Mutants Ate My Carrots review

• Reviews by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

While not all is sunshine and veggies, the goofy charm of this unhinged oddball animal adventure keeps things hopping with fun

Sometimes all you need to make something fun is a good concept. And as far as solid premises go, you can’t go wrong with classic cartoons meeting ludicrous violence and foul language. While other genres have occasionally explored the world of animated lunacy for an adult audience (I still remember Conker’s Bad Fur Day fondly), adventure games tapping into that sweet insanity are even fewer and farther between. Animatic Vision’s Mutants Ate My Carrots is one such game, and while its lack of polish unfortunately chews into its effectiveness, it brings enough fresh ideas and general weirdness to make it an enjoyable romp overall.

The Deep Wood Forest has seen better days. The woodland creatures once lived in harmony with each other, but one day a cruel group of militarized humans invaded the peaceful woods and began slaughtering its inhabitants for reasons unknown. Fighting back was a group of black-furred rabbits, who were all trained in martial arts and cultivated a secret power through special black carrots that could enhance the combat skills of those who ate them. Unfortunately, even with the power of the carrots, the human forces were too great and the rabbits were nearly wiped out. Before all hope was lost, a group of wild cats led by a fearsome lion appeared and drove off the invaders – but not before banishing the few remaining black rabbits from the forest as well for their failure. 

There were only two surviving black rabbits – Blackjack, a youngster orphaned in the battle, and his grandfather, who took up the task of raising him outside the towering trees of the forest. There Blackjack honed his fighting skills and learned how to continue cultivating the special carrots. When his grandfather passed on, Blackjack took it upon himself to continue growing the precious vegetables. Now many years later, the lions and wild cats rule the forest with an iron fist and force the populace to live under their leadership. Blackjack has been supplying a small resistance group of freedom fighters with black carrots in secret to help the animals fight back against the lions, but one fateful day he awakens to find that his entire crop has been stolen overnight. Now he’s off on a quest to find his missing carrots while sticking it to the feline tyrants along the way.

Mutants Ate My Carrots starts off zany and only gets wackier from there. You play as Blackjack, and must use your wits along with your combat skills to get to the bottom of who ate your carrots (spoiler: it’s in the title). Unlike games such as BROK the InvestiGator, though, there are no real-time beat-em-up segments here. This is a point-and-click adventure through and through, except with two distinct inventories: one for the items you pick up, and another for various physical skills you acquire as you progress. 

Items are kept in your main inventory, where they can be examined or combined with each other for puzzle solutions like you’d expect in any other adventure game. The skills menu, on the other hand, is where Mutants Ate My Carrots really sets itself apart. Items you collect are generally single-use, but skills are permanent additions to your pool of options that stick with you once you obtain them. Blackjack starts with two skills: a weak punch and a strong kick. But rather than running around mowing down hordes of enemies, you click on and use these skills like you’re using regular items. One of the first obstacles in the game requires you to use your strong kick to break down a door, and you’ll be using the same skill for various challenges from that point on. 

You acquire new talents by visiting legendary monkey martial artist Master Mon Ki, who has lost his magical prayer balls and asks you to retrieve them. These are found throughout Deep Wood Forest with puzzles and challenges to overcome. Each ball you return will cause Master Mon Ki to throw special drugs at Blackjack to unlock a skill from inside his mind, reclaimed from his black rabbit ancestors. Certain skills are more beneficial than others, with some requiring specific other items to be in your inventory or other parameters to be fulfilled first. But some of the most useful skills can be employed three or more times to overcome obstacles. One particularly cool ability allows you to break through certain types of wood, and in a fantasy world where woodland creatures build many structures from trees, it is a really fun skill to get creative with.

The presentation in Mutants Ate My Carrots is a bit of a mixed bag. Everything is portrayed in colorful hand-drawn 2D artwork, and the characters and backgrounds are suitably wacky for a cartoon world of animals. One area is a relaxing beachfront resort where a whale is happily dozing on a large portion of the sandy area, while a rather cocky frog prince (really just a regular frog with a crown) is surrounded by multiple well-endowed river monster women. Another shaded section of the woods is patrolled by three blind mice sporting mobster garb and a fascination with collectibles of high value (which, as implied by their name, they cannot actually see). There’s a wide variety of weirdos Blackjack meets during his adventure, and they’re suitably outlandish and a joy to interact with.

Characters all speak via speech bubbles with lines of text, but with no voice-over. But where things really start to fall a bit flat is in how they move: with each motion, it seemed to me like one or more frames of animation were missing. They’re nicely expressive, and there’s a wide variety of poses and movements present, especially with Blackjack. But the way the denizens of the world are animated was so glaring to me that it was distracting at times. An assortment of musical tracks accompany your adventure, ranging from bouncy, cheerful fare played when you’re wandering the woods, to darker synthetic tracks that set the tone of the sci-fi environments you discover after a pivotal point in the story. Sound effects are rather muted by comparison, which is a bit of a bummer with the typical silliness you’d expect from a whimsical cartoon world like this one.

