I won't lie, I've always found Disney's Alice in Wonderland rather scary.
As a kid, its sweet-meets-sour universe was up there with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when it came to freaking me out. Many a nightmare was had in which giant packs of cards loomed menacingly towards me.
There have been plenty of takes on Lewis Carroll's book since Disney's own animated take - some pushing the fear factor even further - but, sadly, this revisiting is a little tepid. It never gels into the sort of game fitting as an unbirthday gift.
A puzzling platformerA large portion of blame has to lie with the fact that Alice in Wonderland: An Adventure Beyond the Mirror never really decides just what kind of game it wants to be.
Broadly speaking, it takes a platform approach. Controlling Alice as she makes her way through some beautifully animated stages is handled via virtual buttons that enable her to amble left or right and jump short distances.
Rather than forcing her to leap between platforms and over drops of death ad nauseum, there are mini-puzzles that break up the action. Essentially, this mean Alice wanders into areas where you have to piece together the elements at your disposal to open up the road ahead.
Some of the book's most famous characters are on call to help - a simple tap of Alice is all it takes to temporarily transform her into the character of your choice.
For example, the White Rabbit is so obsessed with keeping time that he can stop it, enabling you to freeze any moving objects and use them to your advantage. Early uses include halting moving platforms so Alice can jump on them to reach new areas, as well as suspending trees that shoot up and block your path.
Leap of faithClearing most of these challenges is pretty easy. Others, however, are a touch more complicated. It's questionable whether some of these puzzles go a little too far: it's often difficult to fathom just who you should use and when.
There's also the odd moment where the puzzles break down altogether. Though not exactly a pandemic, it's easy to get stuck in one of the first batch of levels because you misjudge a jump and end up stranded below ground level with no way of getting back up.
In such situations, resetting the level is the only option. Expect to do this often, because the game fails to register your position when you save, meaning you have to head back to the beginning of the stage when you pick it up at a later date.
Wonderland goes a wanderIt all adds to the feeling that there's something unrefined, almost disjointed, about Disney's game. The world Alice finds herself in isn't exactly the madcap place you might expect.
The puzzles too, though sometimes inventive, feel like a series of random hurdles rather than part of the levels themselves.
Though not a disaster, it does result in a game that feels like a developer ticking boxes without actually giving the end result much of a playtest. It's almost as if presentation - both in terms of visuals and the game's beautiful soundtrack - was given priority over gameplay.
A composite of the sterile and the haphazard, Alice in Wonderland: An Adventure Beyond the Mirror has the right atmosphere for an ode to Lewis Carroll, but feels a little light when it comes to content.