One night a friend of mine was gushing about this website he found because it had a playable version of this risk-like computer game he had played as a kid. He immediately showed me the game, and the old pixelated style reminded me of a childhood favorite of mine. It’s a game I hadn’t thought about in years, Pajama Sam. It was one of my favorite computer games as a kid, and I had to know if it was still out there.
Amazingly enough, it was available for download on Steam along with all of its sequels and spin-off mini games. That’s right, sequels. This game was so awesome that they made three sequels to it. I had only played the first and second games, but I had also played many other games in under the same corporate umbrella of "Pajama Sam".
You see I’m talking about Humongous Entertainment. This amazing video game company made a lot of my favorite point and click adventure games. Maybe you’d recognize the purple car Putt-putt? Or, what about that adventurous Freddi Fish and her little green fish friend, Luther? Then there was Spy Fox, which was a slightly more challenging series of point and click games for older kids. If none of these are ringing any bells, that’s cool. Not everyone experienced these characters. After all, many of these games were made in the late 90s or early 00s.
The thing that was so amazing and unique about these games was that you didn’t have to download any of the disc’s content. This was a big deal back in the day of early computer games. My mom loved it because we could play a bunch of these games and never clog up her computer with files. Of course, this wasn’t the only amazing feature of these games.
They were fun! I mean, what’s not to love about a blue kid in pj’s ready to take on the dark? The characters had personality and the humor was fairly intelligent for a kids game. In "Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide when it’s Dark Outside", there’s a talking boat named Otto that doesn’t believe he can float. There’s also a talking carrot leading a carrot revolution because he’s tired of being put in salads. He wants to be the main dish. I kid you not. On top of that he has a goatee and sounds like a paranoid hippy.
But, the characters were just the icing on the cake. The most interesting thing about these Humongous games was that the game would switch things up after each play through. For instance, in that first "Pajama Sam" game you have to find his lunch box, flashlight and mask in order to defeat darkness, but the placement of these objects would sometimes change after you reset the game. Sometimes the lunch box would be at the bottom of a water filled cave. Other times it would be by a well.
The way to reach these items would change too of course. I remember being a kid and getting frustrated about not being able to get to an item, so I would just restart the game to try and get it to move somewhere where I understood the puzzle. Now I don’t have as much trouble figuring things out, but It’s still cool that I can restart the game and basically get a whole new play-through.
If you are feeling nostalgic, and don’t want to shell out seven bucks for the game like I did, watch this guy’s Youtube video about "Pajama Sam in: No Need to Hide when it’s Dark Outside". He sums up the game pretty nicely. However, if you really want to experience "Pajama Sam", or any of the Humongous entertainment games, they are all available to download and play on Steam. You can get the entire "Pajama Sam" collection for around 25 bucks. If you’ve never played any of these games as a kid, you might still want to check them out. They are a lot of fun, even for adults.
