Hello Kitty White Present (ハローキティ ホワイトプレゼント)
Developer: Goo!
Release Date: 1998
Platforms: PlayStation
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Hello Kitty: White Present is an unusual game in several ways. Primarily developed by Goo! (with JAM on the graphics and T’s Music on the audio), a team mainly known for ports of games like Pu-Li-Ru-La, Gubble, and Wizardry, this game falls well outside their wheelhouse. It’s also the only Hello Kitty game published by Hudson Soft. Beyond all that, White Present has the veneer of a family friendly game, but gradually reveals itself to be deviously challenging, mentally draining, and slightly cruel at times.
White Present is a puzzle platformer that revolves around commanding Kitty’s monkey friends in order to navigate levels, collect keys, and solve the mystery of the earthquakes plaguing the land. Once you find said monkeys, you can tell them to follow you, stop what they’re doing, or form a ladder for you to climb. You can also make them lean forward in ladder formation to help reach faraway areas and have them hang from a ledge to swing like a rope. Initially, the game does a good job of easing you into using these options while mixing things up with gimmicks like disappearing platforms and makeshift elevators, but once levels balloon in size, the cracks in the formula quickly start to show.
White Present demands patience as late-game jumps require near perfect precision, which is a problem when your monkeys decide to jump too soon and miss the platform. Unless you’re telling them to form a ladder or stop entirely, the monkeys will move back and forth constantly, which can cause them to fall or get stuck. If a monkey falls too far down, especially as levels become vertically massive and 15+ minutes in length, you may be forced to restart the level. Even when things are going well, the monkeys opt to help each other up onto every platform even when they can clearly make the jump, causing every ascent of every platform to take several laborious seconds.
If you have the patience, White Present offers a lot of extra things to check out. Collecting every banana in every level unlocks five extra “Omake” stages and beating the game unlocks Expert difficulty, which features the same levels but makes the time limits ludicrously short. If you have a PocketStation, you can record messages on it to share with others. White Present is far too slow and exhausting for most to tolerate it to the end, but it’s not entirely without merit as its brand of puzzle platforming is unusual in its genre.
