Misslead: Li Mei (Season 1)

The idea of watching TV on your mobile may seem counterintuitive, what with the small screen and looming threat of immense data charges. There is another way to get the TV experience on your mobile though: via a game. Of course, it's not generally that simple. For every Lost, there's a couple of Desperate Housewives or some The O.C.s.

The problem seems to be that TV tie-ins have a tendency to be mini-game collections, puzzlers or platformers that do little new with the collection of characters and settings available to them. Misslead: Li Mei comes from quite another angle. For one thing, it's not spawned from a real-life TV show, but it certainly tries to recreate some of the part-engaged, part-soporific TV-watching experience.

It's structured as a series of games, with the first 'season' following the lead-up to a cliff-hanger plot point from the perspective of four young women. Here, we're dealing with just one of them, Chinese girl Li Mei.

Much as this may sound like a new approach, Misslead deals in self-consciously melodramatic soap-style storytelling, so you can look forward to sex, marriage, divorce and shopping, rather than 24's guns and girls who get shot or don't speak that much.

To give away the story would spoil the experience, but suffice to say you don't know who your father is, and getting information out of your flatulent, senile grandmother is proving difficult. The narrative is told entirely through conversations rather than cutscenes. Other than choosing between locations, you only get to decide who to speak to and what to say to them. Forget item gathering and staring blankly into an inventory screen: there's none of that here.

At each juncture in the conversation, you get to choose from a selection of phrases. These either lean towards being bitchy or mild-mannered. You have both devil and angel meters at the bottom of the screen, which are respectively filled up by making four snidey or nicey-nice comments. Once filled, you'll get a devil or angel token. Occasionally within the conversation, you can use one of these to propel the dialogue towards what you actually want to know.

Unsurprisingly therefore, Misslead's strong-point is its story. The twists and turns are spot-on. They might be predictable if you were to try and keep one step ahead of the game, but it has a way, much like a real TV soap, of disarming you so that you still end up stifling a gasp as the big story moments come around.

What's less strong is the actual writing. It's not that Misslead is full of grammatical errors. In fact, the game does remarkably well in this sense considering quite how much text it contains. The dialogue can feel rather workmanlike though, lacking that spark of wit and invention - the crucial element that can truly make a text-based game.

On top of this, the whole angel/devil token dynamic feels a little gimmicky. When used, rather than coming up with some sort of biting repartee to get to the core of your counterpart, your character merely spouts some bizarre and nonsensical aphorism that barely makes sense. It's not always clear how using one of these tokens helps you either because the move often seems counterintuitive when one of the standard responses looks far closer to what you need to know.

The effect is you often end up numb to the meanderings of the conversation, only snapping back when the next intriguing story twist is revealed. It doesn't help that the character visuals aren't all that expressive. Well-drawn and colourful, each also have a few varying expressions, but they could do with some over-the-top exuberance. We're dealing with a cartoon soap here, not real life. Botox injections are most certainly not required.

So Misslead: Li Mei is an interesting idea, but unfortunately it often mis-steps. We love the ridiculous twisty-turny plot, but navigating between each kitschy revelation just isn't interesting enough. Get in some new writers and Misslead season 2 could be this year's lifestyle hit, but if it carries on in the same vein, it's more likely to be axed.