When it comes to horror game protagonists, Barbie isn’t the first name to come to mind. But anyone who played the delightfully dark 1998 PC game Detective Barbie in the Mystery of the Carnival Caper knows that Barbie absolutely has final girl potential.
The premise is appropriately absurd: Barbie and her friend Becky have just graduated from their local detective academy, because of course that’s a thing. A “fall charity carnival” is in town, and Ken is somehow the chairman of the event, despite the fact that he and Barbie are implied to be teens. But the night before the carnival opens, tragedy strikes: Ken vanishes via a magic show mishap, and the charity money goes missing with him! Naturally, it’s up to Detective Barbie, her friend Becky (who serves as her “guy in the chair”), and the player to solve the mystery of his disappearance.
Things get weird pretty much immediately. Upon starting up the game, users are prompted to select their name from a list, and Barbie will verbally refer to the player by name throughout the game. I cannot emphasize enough how long and thorough this name list is. If you’re someone who has historically had trouble finding keychains with your name on them at gift shops, you might think you’re out of luck here, but you’re mistaken. There are thousands of names on the list, which appears to catalogue nearly every variation of every female first name in existence, from incredibly common to surprisingly rare. (The first three name options are all varied spellings of “A’leeshan,” for example.) Although Barbie says the player’s name with a frankly terrifying amount of bubbly enthusiasm, it doesn’t sound like text-to-speech, which has me wondering how long Barbie voice actress Chris Anthony Lansdowne spent in the recording booth rattling off damn near every feminine name under the sun.
Once players have entered their name, they gain control of Barbie as she explores the scene of the crime. It’s late at night, and she’s all alone (except for Becky, who occasionally checks in via the Crime Computer). Looking back, I can’t get over how much wandering around the game’s creepy carnival grounds feels like playing Silent Hill 3. Sure, this carnival isn’t covered in blood and rust, or infested with terrifying creatures like Lakeside Amusement Park, but the vibes are decidedly creepy. Things only get more paranoia-inducing when Barbie starts noticing a dark figure prowling the park. Turns out she’s not alone after all.
While piloting Barbie through increasingly unsettling rides and attractions (the Halloween prop storage room still gives me nightmares), the player will come across clues, which she sends to Becky to analyze. The clues eventually point Barbie to the mysterious figure’s location, and it’s up to her to hunt them down, chasing Ken’s kidnapper through a variety of carnival/theme park staples including bumper cars, an enormous slide with branching paths, and a dimly lit tunnel of love. These chases were genuinely heart-pounding — the music gets tense, and one wrong move could lead to the suspect escaping.
Detective Barbie in the Mystery of the Carnival Caper had a surprising level of depth, especially for a late ’90s point-and-click game aimed at young girls. Instead of dressing up Barbie, or playing with her horses (or dressing up Barbie’s horses), Detective Barbie focused on actual gameplay, had a compelling story, and was creepy as hell. It even had some replay value — each playthrough switched up the types of clues players would stumble across, and when it came to Ken’s kidnapper, there were multiple suspects — the identity of the guilty party changed each time you played. Once the mystery was solved, players could even print out a Junior Detective badge to show off for maximum girl-world street cred.
Of course, after a few replays, you’d eventually see everything the game had to offer, but it was incredible for its time, and even spawned two sequels: 1999’s Detective Barbie 2: The Vacation Mystery, and 2000’s Detective Barbie: The Mystery Cruise. Mattel is still cranking out Barbie video games to this day — the next one is Barbie Horse Tails (yes, another horse riding/accessorizing game), which comes out later this month. While the graphics are a definite improvement over Detective Barbie, I doubt Barbie Horse Tails features the same level of gameplay depth, replayability, or general spookiness as its late-nineties predecessors, which is kind of a shame.
Regardless of Mattel’s original intentions for the game, Detective Barbie in the Mystery of the Carnival Caper ended up becoming my gateway to the horror genre, and I’d love to see Detective Barbie star in another lighthearted-yet-creepy game that involves more than dress-up and horse-riding. The world has plenty of horse girls, but it could definitely use more hard-boiled Junior Detectives solving high-stakes charity carnival crimes.
