Our very own Gabe has played his way through the entire Golden Compass video game and has very kindly reviewed it for us. He was naturally unimpressed by a number of elements of the game, but perhaps surprisingly for a number of His Dark Materials fans, he was also impressed by certain features of the game.

Video games based on movies are notorious for their universal poor quality. Games tend to take longer to make than movies which results in rushed development if the game is to be released simultaneously with a movie. Video games, because of their interactive nature, also tend to work better on their own original concepts rather than movies or books. So I didn’t have very high expectations going into The Golden Compass video game. I expected a rushed, rehashed action game. And indeed, like all movie video games, The Golden Compass has many of the traits of a constricted and rushed based-on-a-movie game. What I did not anticipate was the amount of heart put into the game. Movie video games are often unabashedly mass produced products with cookie cutter gameplay. While The Golden Compass has its share of cliché gameplay elements, it manages to go beyond the obvious and do something interesting with the material.

The game starts with a similar grinding-cog sequence as the movie’s intro with Serafina Pekkala narrating. Unlike the movie the game then jumps far ahead in the story to follow Lyra and Iorek in the north as they try to rescue a random child from the Samoyeds. The story later reverts back to the original beginning at Jordan College, but the brief romp in the snow serves as a tutorial to familiarize the player with the controls for both Lyra and Iorek.

Iorek has three action buttons: one for attack, one for blocking and one for a special action. The special action is used when an icon pops up at predefined points in a level. These actions include jumping over crevasses or pushing over large blocks of ice to make impromptu bridges. Combat seemed rather Prince of Persia-esque to me, with lots of enemies converging on Iorek, his attacks repeatedly knocking them onto the ground until they die in a cloud of Dust. Killing enemies, destroying environmental objects (barrels, ice blocks, ect.) and collecting Rage Claw power-ups fill Iorek’s Rage Guage. In a nice nod to the book, collecting Blood Moss heals Iorek and collecting Sky Iron gives him armor.

After playing as Iorek for a while, the player switches to Lyra. Lyra does not die; instead she has Courage Points which she loses if she gets hurt or loses mini-games. If she loses all of her Courage Points, then the player must start back at the previous checkpoint. Lyra can get Courage Points by picking up three courage orbs that are placed around the game’s levels. Lyra’s gameplay is puzzle based. Some of these puzzles are standard ledge jumping puzzles, and some are more tactical. Occasionally she or Pan must face opponents. In these sequences the player must press a series of direction buttons as they appear on screen. If done correctly Lyra or Pan will dodge as their opponent rushes at them.<br>
The first thing the player must do as Lyra is balance on a ship mast. Balancing on narrow beams and poles is a gameplay element that recurs throughout the game. Balancing is very reminiscent of Prince of Persia. However, in The Golden Compass it feels very awkward and ends up being tedious as you edge along inch by inch. In a cute touch Pan, in ermine form, scurries from Lyra’s shoulders to the tips of her hands to help her balance. Pan also plays a large role in the rest of the gameplay. When Pan is an ermine, the player can use Ermine Insight to find out more about objects in the world by moving a cursor over them. Pan’s other three forms are sloth, hawk and wildcat. In sloth form, Pan can help Lyra swing on objects. As a hawk, Pan can help Lyra glide over a short distance. As a wildcat, Pan can climb up some surfaces with Lyra holding on. When he’s in wildcat form Pan can also help Lyra perform an evasive role.

After Lyra and Iorek find the lost child the story warps back to the beginning of the story in Jordan College. The gameplay here becomes similar to an old school point-and-click adventure game (minus the pointing and clicking). Lyra can talk to people, pick up or use objects, and use the objects to solve puzzles. While talking to key people the player must win a short mini-game before Lyra says her lines of dialog. Winning the mini-game results in a persuasive line which manipulates the person. Losing weakens Lyra’s abilities and she is less likely to persuade the character she’s talking to.

