The film "Inkheart," in theaters today, hasn't exactly been getting rave reviews – but this half-baked, shallow attempt at a movie-licensed video game adventure only serves to demean the franchise further.
"Inkheart" starts out, harmlessly enough, in front of a painted bookstore, where a muddy-looking avatar representing Mo (Brendon Frasier), is window shopping with his daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett). "Do you think you'll find it here? The book that you have been seeking for so long?" she asks.
After Mo goes into the store and we witness a brief, awkward animation of Mo's arm stretching out towards a whispering book, it is inferred that yes, he did.
And between curiosity about what the book Inkheart is all about, and curiosity about the mysterious stranger Dustfinger -- from which the pair then flee in a frustrating, yet blissfully brief sledding mini-game -- we imagine that "Inkheart" might hold you or your child's attention for the next hour, as the player takes on the role of Meggie and attempts to figure out both.
Most of "Inkheart" involves solving puzzles in a simple point-and-click adventure. Tap to move, tap to investigate, tap to grab items, tap and drag to combine those items into tools that allow you to proceed: the controls are elegant in their simplicity, and on a larger, more thought-out adventure game, they'd be useful. But "Inkheart" is only about three hours long, and it gets worse the longer you play.
Where at first you can direct Meggie to look at her surroundings and tell you some backstory, later sections of the game have little or no text to read. Where at first you have to think around carefully and determine which items will help you, say, eavesdrop on your father's conversation, it soon becomes apparent that the only way to proceed in "Inkheart" is to search the entire room for everything grabbable, stick it all together and use it to solve the puzzle at hand, because nothing else exists. Exploration, the main charm of an adventure game, is non-existent -- you move from point A to point B, and occasionally back to A to grab that item you missed.
The animation is jerky, the five minigames tedious, the game's character portraits and short sound bytes reused ad naseum. But the worst part of Dreamcatcher's "Inkheart" is that you will never truly find out what's going on. It's confusing enough that there are no real transitions from one movie-inspired locale to the next, just a hasty cut. But the fact that after the bad guy is vanquished and the three-hour quest has come to an end, you or your child will still have no idea what the plot, its characters, and the book Inkheart itself are really about -- for $30, that's downright infuriating.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:07 am
At least the movie looks good.