Pajama Sam's SockWorks

The Good
In 1996, Humongous Entertainment started the Junior Arcades off with a bang, with the creation of four separate entries in the same year. But after that, the series seems to have become less of a priority to them, as its remaining four entries were released over the course of the next three years, with this being its only entry from 1997. You may expect this reduction of the series' quantity to result in this game being of higher quality, but that unfortunately didn't really happen. As with most Junior Arcades, it's a pretty mixed bag.

To be fair, the core gameplay is actually not half bad. The game puts you in control of a system of conveyor belts that constantly transport between one and four socks across the screen. Your job is to reconfigure various mechanisms in this system in order to ensure that each sock is dropped into a container of the matching color. If a sock lands anywhere else, you have to restart.

The main challenge lies in the fact that you have to do this while the whole system is running. So you often have to keep track of multiple socks at once. In order to avoid having to multitask too much, you'll often want to send socks into small circuits or other locations where they can be safely ignored until you're ready to send them to their containers, though you often have to do it in a way that still allows for individual socks to be separated from the rest. At times, it can be a pretty chaotic and hectic affair, but that's part of the appeal.

Chutes with random destinations add an element of unpredictability to some of the levels, but they're generally designed in such a way that you're still guaranteed to win sooner or later as long as you take every possible outcome into consideration.

Unlike most Junior Arcades, this game has no lives and no score, but that's perfectly fine. I don't think either of them would've worked well in a game like this. And their absence ensures that things never get too stressful.

This also marks the first time a Junior Arcade has a level editor that features all of the gameplay elements. It's a bit of a bummer that you can't change the background and music, but this is still a step in the right direction.

The Bad
In spite of all that however, the game still feels like it was made on a pretty low budget.

If you've played Let's Explore the Airport, then a lot of what I just wrote probably sounds pretty familiar to you. And that's because this game is directly based on that title's minigame, Lost Luggage. Most of the gameplay mechanics, and even a lot of the graphics are just taken directly from it.

The only newly added gameplay elements are paint buckets. They come in two types. Single-colored buckets give their color to any sock that crosses them. They show up in a few decent levels, but are barely utilized in the game overall.

Rainbow buckets appear more frequently, but the way they function is rather bizarre. Whenever a sock crosses them, they change the color of all remaining socks. I've seen some people theorize that this may be a bug, and that they were actually supposed to only affect the sock that crosses them. And I'm inclined to agree with that. Not only is this inconsistent with how single-colored buckets behave, but a lot of the levels they appear in feel like they weren't designed with this behavior in mind. Some of them are surprisingly easy, with many of their components being safe to ignore completely. In contrast, some of the others are confusing messes that rely on precise timing and can be rendered unwinnable if you don't plan ahead. Most of the rainbow bucket levels don't belong to either of those extremes, but the way they play still doesn't feel quite right.

Aside from those featuring rainbow buckets, most of the levels are pretty decently designed, though there are some blatant throwaway levels from time to time, some of which don't even require any interaction. But the biggest issue with the level design is that there isn't really much of a difficulty curve. The game actually has a whopping 250 levels, but only 100 of them will be randomly chosen on each playthrough. But their difficulty is pretty inconsistent, so after the first batch of introductory levels, the difficulty of the average level stays about the same. Furthermore, all gameplay elements are introduced early on, and the backgrounds and music change all the time, with seemingly none reserved exclusively for certain parts. Because of all this, the game doesn't have a real sense of progression, which can cause it to become rather repetitive after a while. I guess you could argue that the randomized levels give it some replay value, but the game gets old too quick for multiple playthroughs to still be enjoyable.

On a side note, there are no Junior Helpers this time. There isn't as much of a need to them as in past Junior Arcades, given the absence of lives, but it could make the game less appealing to the younger players, seeing how there is no way around having to figure out all of the levels.

The presentation is pretty underwhelming as well. Aside from the changing backgrounds (which you probably won't focus on very much), the graphics don't have much of a Pajama Sam theme at all, with only some sporadic joke animations serving as a reminder that this is in fact one of his games.

Even the music is a bit of a disappointment. After five stellar efforts, Jeremy Soule's history with Humongous ends rather anticlimactically with a merely solid soundtrack. Some of the charm of his past works is still there, but the tracks this time are just too short to have much of an impact. They consist mostly just of short, catchy rhythms that could've been fun to listen to as part of longer tracks, but are too insubstantial to really be memorable on their own. Although to be fair, the music is still a huge improvement over Richard Moe's soundtrack for Lost Luggage.

The voice acting also fails to deliver. This is the only SCUMM era game in which Pajama Sam isn't voiced by Pamela Adlon (then known as Pamela Segall). Her replacement, Elizabeth Daily, tries to imitate her with an equally rough voice, but I find it far less pleasant to listen to.

The Bottom Line
I'm not sure how to feel about this game. It's a fun experience at its core so long as you only play it in short bursts, and it's certainly not as frustrating as some of the other Junior Arcades. But it's also a pretty shameless rehash of what was originally just part of a larger experience. It's improved over the source material in some aspects, but not as much as it should have been to warrant a standalone release.