Baby Jo in Going Home

It was summer 1992 and I watched a friend boot up a game where the main character wore a diaper. I'll never forget that moment — we were hunched over a 486 and I wondered if those French guys from Loriciel had lost their minds.

Baby Jo in Going Home is a platformer from 1991 by French studio Loriciel, which was pretty active in the European market at the time. You play as an infant in diapers who needs to get home. The setting is deliberately absurd — and that's the whole point. Instead of a muscle-bound soldier or fantasy hero, you get a toddler wandering through a world filled with enemies clearly hostile to infants.

Gameplay-wise, it's a classic side-scrolling platformer — moving left to right, collecting items, avoiding or defeating enemies. The mechanics are exactly as straightforward as you'd expect from 1991: jumps, power-ups, candy for points, secret passages. The game checks all these boxes like a school assignment checklist, but doesn't deliver much beyond that. Controls work and aren't off-putting, but they won't wow you with sophistication either. Difficulty spikes unevenly — sometimes it's a tedious walk, then suddenly something kills you in a way that feels random.

What keeps the game alive is its visual style. The colorful EGA or VGA graphics have that charm typical of the French school of that era — vibrant colors, somewhat fairy-tale environments, animations of the main character with a good dose of humor. Loriciel knew how to do graphics, you have to give them that. The sound is average for the period — a few tones through PC speaker or Sound Blaster, nothing that would make you mute the TV in the next room.

It's aged as you'd expect. The baby gimmick is still somewhat amusing, but the actual gameplay doesn't offer anything that would keep you invested in 2024 for more than twenty minutes unless you have a personal connection to that era. It's a product of its time — solidly executed mediocrity that filled catalogs back then and exists today mostly as a curiosity. For nostalgically-minded players who remember it, it's a pleasant five minutes in a browser. For everyone else, it's more of a historical document than entertainment.