Adventure Time-style Games

A boy, a dog and a candy kingdom, in fan hands

Every game on this hub is a fan-made or inspired title from a licensed third-party provider; none is an official product of the show, and nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by its network or creator. What the providers borrow is a look that is easy to sketch and hard to mistake: a boy in a white animal hat, a yellow dog who can stretch to any size, a pastel kingdom of sweets, and a line style so simple that a child can copy it. What they build with it is mostly quiet. Jigsaws of fan art lead the shelf, with spot-the-difference pairs, a match board and a hidden-object scene beside them, and the drawing lessons and coloring pages come next, because the art style invites a pencil. The arcade titles, where the boy actually runs and jumps, are the smallest group. The label collects every title that says the show's name or names the two leads, and it is honestly a small shelf, so the neighbors matter from the first page.

The nearest neighbor is the network's own fan tradition, collected under Cartoon Network-style games, where the sibling shows share a shelf; the two largest of them have hubs of their own at gumball games and Teen Titans-style games, and a player who likes one cartoon's fan games usually likes the others. For the puzzles alone, jigsaw games and hidden object games hold the same formats with every other picture in the catalog. The sections below take the shelf in the order a player is likely to meet it: the boards first, the pencil second, and the running and jumping last. None of it retells an episode; the fan games borrow a hat and a dog and let the player decide what to do with them, which on this shelf mostly means assembling a picture.

Pencils, brushes and pieces

The drawing lessons are the part of the shelf that produces something. A faint guide of the character appears, you trace it one stroke at a time, and the guide fades as your line fills in, so that by the end you have drawn the dog or the boy without ever being told how. They belong to drawing games and are among the best on the site for a tablet, where a finger on the glass is a better pencil than any mouse. The coloring pages take the same fan art and remove the color, hand you a palette and a bucket, and let a small child spend as long as they like; the coloring games hub has hundreds more of the same kind. Neither has a score, a timer or a way to lose, which is a feature rather than a gap, and both save the finished picture in the browser so it can be admired again later.

The jigsaws are tablet games too. Pieces are large, the picture is bright, and difficulty is set by the piece count rather than by any trick, so the same board can be a toddler's first puzzle or an adult's slow ten minutes. The spot-the-difference pairs reward a patient eye and a zoomed-in screen and are the best of the shelf for two people sharing one sofa and arguing over where the missing cloud went. The hidden-object scene works the other way, a crowded picture and a list of things to find in it, and the match board turns the fan art into tiles that clear in lines of three. All of them belong to the wider puzzle games hub, and all of them are silent, gentle and repeatable, which is why the whole shelf reappears on the kids games hub beside every other cartoon's pictures.

Categories:ColoringPuzzle

Running, falling and playing on a phone

The arcade corner is small but it is where the boy actually moves. A side-scrolling platformer or two puts him on a candy landscape with a sword, a jump and a few walkers to hop over; a falling game drops him through a tower of platforms where the screen scrolls up and the danger is the top edge; and a bullet-dodging arcade fills the screen with slow projectiles and asks only that you weave. None of them is long, and none is hard in the way the fan platformers for other franchises can be. The platformer games and adventure games hubs have the same formats with their own casts and far deeper shelves, and the general arcade games hub the score-led end. The sword, for what it is worth, is a jumping tool more than a weapon, and enemies pop rather than bleed, so the combat is as gentle as the rest.

On a desktop the arcades use the arrow keys or WASD with the space bar to jump; on a phone they switch to on-screen buttons or a tap-anywhere jump, and the falling game in particular is better with a thumb than a keyboard. The drawing lessons, coloring pages and jigsaws all work with a finger and are better for it. Nothing installs, nothing asks for an account, and a game that waits on its first screen is loading a sheet of fan art, not asking permission. The shelf suits fans of the cartoon first and very young players second, and it leans younger than the show did, because what the providers chose to make is pictures rather than jokes. A player who came for the sword and the running will find more of it under sword games, and the whole shelf's cousins under the general hero games hub.

Categories:PlatformerAdventureArcade