Garfield Escape from Monday review: a tasty little family dish

Having moved into video games as far back as the 1980s, Garfield has passed through the paws of countless developers and tried his hand at plenty of different genres. The modern era, though, has mostly served up low-ambition little mobile games and kart racers (Garfield Kart in 2013, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing in 2019, Garfield Kart 2 - All You Can Drift in 2025). Happily, Escape from Monday breaks the routine and lets the big lazy cat try his luck at the modern 3D platformer. Is the recipe a flavourful one? 

Garfield may loathe Mondays, but the Monday he has to escape here isn't the day of the week: it's Chef Monday, king of the lasagne… the vegetable lasagne! After accidentally wolfing down one of these cursed dishes, our greedy cat passes out. And so the adventure begins, because it's his dreams — or rather his nightmares — that we'll be traipsing through across some thirty main levels. These are spread over three different worlds, each with a resolutely culinary theme. The Vegetable Nightmare pits us against tomatoes and corn cobs amid giant veg, the Sweet Kingdom is teeming with marshmallows, doughnuts, jelly crocodiles and other confectionery, while the Barbecue Desert mixes hot dogs, chips and chicken drumsticks with a likeable Western vibe. Not only do these biomes have the good taste (!) to suit Garfield down to the ground, they also hold a few welcome surprises to keep things varied (a lasagne factory, a TV show, a not-quite-underwater section and so on). The heavenly backdrops of the secondary levels are far less exciting but, contrary to what their appearance in the tutorial mission might suggest, you don't actually spend much time there.

Unlike certain games that come flying out of the blocks and run out of puff along the way, Escape from Monday doesn't make much of an impression in its early levels, but it undeniably grows on you as you progress. 

The gameplay can also disappoint at first glance, since it essentially boils down to an attack, a jump and a dash. Thankfully, each biome gives you the chance to slip into a costume granting an extra power. Turkey Garfield can more or less fly using triple jumps, Bodyboard Garfield surfs across watery or chocolatey surfaces, and Cowboy Garfield hauls himself towards certain platforms with his lasso-grapple. Dotted here and there throughout the adventure, these special moments regularly rekindle the player's interest and attention.

Flavourful ingredients

Unlike certain games that come flying out of the blocks and run out of puff along the way, Escape from Monday doesn't make much of an impression in its early levels, but it undeniably grows on you as you progress. Boredom is kept even further at bay because the level design punctuates the general free-camera advance with a few fixed-view sections, while still letting explorers hunt down slices of lasagne hidden in the scenery. Never tedious, this collectible hunt remains within reach of younger players. A little curiosity is all it takes to reach 100%. Gathering lasagne is also rewarded with furniture to decorate the house shared by Jon, Garfield and Odie. Sadly you can't place these items freely, but the fact that each piece comes in two versions still encourages completion. While the "collectible lasagnes" offer a limited yet non-trivial challenge, the ones tied to the Yum-O-Meter struck us as far too easy to come by. Escape from Monday fully embraces its status as a collect-a-thon, and there's no sense holding that against it. The thing is, picking up the items laid along the main path to guide the player seems to be enough to fill the gauge completely. A touch more demand for this entirely optional objective would have been welcome.

No complaints, on the other hand, about the overall easiness of the adventure or the extremely basic AI of the enemies, two things that are perfectly understandable in a platformer aimed at kids. The fact that hitting enemies automatically restores a hit point could have been reserved for a hypothetical easy mode, mind you, but it's hardly a big deal. Our leniency on this front stems both from the variety of situations mentioned above (meaning you never get bored) and from the adventure's running time, which remains very decent despite the lack of challenge. You can easily hit the ten-hour mark by hunting down every lasagne and replaying each level in time-trial mode.

A little short on salt

Much like its leading man, the game is hardly free of flaws. The most immediate issue is the graphics, which don't really meet today's standards. The franchise's overall look is respected, but the various scenery elements are a little short on detail and polygons. On a Switch 2 in handheld mode it'll do just fine, but the PC version isn't about to make your top-of-the-range graphics card break a sweat. The lack of interactivity with the environments is a shame too. But it's the audio rather than the visuals that disappoints most. We're not talking about the music here, which is perfectly decent and in places genuinely catchy. It's the general absence of ambient sound effects that's the problem. The levels don't feel truly alive, footsteps are missing from certain cutscenes, the voices meant to represent the audience cheering on the TV show clearly aren't those of a crowd, and even the end-of-level animation in which Garfield gets sucked into a telly feels thinner on sound effects than it ought to. The low point comes with the score screens on the time-trial levels, which are simply silent. Let's hope that's a temporary oversight. No patch, on the other hand, is likely to improve the boss fights which, while not unpleasant in themselves, all follow an identical template (dodge several volleys of projectiles, then lob a bomb at the boss).

Finally there's the matter of the humour, which leans far too heavily on breaking the fourth wall. Nods of that kind make sense in the tutorial messages, but having the dialogue reach for them almost every single time is far more grating. This sort of joke risks sailing over the heads of younger players, while its sheer ubiquity will quickly bore, or even irritate, older ones. Granted, it's one of the hallmarks of the comic strip and the animated series, but it could have done with a touch more restraint and nuance here.

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