REVIEW - Barbie™ Dreamhouse Party™ (PC)

I'm no stranger to Barbie™ games. In fact, you might say I'm a bit of a Barbie™ game enthusiast. How lucky, then, that I was gifted Barbie™ Dreamhouse Party™ on Steam this Christmas. They say not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but they say nothing about brushing its teeth.

Barbie™ Dreamhouse Party™ is ostensibly a party game, with all the implications of multiplayer fun times that brings. It's in the goddamn title. And yet...

Barbie™ throws one shitty-ass party.

Even the screenshots suggest very strongly that Barbie™'s party is something like Mario's.

Yeah, that's right, apply the powder directly to the cornea.

Anyway, that horrible disappointment aside, Barbie™ Dreamhouse Party™ is still a game about playing a series of minigames and...well, that's it.

The game begins by throwing you into the main hall of Barbie™'s unreasonably luxurious home. As Barbie™, you can offer a tepid greeting to your boyfriend Ken, or flirt with Ken's much cooler friend Ryan.

"Ken won't even look at me anymore."

From there, your choices are to play one of the nine included minigames, or turn the game off. You'd be forgiven for choosing the latter, but let's assume you didn't.

The story here is that Barbie™ has for some reason invited a mega bitch to her "party". While the rest of the group is having fun playing a videogame, Raquelle decides that shit needs to start going her way ASAP, so she begins messing with Barbie™'s super-villain control room that.....she has, for some reason.

"Shall we play a game? How about Global Thermonuclear War."

Because Raquelle is a dumbass, this accidentally sets Barbie™'s house to Party Game Mode which, once again, I feel the need to stress that this was something that Barbie™ felt strongly about enough to have installed. This means every room is locked by an impenetrable steel door and the house is under the control of a much less charming Wheatley from Portal 2.

"Please let me eat some of your hair."

What all this means is that Not Wheatley demands that the girls run through a series of trials. These involve applying makeup and dressing up, which the robot is very insistent you do over and over again.

Each mini game is preempted by a sequence in which you and the three other AI girls must search for an item in one of the rooms and place it on the correct pedestal.

That's not appropriate scavenger hunt attire, Barbie™.

In practice though, Barbie™ must place all four items on the correct pedestal, because the AI will always put it on the wrong one and then just walk away like it's all cool, continuing to look for items that don't exist. Statistically one would think they would get it right by chance at some point, but one would be wrong. One should really look at that in oneself. Even if everything ran smoothly and Raquelle stopped being a bitch on purpose just once, the necessity of this part of the game would still be questionable at best. There's no challenge, no sense of competition, no reward for doing better or taking less time and similarly no punishment for just sitting on your ass other than missing out on one of the great minigames.

Oh, the minigames.
 
There's not one, but two that involve dressing up by matching clothing to an example the robot provides. The trick here is to button mash the confirm button while cycling left and right. There's no penalty for picking the wrong one, other than the robot saying "Hey, be better" or some shit.

Better? BETTER!? Raquelle looks like she's about to fucking vomit.

There's a very slow rhythm game, where you press a single button every five seconds or so. There's a game where you throw cupcakes in a pile (You can't throw them at the other girls. I tried.), a game where shake your little tush on the catwalk, a game where you catch falling boxes, and a game where you get trapped in bubbles. The best game is by far the one where you groom a horse though. It's great fun to wash, dry and brush such a magnificent beast.

There's also one where you-

Ahhhhhh! What the hell, man!?