Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is right around the corner and the hype is real. People cannot stop talking about this movie, and we know it’s got your interest. Hell, it’s got ours.
So what better way to familiarize yourself with Barbie than by diving into other projects from the same franchise? While video games are a whole different form of media than movies, Barbie is still the main focus in every title, and a lot of the cast is going to seem familiar as well.
So make sure you have your pink cowboy hats and scarves ready because we’re diving into the five best Barbie games to play before heading into the Barbie movie in theaters.
Five Barbie games to play before the movie
The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery
I’m going to be completely honest with you guys here: This is not a good game.
There are a few decent Barbie games; a handful, and they’re all below this one, on this list.
The rest of them are just incredibly low-effort, old games churned out to be copies of one another riding on the hopes that little girls will love and cherish these titles anyways simply because their favorite blonde doll that imposes cruelly unrealistic body standards on them which will affect them their entire lives is in the game. High School Mystery is one of these games.
You, as Barbie, are sent on a mission to locate hidden auction items in your school, a task crafted by one of Barbie’s secret admirers with admittedly questionable ideas of romance. Barbie also sees this as an amazing opportunity to get a juicy story that will snatch the TV anchor position for her from the school’s queen bee, Raquelle, and so she sets out on this quest, of course.
If walking back and forth throughout the shabby environments of the game, repeatedly, is your thing, this could be a contender for you to play. Or if you love janky environmental hitboxes, the non-existence of shadows, and characters that have been modeled to look like melting piles of plastic.
The best part of the game is that Barbie does not do any of the detective work, oh no. Instead, she collects evidence and brings it back to her friend Kevin who uses his superior male brain to mansplain where she needs to go and what to do next. Because Barbie is incapable of doing menial mental tasks herself; she’s just meant to look pretty.
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If you can ignore the sexist themes and the dozen other things wrong with the game, you could try High School Mystery out because this title is quite literally the best of the worst, when it comes to Barbie game titles. Yeah, the standards are on the ground.
Barbie Storymaker
A game that is older than a lot of the people reading this, the 1997-released Barbie Storymaker is quite the appropriate game to be added to this list. This is because this title is less of a game and more of a movie maker.
The movie-making kit video game title is actually quite decent for what it was aiming for, almost presenting itself as a virtual representation of playing with a doll. Storymaker is most definitely a great medium for mothers and daughters to create stories though, with the game teaching little kids both computer skills and the basics of film production.
You are allowed free rein to set the scene, choose your characters, as well as choreograph all of their actions, along with controlling sound, dialogue, and special effects. The objects and characters in the game can look quite out of place and jarring though, but you can definitely forgive a game as old as this one for its visuals.
Then again, is there a better way to get prepared for the upcoming Barbie movie than to make one yourself? Hey, you could be the next Greta in the making.
Detective Barbie 2: The Vacation Mystery
The second entry in the trilogy, Detective Barbie 2: The Vacation Mystery sees the titular doll come to life and reprise her role as lady detective extraordinaire, but this wasn’t her original plan.
Barbie had initially come to enjoy her luxurious vacation with friends Ken and Becky on a mesmerizing island getaway in Hotel Lighthouse Cove. These plans had to take a pause as another one of Lighthouse Cove’s guests, Professor Fitzgibbons, uncovers a secret about the hotel that sets the three friends on a dangerous mission.
While the plot might be pretty generic—a quality that continues throughout the narrative and till the climax—the game itself is pretty decent. There’s quite a bit of depth to the gameplay which incorporates a lot of puzzle-solving and deduction elements that good detective games possess.
Barbie deciphers clues, interrogates suspects, gathers tools, forces the player to question everything and think creatively, and solves a mystery while looking as fabulous as she always does. Beauty and brains, a swell role model for little girls.
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That being said, The Vacation Mystery may not be the best for people that can’t be bothered with deciphering puzzles and have lower attention spans, so, it’s tough to say how many little girls will actually sit through this title.
