Video Game / Garfield (2004)

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Garfield is a 2004 video game based on the comic strip of the same name, not the 2004 Garfield: The Movie developed by The Code Monkeys and published by Hip Games. It was released for PlayStation 2 and Windows in November 2004 in Europe, and on May 17, 2005, in North America for Windows only. It was the first 3D Garfield video game.

It is a puzzle-platformer in which the player controls Garfield and must clean up Jon's house with a vacuum cleaner after Odie trashes it.

Tropes that Garfield provides:

• Absurdly Short Level: Several areas are incredibly short and easy to complete compared to others. These include the hallway and landing, which only have four missing items and a few crooked pictures each, and the greenhouse, which only needs the box of apples to be replaced before rewarding the player with a puzzle piece.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: The only way to explain how Odie is able to wreck the house so quickly, including somehow hiding items on the roof, and how Garfield is able to use the vacuum to replace all the lost items.
• Acrofatic: Garfield, famously lazy and gluttonous, spends the entire game running and jumping through a three story house, pushing around heavy objects, and carrying a vacuum full of other heavy items.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Arlene's flowers do not take up any space in the vacuum and are instead checked off from a separate list when collected, saving the player from countless trips back and forth to complete her Fetch Quest.
• Backtracking: This will happen a lot, due to your limited inventory and several items appearing before their respective rooms are unlocked. Rooms that are already fully completed, such as the living room and games room, will also need to be revisited when tracking down Arlene's flowers.
• Bag of Holding: Double-subverted. Garfield's vacuum can only hold three items at once, however all of these items are far too large to be sucked up into any normal vacuum.
• Broken Bridge: The player can climb up to the roof as soon as the front garden is unlocked, but a gap too big to jump across prevents you from accessing its entirety. When the attic is unlocked, the patio light can be picked up from here and put back, creating a platform to the balcony and Arlene's treehouse.
• Collection Sidequest: 58 puzzle pieces are scattered throughout the house and are sometimes awarded for completing small rooms or other tasks such as pocketing all the balls in the games room. Collecting 50 of them allows you to complete the jigsaw puzzle in the games room.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Locked doors have different coloured sparkles around their doorknobs (yellow for small bedroom, purple for Jon's bedroom, dark blue for basement, green for front and back gardens, pink for games room, red for garage, teal for bathroom, orange for attic, white for greenhouse, and light blue for balcony). The key to each of these rooms also sparkle the same colour as the room it corresponds to.
• Deadpan Snarker: Garfield, as usual. He will quip upon picking up or placing down certain items, kicking Odie, interacting with Nermal, and sometimes passing by places in the house like the fridge.
• Disconnected Side Area: The front garden has the balcony and high roof, which are accessed much later than the lower roof, and the two smaller yards on either side of the perimeter where Arlene's treehouse is and the conditioner and crate of apples can be picked up.
• Door to Before: Completing the attic, which can only be done by saving the kitchen for last, will earn you the balcony key. Its not very useful at this point, but provides access to the balcony, roof, and Arlene's treehouse without having to go downstairs first.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: You have 8 and a half hours to tidy the house before Jon returns. If you fail, a short game over cutscene plays where Jon yells at Garfield before you're kicked back out to the main menu. Given that the game can be completed in a quarter of that time, you really have to go out of your way to see this happen.
• Easter Egg: Several. The game isn't completely unfaithful to the comics:
  • One of Jon's comics can be seen in the den, specifically this one.
  • When interacting with a parcel marked return to sender in the front garden, Nermal will pop out and Garfield say "didn't I send you to Abu Dhabi?"
  • The talking scales can be found in the attic and will beg Garfield to stay away (with Garfield's own voice) when he picks them up.
• Fetch Quest: Arlene gives you one late in the game. She asks you to bring her 12 flowers (3 daffodils, 4 roses, and 5 orchids) in exchange for the lasagna sauce.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The windup roundup minigame in the attic is bugged and will either disable the vacuum, rendering the minigame Unwinnable, or crash the game. The vacuum can be fixed by getting attacked by a spider while using it, however players are forced to quit or watch the clock run down if they don't know this.
• Hammerspace: The vacuum is small enough to be carried around on Garfield's back, but the items it can hold include a computer, gramophone, crate of apples, spare tyre, pool cue, acoustic guitar, and many more. Nermal is also hiding in a much smaller parcel than he should fit in and pops out when Garfield interacts with it.
