Courage: ZaGame Reviews

Courage: ZaGame is a game that is loosely based off of a particular Cartoon Network show. The game is a first person horror game in which a floating orange orb that tells you that there is an ancient evil that needs stopping, and you need to make a potion to do so. To this end, you must find objects around the map. Overall, the game feels mostly on brand as an episode of the show. As strange as they looked, I liked the 3D models used for the characters. My primary complaint comes from the quirkiness of the hitboxes for picking up objects. Some of the prompts to pick up objects only appear from a certain direction at a very close distance. You can be right on top of an object, and not have a prompt to interact with it. On the subject of issues that prevent the player from interacting with the world: I encountered issues when the game did a time skip with being frozen in place and unable to move, but look around for a second or two after the transition back to gameplay. I have three complaints with the game that can be filed under Quality of Life. First is the sometimes unclear directions of where to go, especially as objects from later in the story load before they are supposed to, such as the groceries. Second, the lack of an audio slider or a toggle for the creaking noise that Courage makes with each step, as well as other loud noises that occur during the course of the game. And third, I think the world is a bit too big for the story that the game wants to tell. It only took me an hour to complete the game twice, but most of that time was traversing from the mountains to the house and back to the mountains. Would I Recommend Courage:ZaGame? Not in its current state. The game takes less than an hour to play through twice, there were significant hit box issues, and a couple of other issues the impacted the experience overall. That said, the game has a certain charm about it: the low-poly 3D models of the characters, and the way the game captured the atmosphere of the show were decent. It's a neat game that doesn't quite stick the landing from a mechanical standpoint, and isn't quite able to make up for that in other areas. With a bit more polish, the game has potential to be a great tribute to a classic cartoon.