Like other kids who grew up in the ’90s, I loved the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? games. Carmen was one of the spicier games in a suite of thoughtful educational titles like Oregon Trail and Math Blaster because with Carmen, there was CRIME and SPIES and COOL HAIR. She was athletic! Smart! Funny! Worldly! Artsy! I wanted to catch her, yes, but really, I wanted to be her!
Across dozens of award-winning games, players would race around the world, getting clues about various international destinations and using that information to try and deduce where the criminal Carmen was. You’d try to catch up to the master thief who was always one step ahead.
Studio Broderbund invented the red-coated character in 1985. In the early ’90s, The Learning Company took over, and Carmen also taught math and trivia. But from the early 2000s on, the Carmen Sandiego franchise faltered with half-hearted films and trivia games.
In 2025, I was thrilled to hear my favorite art thief would be back. Carmen Sandiego, developed by Gameloft in partnership with HarperCollins Productions, was released on iOS and Android via Netflix last week and is out today for PC (Steam), PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. However, this is one time you can let Carmen give you the slip.
What in the Hell Is This Carmen Sandiego?
Carmen Sandiego (2025) opens with an aerospace museum tour before a masked thief steals a superfast jet with an invisibility cloaking device (never mind that the jet would not have had any fuel in it). The camera cuts to a young woman in jean shorts, high-top sneakers, a T-shirt, and a messy bun chilling on a beach. She opens up her cell phone and breathily says, “What’s up, Player?”
I hate it. It’s flirty and weird. It’s dumb to wear those shoes to the beach. Where’s her red coat? She’s drinking a cocktail. The whole vibe is too sexy. She’s not the Carmen I know.
I keep playing anyway, because I’ve agreed to review this game.
As the game continues, it’s revealed that was less of a flirty greeting from Carmen, but rather referring to her tech sidekick who is named Player. But you’re not Player; he’s just named Player. It might be a reference to some of the old games or a show, but it wasn’t clear.
And that’s the generally the case with the game overall. It just seems confused. There’s no proper plot setting at the beginning for who Carmen is. I know that she’s a master thief who, in some games, is treated as more of an anti-hero who helps spy agency ACME rather than a true villain stealing with VILE. However, this game doesn’t give you any context at all. I didn’t watch the Netflix 2019 animated series of the same name where she became a hero, but this title assumes the player has.
Fine, I think, this isn’t going to be a game built around plot.
Unfortunately, it’s not got a lot else going on, either.
All Style, No Substance
Carmen Sandiego (2025) was boring enough that I also wanted to watch TV at the same time, and I had an old season of Great British Bake-Off/Baking Show on in the background. Paul Hollywood scolds a baker for having an over-the-top cake that’s “all style, no substance,” and it’s the perfect phrase for this game, too.
The highlight of Carmen Sandiego are the locales. Each one is colorful and exciting. There are fun little profiles for each city with interesting details. You take on the role of Carmen (for the first time). She goes to a city, and she visits up to three sub-locations—like a famous site or a historic neighborhood—to try to get clues for the most recent theft. Sometimes, she’s even wearing her famous red coat and hat! My favorite part was when, in the opening case, Carmen goes to New Orleans. I lived there for four years, and I’m always happy to see it rendered in games (like in one of my favorites from 2022, Norco).
While the visuals are decently strong, the audio is underwhelming. Inconsistent use of voice acting also made the game feel weird. Sometimes there’d be full acting, other times random quips over text dialogue, and other times just subtitles. The music is not memorable enough for me to even comment on. But, like I said, I was initially delighted by the globe-trotting adventures.
That’s the keyword, though: initially.
I soon realized there are only about 16 locations in the game. In the Carmen Sandiego games I remember, I recall dozens and dozens of places, learning about them in detail, trying to compare and contrast bits of information. This Carmen Sandiego game spells out the answers for you in a way that requires little thought. Visit two locations in Hong Kong, for example, and you’ll learn that you need to go a city in a country with green on its flag where they speak Arabic. When you go to the airport, you’ll have only three cities to choose from, and only one of those (Cairo) meets those criteria.
Thus, the main gist of Carmen Sandiego has been rendered uninteresting and uninspiring almost immediately. In its place are several mediocre mini-games that are sprinkled throughout. Perhaps this all wouldn’t be so bad if you weren’t forced to “level up” Carmen in order to progress with the campaign. The only way to get enough experience points to do so is to solve “cold cases” which are just retro-inspired versions of the same game.
The retro-inspired ACME Files are cute, but ultimately still held back by the core mechanics of this new game. Rather than asking players to really digest and engage with information about the world, players are mainly meant to do a crappy deduction mini-game around suspects. You’ll have about a dozen cheekily named criminals who have a randomized set of characteristics—such as having black hair and enjoying mountain climbing as a hobby. You have to find enough clues to use the search filter to do the deducing for you, all so you can issue a warrant, because apparently this Carmen follows some laws.
It’s Fine, I Guess*
I volunteered to try this because I’m fond of another Gameloft title that utilizes a beloved childhood intellectual property, Disney Dreamlight Valley. In comparison, however, Carmen Sandiego is not a game that’s actually for adults, even though it seems like it’s trying to be with its retro nods. I think this would be a decent game if you’re 10 years old with a passing interest in geography, but as a game for kids who grew up in the ’90s, it simply does not hit the right nostalgic marks.
Especially in my early hours with the game, I found myself wistful for travel, adventure, and the joy of learning new things. I was brought back, for a few moments, to memories of playing on an old CRT computer, crowded around by classmates, collaborating on a mission, sharing facts we knew about Poland, Ghana, Uruguay, and Milwaukee. These memories made the disappointment of this new game all the more stark.
Carmen Sandiego (2025)’s wanderlust worldliness is undermined by boring gameplay. In one moment I would be kind of amused by the process of narrowing down my criminal suspects, while in the next I would roll my eyes when a witness in Tokyo said, “Their eyes were the same color blue as our sky blue ramen bowls.”
I played on the Nintendo Switch, but Carmen Sandiego is so gameplay-limited that it could be easily played on mobile. There’s really no reason to play this on a console. Furthermore, in my playthrough, I frequently hit load screens that were between five and 30 seconds long. At first, that might not seem like a lot, but when you hit those once every minute, it’s hard to stay invested in the experience. I started thinking about what I needed at the grocery store, which is a pretty clear sign to me that a game isn’t interesting.
Final Thoughts
Gameloft’s Carmen Sandiego is only worth playing if you play it for free (i.e., you already have a Netflix subscription), or if you’re a nine- to 12-year-old with a burning interest to learn a few fun facts that you don’t want to get from anywhere else.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Carmen Sandiego was interesting because there wasn’t a ton of content about the world that was made for children. How else were we to learn about continents and cultures without accidentally stumbling upon the horrors of this planet and its peoples? However, with millions of hours of free, great kid-specific content on the internet these days, I’d be hard-pressed to know why anyone would spend money on this.
Score: 6.5/10
*Inspired by a category on co-writer Sam Martinelli’s Game of the Year Tier Lists
Carmen Sandiego (2025), developed by Gameloft in partnership with HarperCollins Productions, is out now on Steam, PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. MSRP: $29.99. It is also available for free for Netflix subscribers via iOS and Android.
Disclaimer: A review code was provided by the publisher.
