Movie-to-game adaptations have fared remarkably poorly over the years, largely because of the rushed timeline imposed to meet the film’s release. On the other hand, adventure games featuring people with special abilities to create life with magical books have done pretty well. So with the release of Inkheart for the Nintendo DS, one of these trends was going to have to give. As it turns out, while the game does have its moments of quiet charm that might appeal to younger gamers and fans of the movie, its modest scale and utter simplicity ensure that Inkheart isn’t destined to be confused with the likes of Myst in genre annals.

Of course, as the first of three tales in the “Inkworld” series, Inkheart was a best-selling novel by Cornelia Funke long before it became a movie. I have experienced neither, so I can’t speak personally to the differences between media, but by all accounts the three versions follow the same general storyline, with a bit of creative license mixed in for good measure. While this means that seeing/viewing/playing one will lessen the element of surprise in another, I much prefer this approach than games that try to fill in the “blanks” of its source material, which generally leads to incoherent story messes that only barely make sense even if you know the plot already. Here the game assumes you’re encountering the main story from the beginning, which it just so happens I was.

Unfortunately, it takes a fair while until the story actually takes shape. The game begins with a book restorer named Mortimer (Mo) Folchart seeking a rare tome called Inkheart. But when a mysterious man called Dustfinger appears and calls him “Silvertongue”, claiming other equally-strangely-named people want to meet with him privately, it’s clear there’s more to Mo and this fable than he’s willing to share with his inquisitive 12-year-old daughter Meggie. The early playable sections are spent controlling Meggie as she attempts, quite unsuccessfully, to learn more about this book and her father’s secrets.

Eventually the truth does come out, revealing that Mo has the unique ability to “read” people and objects from written stories into our own world. Tragically for the Folcharts, this skill comes with a very high price. As a consequence of summoning something from the book world into ours, something from our world must likewise take its place in the “Inkworld”, and Mo’s wife was the first victim of this unwitting exchange. He also called forth a group of wicked villains from the book, as ruthless as they are determined to destroy all copies of the book and use Silvertongue’s talent for their own destructive purposes. The ultimate goal of the game, then, is to reunite the Folchart family and conquer the bad guys once and for all.

It’s actually quite an interesting premise, and it’s easy to see why the novels became popular, especially since the value of reading is a self-serving (but completely justified) subtext running through it. It’s not nearly as successful in the game, however, as often major plot points are given extremely short shrift. There’s enough here to follow along, but with a barrage of characters flitting in and out for no apparent purpose, it always feels like you’re playing a condensed version of a much deeper story. It’s Reader’s Digest meets Inkheart.

One of the best features of the game is that it allows you to play many different characters. At various times you’ll control Meggie, Mo, and Dustfinger. You’ll even get a chance to momentarily play as Farid, a boy read out of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and two fantastical animals, though these are very brief and only occur doing minigames. This constant character exchange helps the experience feel fresh, though you can’t switch between them during the main adventure and the only real difference is cosmetic.

And this is indeed an adventure, in a very traditional sense for the most part. The game’s own website refers to it as an “exciting action adventure”, but that’s a misleading description. There are five different types of minigames spread throughout Inkheart, but they represent only a tiny segment of the overall gameplay. Two of them take mere seconds to play and appear only once, while the stealth and maze challenges are a bit longer and will probably take some trial-and-error to succeed before the timer runs out. These can be more frustrating, but they are only repeated a couple times and even the longest takes just a little more than two minutes, start to finish. The “reading” activity occurs the most, which is a shame, since the task of tracing a moving squiggly line across the touch screen gets old fast. It’s fairly forgiving, however, and is completed very quickly, so I didn’t fail any of them along the way. If you do stumble, you’re simply returned to the beginning of the activity in all cases.