Game Factory has another Garfield game out for the DS, but this one isn’t tied to a movie license. Garfield’s Nightmare is a one-off, and the second DS Garfield to be published by Game Factory. The publisher has relegated development to Shin’en, continuing the cooperation that gave us the surprisingly good Pet Alien. The German studio gives us some more quality work with this new sidescrolling platformer, showing off their graphical talent and their ability to innovate.

Garfield’s Nightmare is a good example of what Shin’en does best—they take a simple gameplay design, give it solid fundamentals and build layers of complexity on top. The game is a basic platformer at first blush, something you’d buy a child to keep them busy for a few hours. A few levels in, and Garfield’s Nightmare begins to get significantly harder, with simple platforming principles built upon one another, to make some jumping puzzles worthy of a Mario game.

The game’s plot is quite similar to Garfield and his Nine Lives, another Game Factory title starring the portly cat. Garfield eats far too much and decides to take a nap, but is trapped in his dreams once he falls asleep. He smashed his alarm clock, so he must find his way through four different dream worlds to recover the clock’s pieces. I’m not quite sure how that makes sense, but it sets up the game well and that’s really all that matters. The first dream world he explores is a haunted castle, filled with ghosts and spiders and pits of green deadly fog.

This world does a good job of laying down the basic platformer principles—timing jumps, using moving platforms, pushing and pulling boxes. Garfield’s only offensive capability is jumping on top of enemies, so avoidance is a smart idea sometimes. He can do a ground pound, but this is mostly used for activating switches or smashing containers. Crawling is helpful for reaching tight spaces or ducking under enemies. All of these techniques feel solid and on a whole Garfield controls very well. Once the basics are down, though, things get harder.

Simple enemies are joined by volcanic jets of fire, bombs, lighting and other environmental hazards. The game gives a heads-up in the form of a danger sign whenever there is trouble ahead, but even then it takes some skill to avoid traps. Dangers are only half of the game, as there are a number of clever puzzles to be solved. They usually involve pushing a block or hitting a switch, but Shin’en gets creative with several of them. Getting the right sequence of moves down or finding the right location isn’t as easy as it looks, and these puzzles might even take an adult a few seconds to figure out.
Shin’en has also done a good job of balancing out the difficulty. Avoiding bad guys and traps is of chief importance because Garfield can only take three hits before dying. Health powerups, in the form of pizza slice collectibles, are quite rare; there are maybe two or three of them per level, and they get much scarcer in later levels. Health is not replenished between levels or save points. Luckily, those save spots are somewhat frequent.

Garfield gets a good number of extra lives, which also helps to even the difficulty curve. Instead of golden coins or rings, Garfield’s ubiquitous collectibles are donuts. Grabbing a hundred of them nets Garfield another life, and pizza slices count as ten donuts. Lives are sometimes found within the levels, floating in secluded spots waiting to be collected. Finally, Garfield can find the bonus doors in a level, which are usually hidden in secret out-of-the-way areas. These doors are opened with coins that Garfield collects from defeated enemies, and once inside he can play a minigame where he avoids hazards and collects lives. These bonus stages are a bit harder to...