As the parent of two young girls, I know all too well about the dreaded L.O.L.s. Roughly fifty percent of them is head; fifty percent of that head is eyes; and those eyes are the stuff of nightmares. They are dark voids where your money goes. You find yourself awaking from a hypnosis state surrounded by plastic balls, like the most terrible version of Alien that you could possibly imagine.
True to form, my girls were popping off little L.O.L. dance moves at the prospect of playing L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel. I half expected their heads to revolve around, with huge, doe-like eyes on their faces. Play with us, Daddy.
Ugh. But I’m a professional. I can do this. Not every game is Persona 5 Royal.
Fast forward thirty minutes, and I’m the only one still playing L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel. Now, this is a complicated recommendation. I shouldn’t be the only one playing it. My girls have completely lost interest, as their imagination was nothing like what was contained in the game. On that count, the game has failed. But I’m not hating L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel and, by some metric that we’re still trying to understand, that’s some kind of success.
Part of L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel’s failure to grip my children is the genre. We were expecting a platformer perhaps, or a fashion design sim, or maybe even a life sim. Those assumptions may even make us sexist, bigoted or somewhere inbetween. But what we got instead is Overcooked!. The four-player cooperative cooking game. We could have rolled the genre dice all afternoon and still not arrived at that.
But instead of making burgers, you’re making L.O.L. balls. On the one hand, that’s genius, right? This is a flagrant marketing tool where you are actually constructing the little globes of disappointment that rip £10 after £10 from your wallet. On the other hand it’s demonic, and a little odd too. You are an L.O.L. doll stuffing L.O.L. dolls into spheres so that you can hand them to L.O.L. dolls.
Recipes dance across the top of the screen, and you and your four-player team are stuffing ingredients into balls accordingly. We have kept ‘ingredients’ generic as it’s not entirely clear what they are. Diamonds, stars and hearts go in there, which means there might be some metaphors at play here. Wishes, fame and love? Who frigging knows.
Which defeats the fantasy a bit. If L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel wants you to imagine that you’re Willy Wonka, behind the scenes of an L.O.L. factory, then it could have sold the dream a little better. Why aren’t we stuffing dolls, tiaras and other pieces of plastic-shrapnel into these balls? It might have seemed unsavoury perhaps, but it would have helped my two girls to understand what they were doing, and why it even connected to the L.O.L. Cinematic Universe, or whatever you call it.
The second and largest of the nails in the plastic coffin is how intricate it all is. Creating an L.O.L. ball is often a multi-stage process. Often, you are grabbing an ingredient, processing it (read: dumping it in unheavenly amounts of glitter), collecting it in a bowl, taking the bowl to a wrapping station, and then carrying it to a hatch, where a doll will take it home, open it and presumably curse the amount of packaging and glitter across their pristine home.
The multi-staging is a problem. Even as a stripped back Overcooked!, it was too much for our four and seven year-olds. There’s a lot to take on board, after all. You have to shape-match, follow (and remember) a process, and – most fatally of all – coordinate as a four person group. Even in one player, which L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel happily accommodates, it can be overwhelming.
The question here, then, is who is L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel for? Because we’re going to sodden a finger, stick it in the air, and guess that seven year-olds are roughly the age group that Outright Games are aiming for. There are concessions – there is no time limit outside of a separate Time Trial mode, and the recipes are incredibly simple – but they’re still not enough. This is a game that needs an amount of cognitive power that the target audience might, might not have.
But we kept on playing, didn’t we? For all of its ill-advisedness, L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel is objectively sturdy. We have played more Overcooked! clones than you might imagine (Ooops! 2 is a pertinent comparison, as it made the same gambit of aiming at younger players), and few are as robust as this.
Four-player co-op play is by no means expected, and it works particularly well here. The controls are simple and solid, and there are few issues with targeting that often plague this brand of game. Sure, you are occasionally plonking a bowl to the side of the ingredient you want to pick up, but most of the time your doll is doing precisely what they should. Most importantly, the whole thing is forgiving. You can swap stuff in your hands with what’s on the worktop in a single action, rather than fumble between several actions.
Levels develop gently, as each of the five game worlds add a new thing to learn (Lifts! Portals! Moving platforms!) but nothing messes with the recipes, giving you a stable foundation to work from. The new additions, and the way the levels adapt to incorporate them, inject just enough interest to keep things chugging along. And completing each level, and each time trial, generates a new L.O.L. doll to choose from and play, which is a darn sight cheaper than buying them in real life. If L.O.L. is about collecting and playing an unholy number of dolls, then you can do that here.
We could dig a knife into two completely optional (and utterly inconsequential) minigames that you can play after each level. There’s a concert and fashion show available that are the blandest of rhythm action and memory games, but they feel like frills you can ignore. The same goes to some story scene-setting, as L.O.L.s discuss their travels around the globe between worlds, entirely in emoji. But it lasts seconds, so we won’t get uppity.
We found ourselves exercising some old, forgotten Overcooked! muscles and enjoying our time with L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel. The lack of time pressure, even on the time trial levels, meant we could finetune our efficiency mid-level, working out the optimal path through each map. Levels aren’t particularly long, and worlds pass before they get tedious. We had an okay, not-all-that-bad time.
But a forty-something male games journalist is probably not who Outright Games had in mind. And therein lies the question: is there a market for a reasonably demanding Overcooked! clone among L.O.L. fans? In our house, a sample size of two, the answer is mostly negative. This wasn’t the adventure they were hoping for; it didn’t nail the feelings of making the L.O.L. balls that they love so much, and it asked far, far too much of them.
But children are different. Perhaps there is an L.O.L. fan in your home who is attracted by the premise and complications, and – even better – they have friends to join them. Because L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel, when it has all of these ingredients present, can be a generous, sturdy little Overcooker.
You can buy L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel from the Xbox Store
