Cookie's Bustle

WELCOME to my page about COOKIE'S BUSTLE. It's a fascinating game and I'd love to do what little I can to tell the world about it!

What is it?

Cookie's Bustle is a 1999 point & click adventure game by Rodik. It's the first and last game the company ever made- besides Cookie's Bustle, they just made a couple pieces of office software. I'm currently struggling to find a whole lot of information on the company, but it seems they dissolved not long after Cookie's Bustle. That's not too unreasonable- it only sold about 100 copies!

A promo image from the webpage for Cookie's Bustle. On the right in the foreground is a render of Cookie in a tracksuit reading 'Rodik' on the shirt, holding a grey stuffed rabbit by the ear, running with a focused expression. Behind her is an in-game screenshot of the entrance to the Sports Collisseum, an arch with a neon sign and an alien standing next to the door. On the left is 3D text reading 'Cookie's Bustle'. Beneath that is a render of another alien, gesturing to a few lines of japanese text. The background is a starry sky.

Unfortunately, the poor sales also mean no localizations, and that it was lost media until the game was found & uploaded online just a few years back. But, well, it's found media, baby! ... Despite the efforts of some trolls running around filing copyright strikes. I don't get what's up with that.

Okay, but what's it about?

I am so fucking glad you asked.

Aliens crash landed in a fictional country in the South Pacific called Bombo World, and the president of Bombo World offered them the northern portion of the country in exchange for some of their technology. (I really like the name Bombo World.) The aliens accepted his offer, and built a city- Dero City. Here, they started hosting a sports competition.

In comes five-year-old Cookie Blair!

Cookie really wants to win the gold medal. It's up to you to help her, from solving puzzles in the way of her participating in the competition, to taking care of her basic needs!

Ohhhh but wait. Hang on. There's terrorists. I sure hope that doesn't cause any problems...

How do I experience this?

Sadly, there's not much in the way of fan-translations at the time of me making this page. But, inexplicably, the vast majority of on-screen text is in english! There's a bathroom that has a korean sign for some reason? And some other outliers, many of which I'm probably forgetting. But, hey, in terms of cutscenes and finding your way around, not knowing japanese won't be too much of a problem!

The cover of the Cookie's Bustle game manual. Cookie is in the center, jumping up, holding her stuffed rabbit. Below her is 3D text reading 'Cookie's Bustle', with a japanese subtitle written underneath. Below that 'User's Guide' is written in white text, with more japanese text written under that (presumably 'User's Guide' translated). There are three paragraphs written in Japanese along the sides, with the english titles, from left to right, top-down, Story, Starring, and Co-Starring. I really, really wish I could translate it all for you.

Watching a longplay would be the easiest way, but unfortunately, all of them got taken down out of nowhere. Fingers crossed.
Every download I linked to to play it for yourself got taken down as well. There's others out there, but I'm getting a little scared to link to them now... But, if you get your hands on it, beware it's apparently a little hard to get running on modern tech!
Walkthrough
- This is in japanese, but online translators treat it fairly well (google's full-page translations mangle it, but you can copy & paste text into the regular translator- I know nothing of any other tools). It unfortunately relies pretty heavily on pictures at certain points, which are no longer visible. I recommend using this as reference even if you're just watching someone else play if you don't know japanese, as having the auto-translations handy can help with some of the more confusing bits- not only is all the spoken dialogue in japanese, but there are some puzzles that just don't really make any sense besides any language barriers.

It's still a good time if you don't play it first-hand- I didn't, and I'm the one trying to tell you about it! But if you like games like Moon, it's definitely worth a shot. (I also got some vague Wonder Project J vibes, but I only played that for, like, 10 minutes as a kid, so I'm not exactly confident about this.)

I am also compiling as many things related to this game on my harddrive as I can. I'm not sure yet how I would go about then sharing this with others without risking a copyright strike on myself, but it's good to have things stored offline somewhere for that very reason. If there's anything you would like to contribute (or anything you're looking for & want to see if I already have it), please feel free to reach out to me. I would especially appreciate in-game music, no-commentary gameplay footage (if you saved the Classics Of Game clips before they got taken down I'll be your friend forever), or the gift files.