LAN Party Adventures Review

In the modern age of more complex computer systems, we’ve lost one of the old engagements that people in the late ‘90s and early 2000s used to love: the LAN party. However, LEAP Game Studios wants to take you back to unhealthy foods, floppy discs, and cable messes with its newest title, LAN Party Adventures. The question is whether this is a party you should attend, or if it’s maybe time to become a console gamer.

In LAN Party Adventures, you take on the role of the only one of your friends who has any idea how to run a program on a floppy disc. Well, in truth, you seem to be the only person who knows how to do it in your whole town. However, your friend Pedro, who recently inherited a lot of money, disappears, leading you and your friends to struggle to find out where he went. As such, you’ll be taken to several different levels to help set up computers, while also searching for clues on where Pedro might have disappeared to. 

The plot is, by no means, exemplary, but the mystery feeds into the gameplay by giving you a reason to explore your environments and helps to build the foundations for the puzzles in the game. For instance, you will be asked to set up a LAN at your school, giving you the chance to hack a teacher’s computer to find some more information. It’s a nice addition, and the puzzles that it helps to create break up each level.

However, the main task that you’ll be completing throughout the story, and the Sandbox mode, is setting up PCs. Now, if you weren’t alive during the year 2000, then you won’t get the same rush of nostalgia as some older players will. For instance, you won’t recall having to attach a VGA cable, then turning the two screws on either side to keep it secure. You won’t be seeing things like HDMI cables or USB ports here; instead, we’re looking at the very old school days or wired internet connections and the like. It’s a nice trip down memory lane, but also a reminder of how frustrating it used to be at times. 

Essentially, you’ll usually have to place the monitors and towers on a desk, connect them to a power source, connect them to the internet, and then run a computer program to get them all working. For the most part, the only rule you really need to follow is keeping the cables below the length threshold, so you can play around with how you place everything, although there’s no reward for a novel layout. You also carry all the necessary cables with you (although you’ll only have a limited amount), so you don’t have to hunt them down. 

With that being said, there’s really not much more that you’ll be doing in each level when it comes to the computers and setup. Which is one of the biggest issues with LAN Party Adventures: once you’ve played it, there’s really no reason to play it again beyond just messing around in the sandbox.

There are also some minor annoyances with how the game works that start to get frustrating fast. Firstly, if you want to move either the monitor or the PC’s tower, you have to disconnect the cables first. It gets really tedious when you just want to move a PC a fraction of an inch to get better access to the ports. On that note, there’s no way to really manage the cables or where they go, which can look really unseemly, plus annoying perfectionists. 

Visually, LAN Party Adventure looks fine, and the use of a lot of retro screens, plus text boxes, is a nice touch that helps to set the scene. However, the music starts off as annoying, only to become grating really fast. Thankfully, you can just turn it off and have something else playing, as there’s no dialogue or anything that you need to keep your ears open for. 

It’s hard to recommend LAN Party Adventures beyond the nostalgia, but that being said, everything here is well-designed. It felt like it used to when I used to help set up PCs with my parents, and maybe that’s enough. The fact that you can move everything around as you see fit is also interesting, but it’s all for your benefit over any in-game reason.