Barbie in The 12 Dancing Princess
Based on a straight-to-DVD movie, The 12 Dancing Princesses casts Barbie as Genevieve, the seventh-born daughter of a dozen sisters.
Because of the fact that 12 daughters is a lot to handle for the King—especially since he lost his wife earlier—he invites his cousin, Duchess Rowena, to help raise his girls.
Rowena proceeds to poison the King and capture 11 of the 12 girls, however, because she is the closest thing to a stepmother these girls have and we all know that stepmothers in fairy tales are undoubtedly evil every single time.
It’s now up to Genevieve to now explore the grandiose castle, rescue her sisters locked around various places in the estate, and save her father from the pernicious poisoning sapping his life away in this Nintendo DS platforming romp of a ride.
Yeah, this game is a DS classic, so this one’s for all you people that still have one of those bad boys with you waiting to be booted up once again.
While the game is made for the Nintendo DS, the graphics seem like they’re just a slight upgrade from the Game Boy Advance. The only real criticism that you can give this game is that it doesn’t even slightly take advantage of the DS’ increased capabilities when compared to the GBA.
With creative level design and fascinating magical powers to collect and use with every sister you save on your journey to beat the evil Rowena, The 12 Dancing Princesses is a Metroidvania that you certainly should not be missing out on if you have the chance to play it.
Barbie Horse Adventures: Wild Horse Rescue
Barbie Horse Adventures is a series of games that indulge the blonde hyper-unrealistic fictional doll into plots filled up mainly by equestrianism. Blue Ribbon Race, Mystery Ride, and Riding Camp are the first, second, and fourth entries in the Barbie Horse Adventure series.
What these three releases have in common is that they were satisfying to play and had incorporated the unique element of horse riding fairly well, while still keeping the dress-up element of the Barbie franchise well intact. In other words, these titles were considered to be decent games.
Released in 2003, Wild Horse Rescue—the third entry in this series—was everything but decent, on the other hand. So of course I’m gonna talk about that.
The plot starts off with a group of horses that Barbie happened to be looking after getting frightened by a lightning storm, causing them to scramble off into the hills nearby, leaving Barbie in charge of getting them back safely.
You use the one horse that wasn’t scared off to meander into the hills and locate the rest of them. Talk about natural selection.
Even though this horse would probably be Darwin’s favorite of the lot, it can’t get over silly little obstacles in its way, at which point Barbie—the player—needs to get off and intervene. You’re going to be getting off your horse a lot though, for anything that doesn’t involve moving from one place to another, so there’s that.
When you locate a horse, you pet them and lead them back to a hitching post so you can find the time to phone call the stables, but the best part is finding a horse that doesn’t want to go back. To remedy this, Barbie literally has to lasso the horses to get them to listen to her.
You start to wonder how Barbie has the strength to pull this off when the developers made Barbie’s model skinny to the bone in this game. And I thought the real-life doll had a problematic body image.
Speaking of the visuals, the graphics are laughably poor too. The character models are low-polygon, causing them to look incredibly unnerving. The textures of literally everything are horrible, and yet the framerate of the game still somehow manages to descend to a couple of frames per second, often.
There are coins scattered in the game that tie in with the dress-up element of the experience, and these coins not only look horrible but are literal sprites slapped on in a 3D environment.
The uncanny visuals and overall execution against the backdrop of this sunshine-and-rainbows-themed franchise aimed towards pre-teen girls make Barbie Horse Adventures: Wild Horse Rescue jarringly entertaining, in addition to being downright horrible. The game is so bad that it’s so good; something that the other horrible Barbie game on this list, High School Mystery, did not manage to pull off.
Think of it this way: If your only exposure to a Barbie game is Wild Horse Adventures, then your standards for the Barbie franchise are going to be set incredibly low, which means that there’s no way you will be disappointed with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, no matter how good or bad it turns out to be. A win-win.
