Thank you Black Shell Media for sending us this game to review!

Mr. Nibbles the hamster must bust out of his cage and head to his rocket ship to fly to the moon.  Blocking his path are lots of deadly spiders that will send him to his shoebox grave prematurely.  Mr. Nibbles cannot fight back and must evade the enemies at all costs.  

Also scattered throughout the colorful 2D levels are corn kernels.  These treats serve as currency to unlock consumable upgrades like additional lives, double jumps, and magnets that can automatically collect nearby treats.  The upgrades are selected by spinning a (hamster) wheel.  Occasionally, a new hamster type is available through this method and each spin of the wheel costs one-hundred treats.  Fortunately, unspent treats and upgrades carry over to the next play through.  

A sure way to unlock new hamsters is to successfully complete challenges.  There are many different types of challenges and they range from going a certain distance (in centimeters), collecting multiple pieces of fruit, or making it to the rocket ship (which is your goal anyway).  You can retry the challenge as many times as needed, but your overall performance is ranked and tracked on global leaderboards. My rankings are not very impressive and I probably won’t be posing a threat to anyone anytime soon.  

Each hamster type has its own adorable sound effects and movement animation.  Some hamsters including the Flower Power or Firestarter ones have trails behind them, while the Spectral and Squire ones alter the game’s background entirely by making it dark or monochrome!  

Even though the sound effects are charming, the background music doesn’t change much and gets stale after a while.  It’s not bad, it can just use a little more variety in my opinion.

The visuals are bright, colorful, and sure to attract the attention of children nearby.  The levels themselves aren’t completely random, but they do rotate to add some variety.  Other than the possibility of Mr. Nibbles becoming a spider meal, this game is suitable for gamers of all ages to enjoy.  Though if you buried a hamster in a shoebox recently, you may want to hold on playing this game until those memories are distant.

The game ran fine for the most part, but I did experience an annoying glitch that happened several times.  Occasionally, when I died, the game’s resolution would change and I was not able to navigate back to replay/retry the level or challenge I was on.  Sometimes clicking on the screen would let me restart, but I also had to exit and go back into the game a couple of times as a result of this glitch.

Overall, Mr. Nibbles Forever is a cute and simple game that is reasonably priced at $2.99 on Steam.  There are fourteen achievements that aren’t too difficult to unlock as I managed to get about half of them in under an hour.  If you’re not expecting deep gameplay, this title will keep you (or your children) busy for a little while.