Screaming Villains is a developer that finds retro 1990s FMV adventure games and brings them back to life in a remastered way, often with bonus features. Kids on Site was originally released in 1994 as a comedic choose-your-own-adventure game where if you only did what you were supposed to, you’d miss 90% of the game. It is a relic of its time – innocent, irreverent, and slapstick silly in its clown comedy. It makes me yearn for the nostalgia of simpler times.
There are five distinct sections in Kids on Site: Hard Hat Edition which has you play as a kid learning the ropes in construction. The first four sections can be played in any order as you can take control of a steamroller, a bulldozer, an excavator, and a wrecking ball. Complete the simple tasks in each area and you’ll unlock the finale – detonating a building! The controls are extremely simple – left, right and action – steering your machine or triggering its main move. Each area is introduced by several construction workers including Bertha, the sole woman on site, being the only competent hard worker around. Whilst she insists on calling you Kiddo every few lines, she’ll hand you over to the rest of the motley crew to complete your tasks or cause carnage. That crew is led by Dizzy, who encourages you to be naughty, and Nuts, the clown who you’ll terrorise in a made-for-junior-school way. How Nuts is still alive at the end is beyond me, and his Coffee Break Gang who over-emote every scene without a script is a perfect descriptor of 90s children’s TV.
The best part about Kids on Site is just how freeform it is. Each level is made up of tiny looping clips so if you stay idle little insert clips of the cast pop up for you to collect. As you turn your machine around new screens await for you to interact with. You can go bowling with the wrecking ball if you time your action right. You can steamroll lots of fruit for juice, or press some clothes. Elsewhere you can nearly kill Nuts repeatedly like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It is all about trying new interactions, switching things on and off, and then trying again to collect all the different scenes. A playthrough can take about half an hour if you speed through it but honestly, you’ll miss most of the fun. It is in the exploration of different clips and setups that you’ll get the most out of Kids of Site.
This brings us to the bonuses of the Hard Hat Edition. Every piece of footage that’s been seen once is then unlocked for random viewing elsewhere. Some scenes are hidden behind rewind scenes where you can trigger a scene to go backwards if you time the action button correctly. Also added are behind-the-scenes video clips and photos which remind you just how much production was required for something like this back in the early 90s. I was genuinely entertained seeing all this footage and understanding how the game was made.
Is the clown comedy for everyone? No. Is everything quite rudimentary and basic? Yes. Does it make me nostalgic for this era of games and levity? Absolutely! There isn’t anything like this being made anymore and Kids on Site is a relatively unique entry in the video game world. Often FMV adventures are either intentionally bad or high-concept ideas. This is an interactive comedy that just wants to entertain and wow a young child wanting to see big machines doing big things. A bright light of silliness in a very serious world.
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