I hate movie games. You can always count on insatiable, bloodsucking Hollywood greed to produce an awful and exploitative game experience—the kind of slapdash effort only afforded to titles developed in a quarter of the normally two- to three-year cycle most legit games receive.
Everyone knows 99.9 percent of all movie games are shit—that’s why no one pays much attention to them. The game publishers are after one thing: the fat greenbacks of hapless consumers who would otherwise probably never pay any attention to the medium.
Where the Wild Things Are is a particularly special case. Say what you will about the moody feel of Spike Jonze’s bizarre reinterpretation of Maurice Sendak’s story, or the fact that the Wild Things were all kind of assholes, but at least the film maintained a respectable indie sensibility.
The Wild Things game is an abomination. It isn’t just another tired, forgettable movie tie-in. It’s nothing short of the consumerist rape and defilement of a beloved childhood classic that carries a dubious honor of something that never should’ve been made in the first place.
In fact, shoehorning an already unnecessary idea (commercializing the game) into the body of a crappy action/platformer goes against every ideal in Sendak’s original story—or even, for that matter, Jonze’s film. Max is a child with a wildly active imagination, to the point that he constructs his own world filled with his own creatures to befriend.
Whereas Max’s world is theoretically limited to only the span of his own ideas (this seems less the case in the film), the game is linear, and worse, soulless. No imagination or creativity required: this is just a mindless trip through uninspired levels performing even more uninspired tasks.
You know you’ve got a problem when Max uses his scepter as a melee weapon. Since when did life in the realm of the Wild Things become so violent? And if they’re so goddamn big and scary and powerful, why can’t they just, say, beat the tar out of the enemies that have suddenly appeared on the island?
Oh, but that ain’t the half of it, folks. Though it only takes minutes to realize the inherent fallacy in trying to wedge any Wild Things-relatable plot into generally standard game design mechanics, it isn’t long before the Wild Things are being attacked by black goo that’s threatening to overtake the land.
So in addition to the seen-it-all-before gameplay and the travesty of the game’s existence itself, there’s a derivative plot that has nothing to do with the book or the movie starring low-grade, gooey rip-offs of ICO‘s shadow creatures.
In the game’s minimal defense, the development team programmed the mechanics to be played as effectively as they could, and the visuals are competent. You can order the Wild Things to smash obstacles for you, which is an interesting idea. They’re still passive-aggressive (with no Freudian interpretation to speak of), but it’s a nice thought.
Still, a good chunk of the development team must’ve lost their souls in the making of this debacle. I’m not sure which saddens me more: thinking about the poor bastards forced to make the game, or the poor kids who will beg their parents for the game, unknowing.
But perhaps the worst thought of all is that, invariably, there are going to be some children whose parents’ use this as an electronic babysitter instead of actually reading them the storybook and helping to foster the kind of wellspring imagination Sendak imparted in the first place. And that is just beyond disgusting. Skip this and pick up the damn book instead.