Grimace's Birthday by Krool Toys

 Happy Birthday to our favorite purple fast food mascot!

Who made it?: This game was made by sadly defunct game studios Krool Toys and published by McDonald's to promote the Grimace Shake. Before you ask, this game has nothing to do with that Grimace Shake trend that flooded YouTube and TikTok in 2023.

It's better than the average advergame!

Story: It is Grimace's birthday, but his friends are nowhere to be seen. It is your mission to find Hamburglar, Birdie and the McNugget Kids. Along the way you collect Grimace Shakes for your friends. There are 40 in total, 10 in each level.

Presentation: This game has a nice retro feel to the graphics and music, which is a given since it's basically a Gameboy Color game being treated like a flash game. Matter of fact, you can download the game as a GBC rom from the itch page. Speaking of music, the game's soundtrack is really well made and several of the songs feature the classic McDonald's jingle.

How to play: The arrow keys move Grimace, Up or Down grinds on rail (there's an autogrind option you can disable if you want), Down makes grimace fall through thin platforms and boxes, Z jumps and makes Grimace bounce higher on springs or squirrels, X does backflips while Grimace is airborne (skateboard levels only), Enter pauses and Shift changes the color of Grimace's skateboard on the title screen, which also affects it's color in game. It's also gamepad controllable and one cool thing I found out is if you're playing this on a phone, the game spawns some Gameboy inspired touch controls for you. However you play it, this game controls quite well.

Gameplay: There are 4 levels in this game. The first 2 levels of the game feature Grimace on a skateboard, doing tricks like ollies and grinding on rails to get points. The second 2 levels have him on foot, avoiding birds and collecting balloons to get points. Finally at the end there is a game where you control a curser and blow out as many birthday candles and pop as many balloons as possible in a given time. There are 3 modes to this game: A story mode, a score attack mode where you skate through the various levels trying to get the best score in a limited amount of time, and a freeskate mode where you can explore as much as you like. It's a very short game and not really difficult if you're not trying to get all the Grimace Shakes (and even then, the challenge is at best moderate since you can't die in this game), but it's still a really enjoyable game.

Final Verdict: This is a really fun game and it's way better than most games that are solely made to sell you stuff. My only major gripe with the game is a lack of Ronald McDonald. I know it Grimace's game, but I think Ronald should've at least shown up to wish his friend a happy birthday.