Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection Review (Switch): Doing What a Baby’s Gotta Do

Back in the day, if a cartoon was popular, it was likely that it would eventually get at least one video game as a tie-in experience for the kids to play through. While that was a pretty safe bet to take, whether or not those games would actually be good was a lot more uncommon. Enter the Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection, which brings back several games focused on some of the most popular babies from the 1990s. 

We’ve got six games here, with one headliner that really stands out for people who played it back in the day, and for better or worse, these are essentially the same games as when they released. They’re the “definitive way to play” these exact titles in that there is now an official way to play them on current-day hardware, but that doesn’t mean that they are exactly the greatest experience in 2026.

A Diaper All Full of Stuff

Easily, the headlining game in the Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection is Rugrats: Search for Reptar. I would go so far as to call this an original PlayStation classic. You bounce around various mini-games around the Pickles’ house and earn missing pieces of Tommy’s Reptar puzzle. From a pure nostalgia point, this game is still the best Rugrats game, and being able to play it today is very nice, but it has its rough edges when it comes to its out-of-time controls and constant reusing of voice lines (which is very common for the 3D games). If you can get past that, though, if you liked it back in the day, you’ll still likely enjoy Search for Reptar. For many people, I would bet this might be the only game they play in the collection.

When it comes to the direct sequel, Rugrats: Studio Tour, you have a very similar experience. A bunch of variety when it comes to the minigames, with some being more fun than others. In this case, I never played this game back in the day, but it does feel like a direct successor to Search for Reptar, so you can find ways to enjoy it. That said, I did experience more problems in Studio Tour than the others. Issues like all of the face buttons just not working for long stretches at a time. I’m not sure if this was a problem in the original game or directly a product of Limited Run’s Carbon Engine here, but there were multiple times I was forced to restart because the game simply wasn’t working right.

For the other games in the Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection, I found them all to be rather forgettable and not that enjoyable. Rugrats in Paris: The Movie has much of the same blueprint as the previous two, but it felt even worse. Then you throw in the handheld games of The Rugrats Movie, Castle Capers, Time Travellers, and the Paris Movie, which are all mediocre at best 2D platformers that, from a game preservation standpoint, are nice to see playable here, but I would be surprised if there were many people at all that had fond memories of them. Their inclusion feels like a desperate way to try to make this collection feel more worth the money, but at this point, why not include something like Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt, which again, isn’t a great game, but at least it would add a little more variety into the mix.

“As Bob as My Witless!”

While the overall value of these games could be questioned, the Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection does the standard expectation of adding in current features to make trudging through these games a little easier. Every single game can be instantly saved by pressing a button to pull up an overlay, and everything can also be rewound to fix a mistake.

Outside of that, the extras here are very lacking. There’s a music player where you can listen to every song in each game, but the museum is limited to just box art scans and being able to read the manuals for the games. At the end of the day, those aren’t terrible inclusions, but they don’t make this feel like a celebration of these games in any special way.

Also, if you weren’t tired enough of hearing a constant repeat of voicelines, every time you press A, Tommy says “Go,” B makes Angelica say “No,” and bringing up the overlay is the robotic “Halt, I am Reptar,” so enjoy hearing that constantly when you try to do anything in the menus.

Final Verdict

The Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection is a decent enough way to play Search for Reptar in 2026 if you grew up playing it originally on the PlayStation. Beyond that, there isn’t much to really say that this is a must-buy. Maybe you can find some enjoyment in Studio Tour, but everything else here doesn’t hold up satisfyingly unless you consider yourself the most diehard of Rugrats fans, but even then, there isn’t much to celebrate here.

The Rugrats: Retro Rewind Collection was reviewed on Nintendo Switch with a code provided by Limited Run Games. It is also available on PlayStation 5.

More From Us:
Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland Review (Xbox): High Sponsorbilleries