• Heroic Neutral: Garfield would much rather spend the day watching TV and napping, but is forced to clean the house top to bottom under threat of being put on a diet.
• Item Get!: When completing most of the rooms in the game, a sparkling, spinning key to a new room will appear. Garfield will also spin and pose briefly.
• Last Episode Theme Reprise: The attic is the last new room that can be unlocked and its background theme is a remix of the title menu theme.
• Limited Loadout: Garfield can only carry up to three items at once, and some of these items can be picked up long before they can be put back in the correct spot, such as the bath towel (found in the den, a starting area, needs to be returned to the bathroom, a late-game area). These items will only take up space if picked up, requiring the player to offload anything they don't need yet into one of the three storage boxes.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Passing through any of the closed doors requires a loading screen. The load times are infamously slow and the player will be coming and going through these rooms very, very often.
• Locked Door: There are many doors that cannot be opened at the start of the game, indicated by a coloured sparkle around the doorknob. Completing a room will earn you the key to one of these rooms.
• Mini-Game: There are a few, namely the jigsaw puzzle and Columns in the games room, the footrace with Nermal and Odie in the front garden, and windup roundup in the attic.
• Notice This: Items that are not where they should be are indicated by a sparkle on them. The correct places for those items are represented by moving silhouettes. Objects that can be pushed to gain further access, such as chairs or crates, will have scuff marks in the ground showing the path they can be moved in.
• Now, Where Was I Going Again?: When picking up most items, Garfield will tell you where it belongs. He only says this once for each item, forcing players to rely on guesswork or Trial-and-Error Gameplay if they forget. Downplayed as most item locations are fairly intuitive, but others can feel out of place, such as the RC car belonging in the garage rather than the games room.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Odie draws Garfield's attention to the vacuum in the opening cutscene, causing Garfield to exclaim "Odie, you're a genius!" He then realises what he's just said, and even Odie seems to give the camera an Aside Glance in confusion.
• Overhead Interaction Indicator: Almost everything that can be interacted with, including lost items, those items' empty places, movable objects, Odie, climbable poles, storage boxes, locked doors, and Nermal's parcel cause a ? bubble to appear over Garfield's head when he's near.
• Perpetual Frowner:
  • Due to graphical limitations, Jon is this. He looks uncharacteristically angry through all three FMV cutscenes, even when Garfield successfully cleans the entire house.
  • Likewise, Garfield is a Perpetual Smiler stuck with a grin on his face (even during the Game Over FMV). In fact, the only time he is seen frowning is briefly in the opening FMV just before he notices Odie wrecking the house.
• Personal Space Invader: Odie appears in almost all rooms (except for the den, basement, garage, games room, and front garden) and almost constantly tackles Garfield, disrupting whatever he's doing and knocking him back a few feet. The spiders in the basement and attic also do this, which is particularly annoying in the windup roundup minigame due to its strict time limit.
• Pixel Hunt: The pool cue can be incredibly hard to notice against the leafy wall of the back garden. Inversely, the dart and baseball can be very hard to put back in their correct spots due to the precise angle needed just to see where they go.
• Player-Exclusive Mechanic: Nermal and Odie will always stick to the track in the footrace, however Garfield is free to cut corners as long as he still passes through the checkpoints.
• Pun: Garfield cracks a few of these when replacing certain items.
  Garfield: [putting back the egg basket] Egg-cellant.
  Garfield: [putting back the fuse] How con-fuse-ing!
• Quest Giver: Nermal challenges Garfield to a race and Arlene asks him to bring her flowers. Both of these reward the player with lasagna ingredients and are necessary to beat the game.
• Reward from Nowhere: Any of the keys or puzzle pieces that spontaneously appear when you complete a room, as well as the pasta and sauce that Nermal and Arlene give you when completing their quests.
• Save Point: The game can be saved at any of the three storage boxes in the hallway, basement, or games room.
• Say My Name: Jon yells Garfield's name in the Game Over FMV, upon seeing the house in a worse state than it was before he left.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: Due to an oversight, it is impossible to 100% the game by unlocking the entire house and collecting all puzzle pieces in a single playthrough. When the last room is completed, the ending cutscene immediately plays before the player can collect the reward for that room. This means that the player must choose between collecting all puzzle pieces by completing the kitchen, or unlocking the entire house by completing the attic.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Justified. Odie constantly attacks and disrupts Garfield and the only way to get him to back off is by retaliating with a kick. You can also do this unprovoked, however.