While I’m well aware of Carmen Sandiego, and the edutainment legacy she has had over the years, she’s an icon for a different generation. Despite that fact, I was intrigued to have my first chance to see what a new game for her would look like. While historically she had been the target of pursuit as the world’s premier thief, apparently in line with a rebooted Netflix series featuring the character, she’s now the one tracking down ne'er-do-wells with a combination of light action, some rudimentary puzzles, and periodic throwback demonstrations of your grasp of world geography.

In each mission your focus will tend to be on trying to capture a specific VILE agent, though you won’t know who they are initially. By flying to a variety of exotic locales, your goal will be to collect whatever information you can, both on where they’re going and who they are. On the identification side, you’ll be taking the clues you get to systematically whittle down the list of potential bad guys until you’re left with only one, who you’ll then want to put out a search warrant for to be sure they’re captured. On the tracking side, you’ll usually be collecting different odd details about their next destination, usually involving some basic information about a specific city and country, whether it’s what their primary language may be, some aspect of their flag, their form of government, etc. Once you’ve exhausted all locations in the current country, you’ll then need to use the info you’ve collected to deduce where to go next, and so on.

One thing I do appreciate, is that the developers have attempted to keep you guessing at what sort of activities you’ll run into on any given mission. You may need to participate in some almost quicktime event-like grappling to try to catch up with a suspect, work some puzzles to get through security, carefully unlock a safe, and more. The thing is, for the most part these are pretty simple to complete, though given that the likely target audience for the game would skew younger, that also seems appropriate in general. 

On a general level the focus is obviously on overall presentation, trying to make everything feel as epic and exciting as possible, despite it mostly being an educational game with some value-added flair to keep people interested. If you were a fan of the original games I’m not sure whether this will feel like a step up in some way or blasphemy, but I do at least appreciate the attempt to package this in a way to try to appeal to today’s younger gamers, looking to get another generation hooked while doing a little learning as well.