Think of the Children

Have you ever yearned for the stress of parenting when you play video games? If so, Solomon has just the game for you to sterilize any desire you had for children.

Problem Child

Although my father proudly calls me a mistake, most parents will say their kids were the best thing that ever happened to them. You can see that appreciative glimmer in their eyes. You’ll also probably notice the garbage bags under their eyes, the gray clawing at their hair, and the dad guts and mom handles overtaking their abdomens. They brag about the perks of parenthood while Timmy vomits McNuggets in the corner and Annabelle finger-paints on the walls, using her dirty diaper as her artist’s palette. Children are the hope of our future and the torture of our present. They’re gifts from God, who happens to be a total asshat.

The joys of parenthood have been sorely underrepresented in video games, but developer Fellow Traveler has filled this hole in our collective womb with Think of the Children. Geared for four-player co-op party mayhem, the game subjects you to all the horrors of raising children who have no survival instincts or respect for your authority. What about the joy of parenting?  Fellow Travelers forgot to program it or hates children. There are no blessings to be had here, just crotch gremlins.

What is it?

Think of the Children plays a bit like Overcooked. You and up to three others must keep six children alive for a set amount of time. Each stage hides all manner of deadly creatures and traps to prey on your children, and your kids flock to them like they vacant sheep they are. To thwart their deaths, you can pick them up and carry them elsewhere or yell at them to follow you. You know, just like Grandpa used to.

Each child can mess with a hazard for a certain amount of time, causing a warning sign to pop over their heads. Wait too long, and they’ll be dispatched unceremoniously. Children can die, and each corpse impacts your score once the time runs out. Side missions and your children’s happiness also add points, but the game gives you no indication how to do the latter. If your score equals a C- or higher, you unlock the next stage and a cosmetic item.

The game offers two modes: Story and Party. Story mode guides you as you try to prove your competence as a parent to a judge and jury, combining the utter anguish of losing custodial rights with the slapstick humor of a 90’s sitcom. Party mode offers the exact same ten stages—which still must be unlocked in order—but without the overarching narrative. It’s like a restaurant serving quesadillas and grilled cheese tortillas: they’re the same damn thing, but the two different names make the menu look better.

What’s good?

  1. The story injects some humor into an otherwise sobering experience. It jokingly attempts to make sense of the game’s nonsensical settings and the high child death count, dabbling in some dark humor while maintaining Looney Toons-esque mania. The gags can skew a little too absurd, but so do mine, so criticizing this humor is like trying to hurt my reflection by shoving a fork up my own nose.
Hilarious.

What’s bad?

  1. Think of the Children depicts parenting as pain and suffering, no matter the number of players. As a single parent, raising six kids is nearly impossible, so it will take a small miracle to get a passing grade on any stage. With two parents, avoiding Child Protective Services is possible, but levels are nonstop stress fests. When bumping up to three or four parents, the stress shifts to boredom. Each player gets their own quadrant to babysit, and as long as everyone cares for the children in their area, you’ll achieve the top score. As such, Think of the Children never finds the right amounts of chaos and strategy to spark fun.
  2. The controls are about as unreliable as child support checks. Although you may intend to grab a child drinking bleach, you may instead snatch the child harmlessly drinking vodka or you may grab nothing at all. Sometimes, children will flock to you from across the stage when you yell, but they’ll struggle to hear you as you bellow directly into their ears. Despite all of my practice, I still haven’t figured how to throw children consistently either, and now, I’m banned from all public parks.
  3. The final level is practically unplayable. Unlike the other stages, this one has multiple parts, including rooms which will kill you if you don’t complete an objective in time. A separate timer also counts down to your death, and with excruciatingly slow auto-scroll sections, time will often end you. Bugs plague the level as well, causing you to fall through solid floors, get stuck behind objects, and be unable to interact with context-sensitive items. Even with three people, I couldn’t overcome the bugs, so I aborted Think of the Children right then and there and haven’t regretted it since.
  4. The voxel graphics are both uninspired and a hindrance to gameplay. I have never liked the blocky aesthetic, largely because – outside of Minecraft – the graphics typically seem devoid of character or distinctive features. With Think of the Children, everything is a broken mess of cubes, so it can be difficult to distinguish between your children or certain objects from the background.
  5. Think of the Children lingers barely longer than short-term memory. I recognize my hatred has severely limited my playtime, but the game offers so little. Apart from unlocking aesthetic features, you only have the ten stages, most of which last no longer than a few minutes. You could strive for a local high score, but why? You’re better off parenting your real-life children or planning your or your partner’s vasectomy.

What’s the verdict?

Think of the Children functions best as a form of birth control. If child-rearing happened to be as ugly, stressful, boring, and buggy as it is depicted in this game, teen pregnancy and unsafe sex would be nonexistent, like Solomon Jr. after that kitchen fire he started.  At best, Think of the Children is a poor approximation of Overcooked, perfectly emulating the chaos of cooperation without programming any of the payoff and originality. Unless you enjoy running around with your head cut off, I suggest the best way to enjoy Think of the Children is through abstinence.

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