Bluey's Good Video Game Is Now Even Better
Quest for the Gold Pen now include full voice acting, which means young children are no longer punished for not being able to read yet.
Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen is a good game, a game more worthy of the Bluey name than the franchise’s last outing. But one of my knocks against Quest for the Gold Pen was that my five-year-old couldn’t play it on her own because she couldn’t read yet.
As I wrote at the time:
“I mean, sure, you can figure out the basic logic of every level by looking at the interface, but I mean, who doesn’t want to know what Bluey and Bingo are saying? The characters are voiced in the cutscenes, but the moment you’re in the game itself, it’s all text and my five-year-old was…well, frustrated isn’t the right word. The phrase I would use, though, is left out.”
I was delighted, then, to read recently that Quest for the Gold was getting a free update with “fully voiced narration throughout the entire adventure, making it easier than ever for younger players to follow the story, stay engaged and jump right into the fun, while making the experience approachable for families and players of all skill levels.”
You can imagine the smile on my face. It’s like they read my mind!
One of my pet peeves with many games that pitch themselves as family friendly—especially ones from Nintendo, who has the resources to avoid this—is their baseline assumption that children can read. A child who can figure out how to navigate Mario or Princess Peach from left to right should not have to ask a parent for help figuring out how to load up the level that will allow them to move those characters left to right.
This feature is often called, to use accessibility terms, “voice over” or “text to speech.” It’s basic functionality most devices, including phones and tablets and many game consoles, where the system reads the text of what you’re highlighting in the interface.
(To Nintendo’s credit, Switch 2 has a feature supporting this but only in the interface; games are on their own. This is not unique to Nintendo, this level of accessibility is, sadly, a game-by-game basis. Lots of Microsoft games, like Minecraft, support this!)
You might not like the Paw Patrol games, but one thing they do is have the menus speak to the player while they’re navigating. It helps remove friction and judgement.
Why, then, add this to Bluey’s newest game?
“The simplest answer is that we always want the game to be the best version of itself,” said Eli Hodapp, CMO of Quest for the Gold Pen developer Halfbrick, when asked.
“Bluey’s Quest is intentionally rated for the broadest possible family audience across platforms and regions,” said Hodapp. “That is great, because it means very young players can enjoy the game, but it also means some of those players may not be reading yet. Adding full voice narration makes the game more accessible, more natural to follow, and just a better Bluey experience overall.”
Voicing all the text was not the original plan, but it became part of the plan following feedback from the audience—including my own kid!—playing the game. What was part of the plan was a recording session with the actors from the show in the event that Halfbrick “needed changes to [cutscenes] or had other content needs.” Voicing all of the text became “the most meaningful thing we could do with that opportunity.”
“Before joining Halfbrick, I worked on the Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl games, and I saw firsthand how much voiceover can transform a licensed game,” said Hodapp. “It helps the characters feel present in a way that text alone usually cannot. For Bluey’s Quest, that felt especially important.”
He’s right.
It’s also—knock on wood—hopefully a sign of more developers taking this seriously.
The update is live now and available on every platform right now.
Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.
Also:
The Bluey movie arrives next summer. It feels like it’ll be the last hurrah for the Heeler family in the house, because sadly, my kids appear to be aging out of it.
I’d say Bluey is a little on the decline, too, but it’s also the case that we haven’t had a new episode of Bluey in more than two years. Two years is such a long time.
Completely left-field, but somehow my nine-year-old managed to hear (catchy!) songs from the Hazbin Hotel soundtrack, a wildly inappropriate show for her age.