It’s that time again folks! Movie tie-in time! Can you guess what the source material is this time? It’s Spiderwick Chronicles! Yes, after a number of media permutations, this modern fantasy adventure has arrived on the Xbox 360, just in time to coincide with the pre-spring blockbuster. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks braving the unseen realm of magic and mythical creatures, and emerged…mildly entertained. Spiderwick Chronicles treads a lot of old ground, and I found myself in need of highly caffeinated beverages to make it through conscious.

Spiderwick Chronicles follows three siblings: twins Simon and Jared and their older sister Mallory, as they explore their great uncle Arthur’s mansion and discover his field guide to magical creatures. Soon they’re catching fairies, solving family history and trying to keep the field guide out of the hands of ogres and goblins. In the game, you play as each of the three kids, and occasionally as their small friend, Thimbletack. The game plays out as a pretty standard adventure, which means all of the gameplay tropes are included and some are used a bit too much.

The game starts out with the usual tutorial. As the intrepid Jared explores the mansion, the basic controls are explained and you get a general idea of what’s going on. Jared finds the field guide and learns that the mansion has a mischievous boggart in it, and that he can turn the boggart into a helpful brownie by giving it honey. To do this, you have to find uncle Arthur’s study, smash open an old wall, collect crackers and honey, find a new house for the brownie, and assemble everything in the study. The end result is that you recruit Thimbletack the brownie.

Thimbletack retrieves a special seeing stone for Jared, and tells him to turn it into a monocle so that he can wear the stone and see magical creatures. The game switches control to Simon, who must locate the parts needed to construct a monocle and put them together in the study.

If you’re noticing a pattern here, you aren’t alone. It took me about five minutes to determine that this game was a sequence of fetch-quests, broken up by some combat. Most of your time is spent collecting items around the mansion and its grounds to progress. The only problem is that you can only collect an item once you need it; if you find something important earlier, your character will simply comment idly on it and leave it there. I could deal with this if the characters had a tiny Resident Evil inventory, but they can carry tons of stuff as long as they need it for the immediate objective.


Once the story gets going and all three kids have their main weapons, the fetching thins out a bit and there’s more emphasis on the combat. Jared wields a baseball bat and a slingshot, Mallory is a fencing champion, and Simon is kind of a wimp, so he at first he uses evasive tactics like throwing fruit to distract goblins, but later equips a homemade squirt gun that fires a goblin killing solution. Depending on where you are in the story, the game chooses what character you play as, so you can’t switch on the fly.

Even when you’re out fighting the goblin hordes, there’s still a lot of stuff to collect. The game lets you catch sprites and fairies and store up to three in your inventory. These little creatures have various helpful effects, like restoring health, increasing weapon power, or throwing up a ring of enemy-repelling toadstools. Capturing these little buggers is kind of tricky, as you must nab them in a net and then paint them into the guide before they escape. To paint them you run a small brush around on a page of the guide, using the analog stick to reveal as much of th...