The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia... the great literary sagas adapted for the big screen have been on the rise for a few years. Since December 5, the series At the Crossroads of the Worlds, by Philip Pullman, has joined the procession with the transposition of its first volume, The Northern Kingdoms, under the title La Boussole d'Or. We follow the adventures of young Lyra, an orphan from Jordan College in London, in a world close to ours but in which the soul of each human being is housed in a small animal that always accompanies him, a Daemon. A world that holds dark secrets that the Magisterium, a sort of world government, wants to keep at all costs... even if it means kidnapping children to subject them to mysterious experiments.
Don't lose the North
The context is set and, unsurprisingly, the game follows the plot of the film very closely, allowing itself some extrapolations necessary for the gameplay. On leaving the cinema, and before turning on your console, you say to yourself that there is tremendous potential in this universe for a video game. Indeed, on paper, La Boussole d'Or seems rather tempting. We control Lyra, of course, accompanied by Pan, her faithful Daemon. She can, thanks to him, overcome various obstacles depending on the form he takes. In laziness, he allows him to hang on and swing from bars. The cat can make it climb on certain surfaces (canvas, net... the first one who says curtains takes one!), the eagle makes it hover for a few seconds and finally the ferret analyzes the elements of the decor and gnaws on the ropes. On the other hand, as in the film, the little one is given an alethiometer, the famous golden compass. This dial comprising 36 symbols and three hands, allows you to know the truth about everything. But there is a catch: you have to know how to ask the right question by combining three symbols, each with three possible meanings, and then interpret the answer. We will therefore be led in the adventure to handle the machine. Depending on your discoveries (items to pick up or analyzes of certain objects thanks to the ferret), you will be more or less helped to ask the question, to choose from your journal. Often, you have a basic symbol already explained, and will have to guess which are the others. If you are told “hospitality” and you don't have the corresponding symbol, it's up to you to find the right one, in this case the Madonna. It's sometimes very obvious, sometimes a little more far-fetched, but always logical. And fortunately, the game will be satisfied with two exact symbols to display the answer. Answer that must be read by holding a cursor in the middle of the compass and then pressing the buttons that appear.
Totally confused
For the rest, La Boussole d'Or is a fairly classic action/adventure game: you explore scenery, you overcome obstacles and you chat with the people you meet. Since little Lyra is very clever, she can bamboozle her interlocutors to get what she wants: bonus item, information, service necessary for progress... Obviously, we're counting on you to help her. It is therefore a question of succeeding in a series, more or less long depending on the difficulty, of mini-games: avoiding obstacles, reproducing a series of keys, catching objects by moving the stick... It's never very difficult , but the youngest can make the task easier by using objects found during the adventure to slow down time, for example. Finally, there comes a moment, like in the movie, where you team up with Iorek, an armored polar bear. We then take control of it for movement and combat.
On paper, we were saying, all this seems very promising. Alas, the implementation turns out to be far from up to par. It starts with a mediocre realization. We tested the Xbox 360 version, and it gives off the unpleasant impression of being in front of a quick adaptation of a PlayStation 2 game. Simplistic textures, stiff animations, summary modeling... We are far, very far, from the great visual universe of the film and what the console is capable of. Not to mention the display and collision bugs that look very bad... On the other hand, we can welcome an option that we would like to see present in more games, especially film adaptations: the independent choice of the language of the subs. -titles and voices. As for the gameplay, it ultimately looks like a clumsy assembly of mini-games, resulting in an obvious lack of consistency. For its part, the ultra-rigid gameplay makes the exploration phases quite painful. While she is full of life and energy in the film (remarkable performance by little Dakota Blue Richards!), Lyra seems to be nothing more than a clumsy puppet here... As for the various trials, it is difficult to find real interest. The use of the alethiometer is not bad, but may put off the youngest. Regarding the dialogues and mini-games associated with it, their lack of imagination and difficulty only give us the impression of being only a formality intended to artificially slow down the pace of progression. Finally, we also feel in the narration a kind of strange wavering. Despite excerpts from the film, we pass very quickly on important moments of the scenario to dwell on others much more anecdotal. So it's not obvious that everything is very clear for anyone who hasn't seen the feature film before... Lack of time, lack of resources? This failure surely has an explanation, but unfortunately as players/consumers, what matters to us is the result, not the intentions. And from this point of view, it's hard to recommend La Boussole d'Or. Especially when at the end of the year it is not the big games, whether intended for gamers or the general public, that are missing.
