Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo

aka: Pouce-Pouce Sauve le Zoo, Putt-Putt redt de Zoo: De Dierentuin van AutoStad, Putt-Putt salva el Zoo, Töff-Töff rettet den Zoo
Moby ID: 1225
Windows 3.x Specs
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Description official descriptions

Putt-Putt and his faithful dog Pep have to help Outback Al find six missing baby animals before the new Cartown Zoo can open. Putt-Putt must search through Arctic Land, Jungle Land and Grasslands for the missing little ones. Once he finds them, he must use tools he finds along the way to help them get home to their parents.

Spellings

  • Автомобильчик Бип-Бип Спасает Зоопарк - Russian spelling

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Credits (Windows 3.x version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 85% (based on 8 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 27 ratings with 2 reviews)

Putt-Putt's third adventure now relaunched on the Android!

The Good
It seems to me that it has a similar feel to using the controls. Everything I touch gives me a lot of surprises during the adventure. As I got it for free, there is also an option to unlock it as a full version, but I'm not gonna unlock it just yet. The visual guides are very useful features in this game, because before in the original release for the PC there were none. I kinda think of them as pointing arrows to go to a different location throughout the game.

The Bad
There is a little glitch where the colour of Putt-Putt stays as purple, but if you go to a different location, it uses the saved colour the player used when he or she changes the colour of Putt-Putt before they closed the app. Hopefully Humongous Entertainment might fix that someday.

The Bottom Line
You will love the exciting, colourful, and amazing world of Putt-Putt and the animals that this game has to offer! If you are like me, then you should give it a go! It is excellent for children ages 3 to 8, but I like Putt-Putt since I was young. Brings back the memories!

Android · by Katie Cadet (10036) · 2016

The first Junior Adventure that still holds up

The Good
This game is a considerable step up over previous Junior Adventures in a number of ways. The most obvious being the graphics. After a bit of a rough start with the first Freddi Fish and the first two Junior Field Trips, Humongous Entertainment's artists were gradually starting to get the hang of hand-drawn animation. The linework is now reasonably polished most of the time. Only a few angled shots of Putt-Putt's face still don't look quite right. The backgrounds look rather nice as well. They're fully hand-drawn like in the first Freddi Fish, but their artists gave them much brighter and more cartoonish colors. They fit the game a lot better, and also handled the conversion to 256 colors more gracefully.

And for the first time, the soundtrack is almost fully live-performed. George Sanger and his Team Fat took full advantage of this to deliver something far more lively and experimental than their previous output. It's full of personality and really helps give the game a unique atmosphere. No other game in the company's lineup sounds anything like this.

This is also the first Humongous game to have acceptable writing. The writers of past games seemed unsure on how to handle dialogue aimed at children, and so they often settled for a very basic and somewhat patronizing tone. This game's script on the other hand is less hesitant to show a bit of flavor. It's hardly a literary masterpiece, seeing how it does still have to remain perfectly comprehensible to young children, but it's complex enough to give characters some basic personality, which is more than I can say for almost any character of prior games.

The competent voice acting also helps. I don't really have anything to complain here. Every voice actor fits their character just fine. What's especially welcome is that all of the game's baby animals are voiced by actual children, which helps make their voices sound more authentic.

In general, the game just has more heart to it than past Junior Adventures. Its setting has a real sense of exploration and adventure, while also being filled to the brim with side activities and random fluff to play around with. The actual quality of said activities isn't all that great, but they still help make individual locations more memorable.

The Bad
Sadly, if there's one area that doesn't really mark an improvement, it's the puzzles. Well, perhaps I should rephrase that. They do indeed mark an improvement over the often extremely primitive puzzles of Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon. But compared to those of Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, they still feel like a bit of a step back. It makes sense that the developers opted for somewhat simpler puzzles, given this game's slightly lower target demographic. But simpler doesn't necessarily have to mean uncreative, yet that's the route they often took. Most of them are about as generic as it gets. Yes, of course you would need a shovel to dig through a pile of snow. And use cheese to lure a mouse away. And a log to fix a raft that's missing a log. You could argue that the straightforwardness of these puzzles helps make them even easier for children to figure out, but I don't think you have to go quite this far. Judging by the puzzles of the next games in the series, the developers seem to have arrived at the same conclusion.

But the biggest disappointment is the complete lack of replay value. Once again, there is extremely little variation between different playthroughs. And this is coming straight on the heels of the first Freddi Fish, which was the first Junior Adventure to feature a considerable degree of randomization. Why was Humongous this hesitant to utilize this in the Putt-Putt series? I don't see how concerns over the games' difficulty could be the reason, considering a lack of randomized puzzles doesn't make the first playthrough any easier. It just makes future ones more stale.

The Bottom Line
This game was an impressive achievement for its time, and it still has plenty of charm today. But rather than a conventional adventure game, it almost feels more like a theme park with some occasional adventure game puzzles on the side. And it's not a badly made theme park at all. It's just a bit lacking in substance. It's somewhat unfortunate that the Junior Adventures' popularity seems to have peaked at this point, because future installments would retain everything good about this game, while also having a lot more effort put into their puzzles.

Windows · by SomeRandomHEFan (164) · 2020

Discussion

Subject By Date
he0, he1 files etc. - what's this? Nowhere Girl (8680) May 15, 2012

Trivia

Difficulty level

This adventure, like Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon and Putt-Putt Joins the Circus, is especially good for the youngest players, since the tools Putt-Putt needs and the missing animals are always in the same place. Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Putt-Putt: Pep's Birthday Surprise mix things up just a little more each time you play, though they are still largely the same on each playthrough. Putt-Putt Travels Through Time and Putt-Putt Enters the Race have more drastic changes between playthroughs, which some might argue makes them more challenging (although they are still fun for youngsters.)

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Related Sites +

  • ScummVM
    Get "Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo", as well as many other adventure games, to run on modern systems by using ScummVM, a legal and free program.

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  • MobyGames ID: 1225
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Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Melissa Leonard.

DVD Player added by Onfy. Nintendo Switch added by Rik Hideto. Android added by Andy Hieke. PlayStation 4 added by Kam1Kaz3NL77. Linux added by Sciere. iPad, iPhone added by Kabushi. Macintosh, Windows added by Andrew Shepard.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Apogee IV, Sciere, Klaster_1, Onfy, Mr. Eight-Three-One, SomeRandomHEFan.

Game added March 29, 2000. Last modified November 28, 2023.