Lemony Snicket’s: A series of unfortunate events review

Games based on films (aka, film tie-ins) haven’t got the best of track records. More often than not they suffer from a serious lack of imagination. Lemony Snicket’s: ‘A series of unfortunate events’ didn’t yield us many good omens in our pre-game search for signs of potential.

There’s the introductory statement that ‘The videogame you are about to play is extremely unpleasant’ – no doubt a sentence that had reviewers across the country licking their lips in anticipation. This, coupled with the unfortunate name (pun intended) doesn’t hint at a gaming classic.

Meet the family

Unfortunately (yep, there’s another pun), the gameplay doesn’t show much that’ll get it into the gaming hall of fame either. The three playable characters at your disposal are, funnily enough, the three Baudelaire children you’ll already be aware of should you have seen the film.

As you play you’ll be able to switch between Klaus and Violet – Klaus being the brawn, Violet being the oh-so-clever inventor, able to make interesting but pretty darn tacky devices. Sunny appears to be the representative of A series of unfortunate events target audience – that is to say, she’s not quite out of nappies yet.

Strangely enough, Sunny is the most enjoyable character to control by some way. This is because she’s the one who is able to slide down unfeasibly large slopes, literally by the seat of her pants, and carry out other mini-game sequences.

Backtracking

Visually, Lemony Snicket’s: ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’, is nothing spectacular with graphics that appear a bit too dreary in places. However, the do manage to stay faithful to what you’d expect from such an unpleasant (their words, not ours) game.

Environments are also fairly varied, which is some recompense when you’ve been forced to backtrack over areas you’ve already been through on several occasions. This seems to have been done in part, to lengthen what is not a particularly long game to begin with, taking not much more than 5 hours to complete. Though if you hand your PS2 controller over to your very own Sunny the baby they might be able to draw it out a little.

Family tragedy

For those who haven’t seen the film, the Baudelaire children are orphans – so you see, they’re not entirely fortunate. The fact that their parents died in a house-fire, we’re guessing, won’t have done much to provide them with hugely happy childhood memories.

We join the cheery little kiddies as they’re sent to live with their uncle, Count Olaf. As you might have guessed, this isn’t where the tale ends – there’s no happily ever after and they’re not going to spend all their waking hours in luxury, drinking tea and eating crumpets.

After a pretty well put together series of animated sketches, explaining the above, you gain control of the characters and the tedium begins. Much of the game sees you trundling around, carrying out dull and repetitive tasks.

A typical task will see you exploring Count Olaf’s house in the hope of finding materials that will enable you to build a useful gadget. This will be after Violet the incredible has thought over the problem, the war in Iraq for example, and concluded that the thing to do is to build a nuclear missile launcher out of a can, some string and a rubber glove.

What does this do?

The required objects will be spread around the house though, so will the items that you’ll need for later tasks – attempting to pick them up will result in a quizzical voice informing you that they might be useful at another point in the game.

As much fun as attempting to guess what Violet will conjure up with such unavailable items later in the game is, it might’ve been an idea for them to have been left out of the action until they’re needed. A further problem is the camera angle – although slightly it can be corrected up to a point, it sometimes spins into an unhelpful area, obscuring your vision.

One for the kiddies

Although it has its fair share of shortcomings, A Series of Unfortunate Events does have a few redeeming features. It stays fairly close to events within the film, so if you sat there in the cinema and thought I’d like to play that, you might get lucky.

Mini-games with Sunny are also pretty enjoyable on the whole, as much due to the fact that you’re manipulating a small baby around fairly ridiculous tasks as it is due to the gameplay itself though. Above all, it should be remembered that this isn’t really a game for those much older than 10-12 year olds.

With age, tends to come more gaming aptitude, which will mean you’ll make quick work of Lemony Snicket’s and a yearning for a bit more of a challenge. By all means though, give it to your toddler and they’ll go wild.