Elmo’s Letter Adventure is a Sesame Street themed edutainment game, and one that’s rather quite bizarre due to how overly simplistic it is. The objective in each level is to find the same letter over and over again. You walk over and press any of the face buttons to select and repeat it. What makes no sense is how the skills required to play the game – even for how simple it is – far exceed the extremely basic letter recognition that is the game’s only task.

The game tries to dress itself up in different settings and give Elmo different vehicles, but it doesn’t change the game in any way – you just move around on a flat plain (no moving up or down) until you find all the letters. Even the underwater levels are no different. Most levels are long corridors, but there are couple more “open” ones. Here is where the pop-in becomes an issues, as an area may look empty, but there are letters there.

Once you complete a section, you’ll get a bonus game where you have to find the first letter of a word – the most advanced section of the game. You still get told what letter you have to find, though. Once you’ve completed all three missions, which takes a combined total of 20 minutes, you’ll get the end credits. The big problem is that the entire game is simply matching a letter to the one on-screen (or matching the sound of a letter), and by the time a child is old enough to work a games console, they’re already far past that stage. My 2 year old son has more advanced jigsaw puzzles than the level of education this offers.

The few Sonic edutainment games I’ve played – including an unfinished one on the Master System – are far more advanced educational tools than this, featuring different categories, as well as catering for a wide amount of skill levels. They’re also much more enjoyable games than this. I couldn’t find any details on the pricing of this game, but considering the expense of N64 cartridges, I would guess a minimum of $30.

And it doesn’t end there – soon I’ll be looking at Elmo’s Number Journey, which is this game with numbers. So not only was the game immensely simple – but they had to split it into two games for that extra greed.

Worst

The dreaded concept of edutainment reared its pre-teen head this month, with the confirmation that a series of Sesame Street titled will be heading N64-wards later this year, thanks to NewKidCo.

N64 Magazine #25

Remake or remaster?

This is some of the worst shovelware on the N64, so no.

Official ways to get the game.

There is no official way to get Elmo’s Letter Adventure