilled by the collectible stars hidden in every stage. They do absolutely nothing but make a number in the corner of your screen go up, and that number resets at every new location, but my daughter made sure we grabbed every one that we saw, and didn't once consider that they might be meaningless.
 
You may also occasionally see one of the set pieces on your path wiggling. Approaching a wiggling bush, stump, or stone will cause The Fiesta Trio (a teeny animal band) to pop out and play a jingle for you. You can trigger the jingle as many times as you want, and I never got sick of my girlie giggling and saying "silly buggies" when they appeared. That was my daughter bringing me joy, though; not the game. However, I was fully on board with one intrinsically rewarding feature of Barnyard Buddies. Dora has some unique physics affecting her movement that make her accelerate pretty slowly, but if that girl hits a downward slope, she slides like a marble on glass. At first, these are a bit uncommon, but the second half of the game is filled with ramps for no reason at all. There are hills you slide down, there are semicircle bridges to nowhere, it's all made for sliding, and I don't know why, but I loved it!
 
Dora The Explorer: Barnyard Buddies was another nostalgia-bomb for me, and I was glad to see my daughter so excited to play it. Her game literacy continues to improve, and she really picked up on the gameplay loop this time, along with gaining some interest in using the joystick. I'm out of games from my childhood that I think are appropriate for her current skill level, so we'll need to start discovering some new experiences until she's a little better at using a controller independently. Whatever we end up playing, I'm sure I'll enjoy the time I spend with my little one!
Although the game is no longer being distributed, you can learn more about it here (as of 2/20/26): https://psxdatacenter.com/games/SLUS-01576

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