Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

"An otherwise decent game suffers from tragic, unfortunate flaws..."

I myself am not a fan of the Lemony Snicket series. However, I also have nothing against it. My girlfriend and I played this together, and due to the fact that she was a fan of the books, I wanted her to have a wonderful time. She did...for awhile. Thus begins our tragic review...

In this game you control Violet, Sunny, and Klaus, 3 orphans who are in for a pretty rough time. You take turns in the game controlling each one of them. Most of the time you play as Klaus and Violet, who at the beginning of the game are basically the same character. They can jump as well as push objects around and collect items. As the game progresses, though, they will become more unique as each of them becomes armed with different inventions that Violet makes out of household objects.

While Violet and Klaus roam around their environments in 3D, the segments where you control Sunny, who is a baby, are 2D; that is, the graphics will still be 3D, but Sunny can only move right and left, up and down. Sunny will also get some inventions to use over the course of the game, and I personally had the most fun playing as her; this was probably because it is incredibly amusing to see a baby jumping around with a jetpack and eating through steal pipes.

The basic pattern of the gameplay is that the children will be given a task to complete, usually by their current guardian, and they will have to work as a team to complete it. For example, the first task in the game is to clear the house of rats. The children will have to invent a device to remove the rats, then use it to get rid of them. Once you finish this task, you will be given another, etc.

Sometimes the henchmen of the game's villain, Count Olaf, will get in your way and you will have to fight them. At times they can be taken out with a single hit, but sometimes there are boss fights that will make for a much more lengthy battle.

The game's graphics and sound are very good. The atmosphere tends to be very dark and bleak, which fits nicely as well as echoing the movie that the game is based on. The voice-acting in the game is also wonderful; more games should have voice-acting this good. If it wasn't done by the same actors that were in the movie, I couldn't tell.

Most of the game is fairly easy, so newbie gamers won't have much to worry about. There are no "lives", so you can die and try again as much as you want, and there are lots of items that replenish your health. Even my girlfriend, who doesn't play many games, was able to overcome most challenges after a few tries.

That being said, there are at least a handful of sections in the game that have an unreasonably high difficulty. At times this is caused by the rather sporadic system of double-jumping: sometimes your second jump will move you at the high speed you need to complete the jump, and sometimes it will move you at a snail's pace; after hours of testing, I, a veteran gamer, was unable to figure out how to guarantee that your jump went far. Because of this fatal flaw, there are a few sections in the game where you will most likely get incredibly frustrated as you try to make a series of 5 or 6 jumps, only to have one of them fail along the way, forcing you to start over again and again.

In addition, there is a section of the game that is purely a first-person shooter. The difficulty of this section is unprecedented compared to the rest of the game, and will no doubt be too much for many casual gamers. The normal movement controls in the game are pretty twitchy, too, making it a bit of a chore to even set yourself up for some of the needlessly trying jumps.

In any case, I had 4 people, including myself, trying to beat this game, and we have all accepted the fact that we never will. It is sad that a game that is in all other aspects so polished could let a few horrible, game-killing flaws ruin it. I assume that there just wasn't enough time to adequately test the game before it was released.

If you really are just dying for all things Lemony Snicket, you will probably want to try this game just because you can. Odds are that you'll have some fun for awhile, just like we did. However, if you're looking for a good game, I am very sorry to tell you that you will need to look elsewhere.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/06