7MMO
Moderator
If there are two things to know about Garfield, it’s that he loves lasagne and he hates Mondays. So, it should come as no surprise that developer OSome Studio’s rendition of Jim Davis’s beloved cartoon series, Garfield - Escape from Monday, is heavily bound to those two themes. Set across a series of foodie nightmare worlds, this 3D platformer sees the famous tabby kicking veggies and chomping processed snacks to awaken from a fibre-fuelled fugue state. Sadly, like other disappointing cartoon adaptations (such as SpongeBob SquarePants: The Patrick Star Game), this exploration of the food-obsessed feline’s psyche is actually rather dull. Its overly familiar platforming and excessively camera-winking writing make it little more than a dazzling but sarcasm-laden slog.
Escape from Monday kicks off with a toon-shaded Garfield haphazardly shoveling a slice of what he thinks is Jon’s lasagne into his gullet. Once he realizes the meal is actually laden with veggies, he quickly passes out and is transported to an inner world called the Dreamland, which conveniently takes the form of a board-game course reminiscent of Super Mario Galaxy 2. Here, a vegetarian TV chef, knowingly named Monday, has transformed his cheese-and-meat fantasies into approachable, obstacle-filled levels, stocking them with aggressive snacks to boot. With a kick, a jump, and a forward boost in your arsenal, plus a forgiving health bar, you run Garfield through these stages to eventually wake him up.
The story rarely dives deeper than this initial premise, and leaves you with little more to chew on than "bad food is yummy" and "veggies are gross." I’m not looking for Shakespeare, but it does feel like a wasted opportunity considering how much personality Garfield has in other incarnations (heck, even Bill Murray’s 2004 interpretation had a heart), and how much room there is to have fun with that here. Alas, instead of a sarcastic hero you can root for, Escape from Monday orbits something much worse: an unlikeable cat who delivers a stream of constant complaints until you hit the credits 40-plus levels later.
This one-dimensional attitude grows increasingly grating throughout the roughly 9-hour runtime. Garfield is relentlessly grumbling. When he’s not lamenting his situation, he’s waxing lyrical about the developers, pointing out how certain obstacles or puzzles are repetitive and uninteresting. When his friends appear like expository force ghosts, he continues to disparage them, too. Parading as a PG-13 Deadpool, the meta-humour gradually begins to feel like an excuse, his hypercritical lens intending to lower my own expectations rather than make me laugh.
The most disappointing part of Escape from Monday is the platforming itself.
As you work your way through the zany levels, you’ll also collect hunks of lasagna that fuel a metagame where you furnish a surreal version of Jon Arbuckle’s apartment. To unlock physical versions of sofas and lampshades, you need to find slices hidden in each level, whilst simultaneously gathering enough snacks to fill an on-screen pressure gauge called the Yum-o-meter. While this technically provides extra goals beyond simply reaching the end, the system ultimately feels like an afterthought, so disconnected from the main game it’s easy to forget about his fantasy apartment altogether – I know I did.
Thankfully, the art style provides a much-needed distraction. Escape from Monday’s aesthetics are delightful, evoking the blocky simplicity of PS1 platformers like Rugrats: Royal Ransom. The Dreamland is split into three themed overworlds – Veggie Nightmare, Sweet Kingdom, and the Barbecue Desert – with each featuring a basic, bullet-hell-lite miniboss to defeat as you bounce toward an edible point of interest. By fusing confectionery with familiar adventure tropes like pirates, farmers, and the western frontier, Escape from Monday cleverly conjures the tone of the classic comic strips. Particular standouts include spinning radish stepping stones, Twizzler grind rails, and ketchup-dressed french fries poking out of rocky mountainscapes.
As you wade deeper into each level, the obstacles also evolve nicely, moving beyond basic wooden platforms and bouncy pillow blocks. Suddenly you have to contend with floating panels of meat that flip with your jumps while angry cobs of corn hurl kernels at your head, as well as giant metal graters that launch you into the air as fire-breathing chilli peppers shower you with flames. The combinations were never enough to make me break a sweat, particularly as one hit will take out nearly any enemy, but you can at least feel the deliberate care behind their placement, and I enjoyed the spectacle nonetheless.
Unfortunately, where the levels steadily build, the tools you're given to tackle them aren’t quite as compelling. You eventually uncover thematic outfits that grant you unique powers: There’s a Turkey costume that lets you fly temporarily, beachwear that equips you with a surfboard to ride over bodies of water and skate over obstacles, and cowboy garb that supplies you with a lasso to grapple onto horseshoes to swing over ravines. These additions are far from imaginative, and instead of letting you experiment, Escape from Monday is more keen to explicitly tell you when and where to use them. As such, you’re left mindlessly moving towards the finish line for the sake of… completing the level. The only difference now is that you’re wearing a funny hat.
Still, beyond that lack of any real room for experimentation, the most disappointing aspect of Escape from Monday is the platforming itself. Unlike the grounded movement of It Takes Two or Astrobot, the process of getting Garfield to jump between ledges or kick a rogue zucchini feels more like wading through honey. Sure, the ginger cat is infamous for his overt laziness, but the sluggish action here is at odds with the puzzles around him, and as a result I frequently overshot ledges or prematurely course-corrected due to delayed actions. In early levels, where movement is little more than riding wind gusts or jumping between slowly rotating windmills, it's easy to overlook. But as the obstacles expand, those unearned mistakes started to get under my skin, particularly as I pushed toward the end.
It’s an issue made worse by the erratic camera, with Escape from Monday frequently leaving it unclear who’s in control of your field of view. During the tutorial, you’re given the impression you’ll have the freedom to rotate its position, but during the actual levels after that, the view snaps and twists at random – frequently right in the middle of tricky maneuvers. On many occasions, while planning my next steps, I encountered an irritating camera icon trapped inside a block, indicating that (for whatever reason) I couldn't look around the area. With no alternative, the only option was to ignore my inner explorer and continue down the main path.
The saving grace here is that Escape from Monday is at least extremely generous with its checkpoints. Every few steps, your spot will be saved, allowing you to pop back into place ready to try again if you slip off the map. As with the collectibles, the checkpoints feel more like a band-aid, intended to make the experience is totally frictionless rather than actually solving the platforming issues this game so clearly has. They certainly kept me from getting too frustrated, but in doing so, they also distanced me from the actual joy of progress or success.
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