If you haven’t figured it out already, this game was created for a young audience. As an adventure genre fan, I have no problem playing and reviewing a kids’ game every now and then.
The Ugly Prince Duckling takes place around 1820 in Copenhagen, a year in which H.C. Anderson, the main character as which you play, is fourteen years old. Poor and unprivileged, Anderson’s goal is to work his way up in life. He wants to become an actor, earn money, and make the jump to a new social class. Meanwhile, the princess has just turned fifteen, and has wandered away from the royal palace in search of new experiences and adventure. It isn’t very difficult to guess where the story goes from here. Rumor has it that the Master of Darkness will come and try to kidnap the princess at some point and now a perfect opportunity has presented itself. To try to protect the princess, a gnome-like character gives her the tinderbox and magic glow. Supposedly, protectant dogs will appear in times of danger for whoever holds the tinderbox. Acting like the Paris Hilton of the 1820s, the princess doesn’t care about the box and throws it in the street along with the glow. Trolls appear and she is kidnapped. Your goal is to rescue the princess and save the kingdom from being overrun with trolls.
To begin, the gameplay and controls are far less than sufficient. It’s a standard third-person adventure game where you’ll need to talk to the townsfolk, complete certain puzzles, and do a few chores in order to progress. There are just a few basic controls, and you will probably end up using either the keyboard or mouse to move around. As simple as that sounds, it is the game’s major pitfall. If you start with just the mouse, you’ll soon find that it is terrible. For some reason, it can be very difficult to move from one area to another with the mouse and you’ll oftentimes think you cannot proceed any further. When you click on whatever side of the screen you’d like to travel, to it will be like hitting a wall. Eventually, I would be able to get it, but it always took several tries each time I was “stuck.” After a while, I migrated to the keyboard, which seemed good at first, but just wait for the camera angles to change. It’s just like the console-to-PC ports, where practically every new area changes the angle in a big way. That makes running from scene to scene frustrating. Basically, there isn’t anything good to say about the controls.
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"... the gameplay and controls are far less than sufficient." |
Another thing that can be frustrating is moving through doors and going up and down ladders and stairs. For example, in the first level when I wanted to travel up the stairs to the windmill, I figured I would just be able to click anywhere on the stairs. However, I had to click in a very specific area in order to continue. It’s the really little and standard components like this that kill this game.
As far as the story is concerned, I enjoyed the narration segments, as I mentioned in the beginning, but there is a substantial lack of depth to the game. Characters you meet seem extremely automated and your conversations with them don’t usually last more than a sentence or two. Even though the game is targeted at a young audience, I don’t think that’s any reason to subtract from the story or make it less important. One of the things I remember the most about the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales I’m familiar with is how colorful and imaginative they are. The storyline in the game was just too simple and the characters too robotic.
It’s not all bad, however. The game’s graphics are well done. The characters have a cartoon-like look, and the towns are very bright and provide the perfect environment for this type of game. When the trolls overtake an area, storms roll in and everything gets dark. The contrast between the good times and the bad works well. If only the rest of the game’s components had been as good as the graphics!
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"The contrast between the good times and the bad works well." |
Along with the robotic characters comes voice acting that isn’t impressive. As I already stated, most characters will only speak for a sentence or two (if even that), which really leaves the character development in a sour state. It wasn’t that the acting was always bad – just that they spoke so little. Music, on the other hand, seemed to fit well. Good orchestral music plays during the game, and it always fits the situation at hand. For example, happy and relaxing music plays during the normal parts, but, when the trolls take over a portion of the city, it changes.
I was honestly excited to play this game when I fist started it up because of the first narration segment and the great-looking environments. It didn’t take long, though, before I became bored and disappointed. Guppyworks may have decided not to focus on the storyline and character development because of the target audience, but I believe that was a mistake. It really wasn’t challenging at all, either, but I can understand how that fits into the audience equation. The simple control problems are the game’s main downfall, which was somewhat surprising to me. I wouldn’t recommend purchasing HCA: The Ugly Prince Duckling unless they release a patch or two.
