The Golden Compass

Oh boy, I have been dreading this for a long time.  It’s time to talk about one of the scourges of the gaming world: licensed movie tie-ins.  

There was a point in time where you absolutely knew any game based on a movie was going to be complete trash.  Developers would slap together something as quickly as they could, throw on a label and flood store shelves with it.  These were almost universally shameless cash grabs designed to separate gamers, and their unassuming parents and relatives, from their hard earned money.  Fortunately, that has changed to a degree as quality control has become better.  But it still happens.

First, a little bit about the source material for today’s game.  In true “Street Fighter: The Movie” style, we have a video game that’s based on a movie that’s based on a book, the first in Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series.  I remember reading the book when I was younger and thinking it was alright, but I never read any of the sequels and I’m not overly familiar with the series.  I did go to a premiere screening of the film when I was in college, but it was more of a “yeah, sure I’ll go” than an “OMG I can’t wait to see the Golden Compass movie.”  I also remember getting my money back because the audio cut out for like two seconds and some old lady that was there complained.  They refunded everyone in the theatre. 

But brief technical difficulties at a random movie theatre in Connecticut were far from the biggest controversy surrounding “The Golden Compass” film.  I try to avoid talking about religion here, but it’s impossible to ignore the critical undertones of the book.  Well I guess it was possible, because that’s what the film decided to do.  At least at first.  But they didn’t want to deviate too much from the novels.  So they put some of it back in.  So instead of: 

1) Just following the book and aggravating religious groups 

- or -

2) Completely cutting the religious elements and aggravating censorship and secular organizations,

they decided to go half way and aggravated both.  Middling reviews didn’t help and the film lost a bunch of money at the U.S. box office (though it did perform much better internationally).  New Line Cinema decided to cancel the planned adaptations of the next two novels (“The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass”) and the series, along with the media blitz that came with it, was dead.

And part of that media blitz was the video game, which was the point of this blog to begin with.  It was made by Sega and released on several different platforms, but the PS3 version is the one I played.  It follows the movie, which follows the book, which follows a young girl named Lyra Belacqua, an orphan entrusted with a device called an Aleitheometer.  This device looks like (surprise!) a golden compass and allows Lyra to see the truth.  This device is considered very dangerous to the Magisterium, a religious group that controls much of the known world.  As if that’s not enough, Lyra’s friends keep disappearing, kidnapped by mysterious entities the children call “Gobblers.”  With her compass in hand, Lyra and her Daemon (I almost forgot, in this world every person has an external incarnation of their conscious called a Daemon that follows them everywhere) Pan embark on a quest that will see them learn just how important they are to bringing down the Magisterium.

That actually sounds like a pretty good plot for a video game.  And you know, it kind of is.  This could have really made an excellent adventure game built on exploration and puzzle solving, or an action game where you beat down swarms of Gobblers, or even a stealth game where you need to hide from them.  Unfortunately, Sega tried to shoehorn all of these things into one title and it doesn’t quite work.  

You start the game riding atop Iorek Burnison (a big-ass polar bear voiced by Magneto) battling wolves and other enemies.  And its okay, but then you get off and go it alone as Lyra.  You use Pan’s various shape shifting abilities to swing, climb and explore and its okay, but then you find yourself back in the present times at Lyra’s home, Jordan College.  You swing about the rooftops and again you use Pan to explore, relying on his scanning ability to help you determine where to go and what to do, and its okay, but then the game changes again.

Once you start meeting other people, you have to manipulate them into giving you the information you need.  This means playing a series of mini-games to ensure they have a favorable opinion of Lyra.  The games aren’t particularly interesting or difficult, so they often feel like a waste of time.  You can collect items to help make them easier, but they are rarely necessary.  As you can see, The Golden Compass quickly breaks down into a mishmash of styles that don’t necessarily play well together.  

None of the individual sections are all that bad, they are just disjointed.   I don’t hate any of them, but they really should have focused on one style.  Honestly, the most fun sections are the exploration/detective sections.  Once Lyra learns to read the compass, you gain the opportunity to answer various journal questions.  The compass has more than 30 symbols, each with 3 meanings.  It’s up to you to decipher the meanings by finding the objects in the world and scanning them with Pan.  It’s actually pretty fun, but once you get going it just gets broken up by some mediocre platforming or stupid mini game.  The controls are just meh, I’ve certainly played games that were worse but the jumping is wonky and the hit detection isn’t great.

The worst part of this whole package though is the graphics.  Some of the backgrounds are okay and a few locales look downright beautiful, like the college.  But the character models are horrendous, they look like they are from a PS1 game.  Lyra looks like a possessed Raggedy Ann doll and the camera always seems to have you looking at her terrifying, lifeless face.  

The Golden Compass had a pretty star studded cast, so the awful character models stand out even more because they are supposed to look like real people anyone would recognize. 

That’s supposed to be Nicole Kidman? And Daniel Craig? And Sam Elliot?  Yeesh.  Any one of these people could have sued Sega for butchering their likenesses.  And they would have won.  At least the voices are okay.  Side note, why does Sam Elliot keep coming into my life?  Ever since I randomly watched “The Ranch” I feel like he is in anything I watch, even the kid movies my son is obsessed with.  Now he’s in video games too?

Sorry for the tangent, I feel like I’ve been going on those a lot lately.  Besides, I wouldn’t have been able to say much about this game anyway.  It’s far from the worst I have ever played and it’s certainly not bad for a licensed title.  But that isn’t saying much.  Graphics aren’t everything, but this looks like an early PS2 game.  It really takes you out of the element, especially because the character models very clearly fail to represent the people they are supposed to.  

There was some real potential here, but it feels like Sega just took teams that were working on four or five different games and told them to consolidate their different projects into one.  That’s why games like this are usually bad, it’s more about getting something, anything with “The Golden Compass” on the cover into stores at the same time as the movie than it is about making an interesting game.  Again, it could have been worse, but there is really nothing worth going back to today.  I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, so if I were going to rank the three different mediums, it would be 1. Book 2. Game 3. Movie.  The movie was below average and the book was pretty solid, so that makes the game definitively mediocre

5/10