This video game should be enshrined in some museum as a litmus test for just how far a release of this kind can coast on festive goodwill. Before one is able to dissect its value as a piece of entertainment, one has to take certain considerations on board. This is a game aimed primarily at children and it is designed to be consumed while the Disney animated feature it's based on is still fresh in their memories. It's not intended (hopefully) to be too challenging, nor is it meant to occupy a space in any avid gamer's collection. It's design and content seem to indicate that it's meant to be considered only as a marketing peripheral to the new Disney film. One could argue that, at the very least, it introduces its target audience to a story by Charles Dickens, and this is no bad thing. However, depending on your level of Christmas cheer this Nintendo DS game is either a disposable piece of festive fun or a poorly designed cash-grab.
While the game's level of appeal may be open to debate, the paucity of its content isn't. The game's story mode takes just under an hour to beat and once that's been done there's precious little here to keep anyone entertained. The game follows the events of Dickens' classic tale with the player occasionally being called on to solve the odd puzzle to move the plot along. This involves shifting items on the screen around in a certain order with the stylus. There is usually one solution, or one sequence of events required to unlock the next stage of the story, so once the story mode has been beaten, there's very little reason to play it again. The puzzles are a mixed bag. Most of them are insultingly easy, but there are a couple which have solutions that aren't immediately obvious. In these instances, however, this is sometimes a due to a fault in design; one example of this occurred when we had to tickle Scrooge's feet and while placing the stylus exactly on the right point produced the desired effect, moving it a fraction of an inch to either side produced a dialogue window.
As A Christmas Carol's main story mode unfolds, the player will come across a selection of mini games. These are based around arbitrary activities such as playing cards, flicking coins and making Christmas dinner. The design of the mini games is patchy. The card games are quite good and the cooking game isn't bad. However, some of the games are frustrating and badly designed – stand outs in this regard include the snowball fight and coin flicking games which involve zipping the stylus across the screen with varied results. Another example of a poorly designed game involved using the stylus to tap out notes on a fiddle which felt muddled and unresponsive. As hit and miss as these experiences are, however, at least they don't hold up the game because, unlike the other puzzle games, players don't even have to beat the mini games to move the story along.
Aside from the main story mode, there's very little on offer. Players can replay the story mode's mini games separately, either by themselves or in multiplayer (pass the DS) mode. There's a selection of spot the difference puzzles packaged as an advent calendar and finally, the game also contains a copy of the original story in its extras section (along with the game credits and the cheat code entry point). The game looks the part. The animated sequences are nicely rendered and the character art faithfully represents one's expectations; Scrooge is a hunched miser, the Cratchits drip with wholesomeness and piety and the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future look like a cherub, Brian Blessed and the Grim Reaper respectively. However, none of the actors from the Disney film supply their voice talents for the game. The main story mode, instead, is narrated by Charles Cecil (of Broken Sword fame) who does a very solid job.
As nice as it all looks and sounds, however, one can't help coming back to how lightweight this game is. Even for a title aimed at a younger audience, Disney's A Christmas Carol is an anorexic package which offers very little in the way of replay value. The puzzles and mini games aren't challenging enough to be entertaining the first time round and once all the solutions have been worked out there's no reason to play it again. Ironically, the content which offers the most reward is the story upon which the game and the movie are based, and you don't need to pay full price for this video game to get hold of that. Players with low expectations may enjoy playing through this game a couple of times, but it will probably test the Christmas spirit and patience of anyone else.
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