Epitomized by many movies and books over the years, somewhere on their way to becoming adults, kids should have the opportunity to participate in some sort of grand adventure. Often over the objections or interference of their parents and other authority figures, they’ll get together, set out to find some mythical object or solve some mystery, and something fun will tend to follow. In the case of Terror in Little Creek that formula is being applied to a pretty mild monster mystery story, adding in some fun and generally slight scares along the way as your character Sloane and some of her friends try to work out what’s been happening in their small town.

For the most part this could have just as easily been a small-town adventure, as you’ll get together to look for clues, explore, solve puzzles, and uncover a variety of mysteries along the way. What really surprised me the most was that while so many adventure titles out there struggle to make their puzzles diverse and interesting, I pretty well found all of them here to be smart and engaging. Thankfully they should also be accessible to kids, especially since the majority of the time the solution to the puzzle at hand is close by somewhere if you’ll just take a moment to patiently look for it.

When it comes to the game’s monsters, they’re also appropriately mild, and more often than not the suspense of hearing one is near is far higher than when you’ll typically see them. Yes, something seeing you and coming running can make you jump, but the very cartoonish appearance they tend to have also helps to make them less intimidating. Much more of a “man in suit” vibe helps to minimize the nightmare potential, and hopefully even kids should be able to see the fun here for what it is, even if more skittish ones could still find it terrifying.

Put it all together, and while the game’s target audience is clearly on the younger side of the spectrum, for older gamers simply looking for a fun diversion, the game serves pretty nicely as well. While it honors some of the classic horror titles by including things like performing saves at a typewriter, for the most part this is no more intimidating than your average classic episode of Scooby-Doo or something else a little more contemporary. Rather than taking a license and leaning too heavily on it to carry the experience, even without the Goosebumps name this would have been an enjoyable romp.