The Addams Family: Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt is a Super Nintendo platform game, based on the animated series by Hanna-Barbera (which in turn is based on the TV series, The Addams Family), developed and published by Ocean Software in 1992.

The game is similar to Ocean‘s previous Addams Family game, released the same year, where you (as Pugsley) go searching for items inside doors, each leading to a room in the Addams Family residence. You also collect money (in the form of rotating golden dollar signs), that will award heart top-ups (for 25 of them) and extra lives (for 100 of them).

The platforming in this is slightly different to the other Addams Family game. You can still jump on top of (most) enemies to kill them, although this time you can climb up ropes and chains, and there are also switches that turn blocks on and off, which allow you access to new areas.

The graphics in Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt are beautifully drawn and coloured, and are more appealing than in the previous AF game. The music is excellent, and the sound effects are mostly whoops and fart noises, so will appeal to kids and simpletons… 😉

Gameplay-wise, Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt is arguably too damn difficult. A good number of switches – required to progress through certain areas – seem to be hidden, and riding cannonballs to get past barriers is also very frustrating on occasion (in one area I just gave up and reset the console, because I couldn’t go backwards or forwards).

There are no passwords or saves, so you have to complete the game in one sitting, which just seems ridiculous to me. The first Addams Family game was challenging, but Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt is way tougher. Too tough, as I said.

Boss battles are a bit clichéd, too. You go all that way (some levels are way overlong) to take on a bog-standard patterned boss, on a single screen, just to get an item from them. More should have been made of the bosses.

Which is a pity, because overall the presentation in Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt is lovely. It just needed a bit more imagination injecting into it, and a better-judged difficulty curve.

More: Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt on Wikipedia