Have You Played... Barbie Dreamhouse Party?
Of COURSE you have
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
That's a rhetorical question - of course you have. Everyone's surely played Barbie Dreamhouse Party [official site]?
What I love most about Barbie Dreamhouse Party, and yes, sure, I'm hardly original in this position, is the influences of Portal.
Not in puzzle design, or the humour, or even aesthetic. I of course mean the appearance of a malevolent AI that communicates through a cyclopsian orb. A pink one. That lives in a wardrobe, and imprisons people when they get their make up wrong.
This terrifying fuschsia robot demands Barbie and her dangerously emaciated chums complete a series of minigames before it will - and you'll all remember this is true and not a thing I'm making up - remove the giant metal shutters with which it's trapped them inside her opulent mansion. Just in case for some reasons someone reading hasn't played, and thinks this is in some way unrepresentative, here's a clip:
Barbie and her friends clearly get on incredibly, sincerely well, as is displayed through the game's witty repartee and heartfelt delivery:
Obviously it's a game on all our shelves, and presumably one we all regularly replay, but it seemed unfair not to include it just in case.