Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why’d You Steal our Garbage?!!
Like Steven Universe, Adventure Time is chock full of video game references. Heck, one of its episodes is set inside a video game, and one character actually is a video game console. Creator Pendleton Ward has said that video games influenced the show, so it stood to reason that a video game would be one avenue that the property would stretch out to. Second to if it would be a good game, the big question with Adventure Time: Hey Ice King, Why’d You Steal Our Garbage?! (yes, that’s seriously the full title) was what kind of game it would be.
Next to Disney, Cartoon Network is the one cartoon channel with kids programming that could best be suited for a video game format. Their shows are so out there and reach new levels of absurdity with each episode that they could reasonably fit in well in the gaming space. The problem has been that the games themselves were in genres that didn’t feel all that true to the material; Teen Titans was a beat-em-up, and the Ben 10 games switched genres every other game. Thankfully, WayForward decided that a game about a boy and his shapeshifting dog in a nuclear apocalypse would be the best property to turn into a Zelda game.
Adventure Time has had five video games come out for it, but the original is where it’s at. Each of the Adventure Time games has been influenced by a famous game, but Legend of Zelda is the one most have been drawing from. Hey Ice King, Why’d You Steal Our Garbage is very much in the vein of Legend of Zelda II to the point where you wonder if WayForward just asked for the Zelda II code and added Adventure Time on top of it. Switching from top-down Ooo traversal to side-scrolling between iconic locations provides a sense of scale, and the Metroidvania dynamic between Finn and Jake works nicely. Combined with the series’ trademark humor kept perfectly intact, though the lack of voice acting is a bummer. Until there’s an Adventure Time game on consoles, this is the best title fans could ask for.
