Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon (1993) - MobyGames (2025)

The Good
This is the third and last of the Junior Adventures from Humongous Entertainment's DOS era. Over the course of these games, you can see Humongous gradually getting the hang of things and finding their style. Though this process would take them a few more years to complete, this game already shows some signs of progress compared to Putt-Putt's rougher first offering.

After the relatively mundane settings of the first two games, this game's setting offers a real breath of fresh air. It gives the game a much more surreal atmosphere, which does a lot to make it more memorable. You can tell that the artists in particular were clearly having fun coming up with all sorts of weird and colorful buildings and characters.

And the soundtrack deserves special mention here. I find George Sanger to be a very inconsistent composer (at least judging by his work for Humongous and Hulabee Entertainment), but he was absolutely in his element here. The music really enhances the game's already playfully surreal atmosphere, while also having a really strong sense of rhythm (in contrast to Tom McMail's far more simplistic compositions for Humongous' previous titles).

In general, the game doesn't do a very good job at incorporating much of its world into the puzzle-solving process. There are many locations that exist only to play around with various gimmicks, while doing nothing to advance progress.

It doesn't help that the game is always the same on every playthrough, in contrast with Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise. It would take a few more years for Humongous to fully embrace the randomization concept originally introduced there.

The voice acting also leaves some room for improvement. On the one hand, Putt-Putt's voice actor, Jason Ellefson, seems to have learned a thing or two about acting in the year that passed since his first role at Humongous. His voice acting here is more in line with how he would sound in Putt-Putt's future offerings. On the other hand, many of the side characters sound pretty bizarre, even more so than in previous games.