Later in the game Lyra gets the Alethiometer. Reading the Alethiometer is a game in itself. Lyra collects questions throughout the game which the player can access through Lyra’s journal. The player selects a question and the Alethiometer mini-game starts. The first step is to ask the question. This is done by pointing the three needles on the Alethiometer at different symbols. Each symbol has three meanings. Lyra can find meanings hidden throughout the game. If she already knows one of the meanings required to ask the question then that needle is set automatically. The player must guess the symbols for the question’s other meanings. The meanings are not straightforward and are as cryptic as in the book (I only got one or two right in the whole game). Once the question is set, Lyra must read the Alethiometer’s answer. The player uses the direction controls to keep Lyra focused on the Alethiometer. When the big needle spins and holds on a symbol that is part of the answer the player must hit an action button corresponding to the icon that pops up. If all of the meanings were guessed correctly in the first part, then keeping the focus is very easy. Each meaning that is wrong makes the focus harder to control.

The story of the game follows the book far more closely than the movie does. It is clear that the developers read the His Dark Materials trilogy in earnest and set the book as the guide for the game’s development. There are extra details in the game that are missing from the movie. When Lyra finds Billy Costa in the frozen shack after he has been cut, he is clutching a frozen fish as Tony Makarios did in the book. Later as Lyra creeps around in the air ducts of Bolvanger, she witnesses a child cut away from his dæmon. Contrary to the movie which implied that dæmons cut away simply disappear or die, the game explicitly shows the boy’s still living dæmon being locked away in a cage. The witches’ consul, which was missing in the movie, is in the game. The events even play out the same: Dr. Lanselius tasks Lyra with using the Alethiometer to find Serafina Pekkala’s cloud pine. Also unlike the final movie which was hurriedly re-cut just weeks before release, the game has the book’s correct series of events. Lyra goes to Bolvanger before falling out of Lee Scoresby’s balloon and getting captured by the bears of Svalbard. (Interestingly the game shows Lyra falling out of Lee Scoresby’s balloon via a video clip from the original cut of the movie) The ending of the book is awkwardly missing from the game. It was clearly chopped off at the last second as the game ends rather abruptly.

The graphics in The Golden Compass are solidly mediocre. There are times when the graphics are nicely atmospheric such as the Bolvanger air ducts, but at other times such as the icy North they are very bland and flat. Visually, the game looks like it is still in the prototyping stage when graphics are simply functional for gameplay purposes. Camera movement proved to be a major source of frustration. The camera is controlled automatically, rather than by the player. This often led to situations where a certain jump proved to be excessively awkward which in many cases subsequently resulted in a quick demise for Lyra or Iorek. The beam balancing element of Lyra’s gameplay is painfully slow and tedious. I couldn’t help wishing for the simple yet elegant balance control in the Prince of Persia games. The sequences playing as Iorek tended to be repetitive and uninteresting. While there are extra tasks sprinkled in to make the game more interesting, ultimately Iorek’s sections were the parts of the game that I personally just wanted to be done with as soon as possible.

Lyra is wonderfully cheeky, for example when she does a little jig after jumping down a slopped roof to impress Roger. Pan plays a surprisingly large role in the game. There are subtle cute ways he tries to help Lyra and he is not forgotten in dialog. One nice touch is when the player stands still for an extended amount of time: Pan eventually starts complaining to Lyra about the wind on his fur or the fact that they have things they should be doing. The voice acting is surprisingly good. Often voice acting in a game is worse than its movie because of the volume of work that must be done. While not perfect, the voice acting in The Golden Compass manages to catch the mood and is often cute and charming.

In the end the game is probably too flawed for non-HDM fans to get much enjoyment. However, the game is decent and fans of the book will enjoy the amount of effort the developers put into keeping details from the book. Once while Lyra was talking to a sailor on the Gyptian’s ship, he mentioned that some sailor’s dæmons settle as dolphins. The game’s world and dialog are filled with these little details from the book. The developers clearly devoted sincere effort to making The Golden Compass video game faithful to the world and characters of the book. While the end product still suffers from the same flaws that every movie video game has, The Golden Compass at least tries to live up to the potential of the material. Considering the enormity of that task, I think they did an admirable job.