Mutants Ate My Carrots

Genre:	Comedy, Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Action-Adventure, Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Action:	Combat
Difficulty:	Medium
Theme:	Animal

Gameplay is controlled through a simple point-and-click interface, the smart cursor changing as you scroll over hotspots. Left-clicks interact, while right-clicks will bring up additional information on objects and items you highlight, as well as descriptions of characters you meet. Blackjack has one movement speed, and while he’s not slow by any means, it would’ve been nice to have an option to either run or double-click an exit to speed up the process of moving between areas. Rabbits are built for speed, after all. There’s a handy hotspot highlight function that will show all interactive objects in any scene, though I personally only found myself needing it once or twice. Your inventories are accessed through a carrot icon at the top left of the screen, opposite a mushroom icon with the options menu on the right with save/load files. You can scroll with the mouse wheel to move quickly through acquired items, and clicking the wheel will switch between your item and skill inventories. 

The game’s simple but effective interface allows for the focus to shine on its insane puzzles and world. You’ll walk by a rabbit smoking a blunt and toss hallucinogenic mushrooms at a cat warrior, all while dropping enough foul language to make a sailor blush. The zaniness makes for some fun puzzle solving that combines crude humor with genuinely smart challenges. Puzzles are clued by character interactions and environmental details, and I never felt like I was being led along by too many breadcrumbs to arrive at a solution on my own.

Some of the most memorable puzzles are “boss fights” against particularly intimidating individuals, which are not battles like in a typical action game. Rather, you have to use items you’ve collected to create openings to defeat your foes with whichever skills are best suited for dealing with the situation. One fight requires you to start up an allergic coughing fit in your opponent, as only then will you be able to squeeze in a punch from your skill list to finish them off. If you try to use, say, a standard punch against a giant bird who’s not having any of your nonsense, you’ll get knocked back and no closer to progressing. There’s no way to actually die, but you won’t get anywhere just using random skills against hostile creatures rather than thinking it through and using your brain and brawn cooperatively.

Unfortunately, some abilities are only useful for a single confrontation each due to their specificity. Blackjack will say as much when you attempt to use a skill against someone other than his intended target. For example, one talent can only be executed against weak cat foes and only in one particular scenario. With a system like the skill inventory, which is designed to be different from the typical one-and-done uses of inventory items you collect, it’s disappointing that a majority of these unique abilities have such limited uses.

My disappointment was exacerbated when I began experiencing a multitude of technical hiccups over the four hours it took me to reach the end credits. In the very first area of the game, I was tasked with giving Blackjack’s friend Turt the turtle a stash of black carrots to help against the lion tyranny. However, if I tried to walk inside Blackjack’s house or attempted to walk away from the vegetable patch outside, Blackjack would say it was getting late and went to bed as if I had given Turt the carrots already (which I hadn’t). This happened three times to me – once on accident when I mis-clicked on Blackjack’s house, once when I clicked on the house intentionally to see if it was a fluke, and once when I clicked the exit towards the woods to see if it was just the house door that was bugged. (It wasn’t.) 

While the game is to be commended for allowing manual saves instead of using a checkpoint system, I experienced an odd glitch after creating a save file. When I tried to record over the same file, rather than overwrite it a new file would be created. Although not a bug, I was also surprised to find that there is no way to turn off the auto-advance function when talking with characters. There were multiple times when I briefly left the game unattended, only to come back to find that the current dialogue had finished without my say-so. 

My biggest hangup with Mutants Ate My Carrots, however, is the prevalence of spelling and grammatical issues present throughout. Characters will speak in incomplete sentences, names will be changed from one line of dialogue to the next, and grammar is wildly inconsistent. Even just mousing over Blackjack, the cursor just says “Rabbit” rather than “Blackjack,” which is odd. It’d be one thing if these were stylistic choices for how they referred to themselves or communicated with accents, but instead it just seems like there wasn’t enough time spent refining the localization, and that’s a shame.

Thankfully, the game’s ludicrous tone and over-the-top subject matter only get better as the game goes on. About halfway through, you uncover a sinister conspiracy involving woodland creatures being experimented on and mutated. From this point on, you receive a map that can be used to fast travel between locations you’ve unlocked, and the game opens up significantly as far as puzzle complexity and location variety. The ending sequence turns the craziness dial up to 11, and it’s a satisfying conclusion to the various shenanigans Blackjack has been thrown into throughout the course of the game.

Final Verdict

Mutants Ate My Carrots is one of those games that if you like the concept on paper, you’ll likely enjoy the game in spite of its many issues stemming from a lack of polish. It’s never laugh-out-loud funny, but the crude humor, colorful cartoon presentation, and enjoyable puzzles make for a good time while it lasts. I’m hoping some of its many minor issues with glitches and dialogue get fixed over time, but even as is, this is a wacky fairy tale adventure that’ll put a smile on the faces of those depraved weirdos (like me) who enjoy their pointing-and-clicking with a bit of crass attitude.

Sam played Mutants Ate My Carrots on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.