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I've bought the two Putt-Putt games for my kids (ages 4 and 7) to play together, and they have enjoyed them. They played through Saves the Zoo probably half a dozen times, but found Travels Through Time to be a bit trickier and haven't been able to finish it. My impression was that Travels Through Time has a premise that is a little less accessible for small kids, and the puzzles seem to be more esoteric - I haven't been able to help them through it! The younger kid still asks to play Putt-Putt, but the older kid finds it hard to get excited about Putt Putt when the Switch also has Mario Kart on it. To be honest, the market for kids games is so different to what it was in the 1990s. The pace of the Humongous games is so much slower than almost any other game my kids have played on something with a screen. Modern games have an abundance of ways get instant feedback by clicking or tapping or swiping, and constant incentives to keep playing and progressing in some way or another. Compared to this, Humongous games are much slower. I would say that they are less engrossing than watching cartoons, since there are plenty of times without a lot of action, or where you might just be sitting there thinking about how to solve a puzzle. The level of engagement is more like reading a picture book, which I personally think is good for kids, but that's not where the market is. Obviously, the market for these kids of games is parents rather than kids, but again the market is way different than it was in the 90s. I remember seeing Humongous games at Costco and electronics stores in the 1990s, but that casual retail market is gone. I honestly have no idea where to buy good 'edu-tainment' games for my kids. Interestingly, the Humongous graphics and sound have held up better than I expected. My seven year old nearly started to cry when he saw what Mario Kart 64 looked like, but had no complaints about Putt-Putt.

Tommo owns the games, and I think they'll use their UFO Interactive label for console releases. The games here seem like a decent representative slice of Humongous, though I think any weirdness or exclusions in game selection comes down to Tommo. They have not handled the brand with much grace. Freddi Fish 3 shipped on Switch with broken music (as in silence, apparently). All of their releases have the big, ugly internal dev subtitles turned on by default (which ScummVM allows you to turn on, though were hidden and inaccessible on the disc releases). The characters' poses on this cover are all hacky repurposings of existing art, which is par for the course. These games have not gotten the presentation and treatment they deserve at all over these last few years. ☹️ I'd like to think there was some marketing and presentation needle to thread to keep them relevant and have them land with modern kids, though I don't think the mobile versions have ever taken off. Lately Tommo's marketing copy has shifted and positions them as a way to "relive your childhood" which really feels like circling the drain. (And that is now literally being represented on this cover) ☹️

I think this is the same list games are already available to download in the Nintendo Switch store, but it's cool to see them get a physical release. I wonder how/why they chose these particular games for porting to the Switch. They seem to coincide with the height of the brand's popularity, or at least when they really hit their stride, launching with several franchises. I believe the chronological order of the main, adventure-style games was (with the games that have been ported to Switch in bold): Putt-Putt Joins the Parade (1992) Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise (1993) Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon (1993) Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds (1994) Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo (1995) Freddi Fish 2: The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse (1996) Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside (1996) Putt-Putt Travels Through Time (1997) Spy Fox in "Dry Cereal" (1997) Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell (1998) Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren't so Frightening (1998) Putt-Putt Enters the Race (1999) Freddi Fish 4: The Case of the Hogfish Rustlers of Briny Gulch (1999) Spy Fox 2: "Some Assembly Required" (1999) Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat from Your Head to Your Feet (2000) Putt-Putt Joins the Circus (2000) Spy Fox 3: "Operation Ozone" (2001) Freddi Fish 5: The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove (2001) Putt-Putt: Pep's Birthday Surprise (2003) Pajama Sam: Life Is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff! (2003) They're all available on PC, but just the 95-98 games are on Switch. The curious outlier is Freddi Fish 2. I wonder why it's been excluded, and why the later games have not been ported. Any Humongous historians out there?

Ron Gilbert posted an early (2020) RTMI puzzle dependancy chart on his blog. https://www.grumpygamer.com/rtmi_pdc There's a few interesting things here, including that the Loom guy was going to be involved in a puzzle, and the cannibals were going to return. Widey Bones may have been called Brother Jack, or a different character named Brother Jack may have filled her role at this stage.