You play Aymun (a pumpkin-eyed humanoid), who begins the game locked in a cell with the mouse Justino. You must locate the loose mattress spring, then use it on the door to pick the lock. Outside the cell is a dungeon corridor, but before you walk down the corridor, you must solve several multiple-choice math equations by clicking on the flying bat whose number matches the answer.

Once you escape the Gulfi pirate’s lair, you fall into a sea serpent and must figure out how to get expelled. Cast out into the sea, the Captana and her Beady Pirate crew pick you up. Once you save her ship from attack, she rewards you by setting you free on the island where the Mechon pirates have docked. Work your way into their treasure trove, grab the sacred stone, then run for it!

Aymun combines two types of games. One game is a standard “figure out what needs doing, and what object you need to do it” adventure game. The other is a series of wide-ranging multiple-choice challenges — for example, matching geometric shapes to their description, identifying types of pronouns, completing mathematical equations, and matching seasonal images to the correct season.

CMY is attempting a praiseworthy goal — to create non-violent, educational games, especially for kids in elementary grades. While they get an A (or maybe a B+) for effort, the resulting game grades no higher than a C.

That is, the resulting grade in English. Aymun and another recent CMY game ,Abby and Gordonne’s Secret, were originally created in Spanish and CMY has translated them into English. CMY has similar plans for Don Quixote.

(Quick side note: the entire game is available in Spanish as well as English, and you can switch back and forth anytime you want. This is probably a good opportunity to practice Spanish … for those of you who know any Spanish. However, if the dialogue is as colloquial in Spanish as it is in English — and it seems to be — don’t expect it to closely match classroom Spanish.)

The English version suffers a bit from the translation (as you can see from this article’s intro, taken from the game). The text has frequent spelling, punctuation, grammatical and syntactic errors — about one per screen. Some are left untranslated from the original Spanish (for example, Spanish places an upside-down exclamation point at the beginning of an exclaimed sentence, but English doesn’t; laughter in English is written “hahaha,” not “jajaja”; English spells it “barrel” and “gallon,” not “barril” and “galon”). Others are simply incorrect translations: “I’m leaving with a fresh wind” instead of “I’m leaving to get some fresh air,” and “Prize!” rather than “Score!”

Is this important? In other games, maybe not, but Aymun is supposed to be educating while it entertains, and so the existence of such errors teaches the wrong thing.

In addition, some of the puzzles have problems. Some are obscure: is the metatarsal a bone or a muscle? in what season do large green fuzzy balls appear?. Some don’t translate well: it may be challenging to match singular and plural forms in Spanish, but the English version just adds an “s” to each singular word, making the matches trivial. Some are simply wrong: when asked for the divisors of 63, you can choose from several answers, including “21” and “9.” Both are divisors of 63, but choosing “21” gives you a wrong-answer beep. 15/6 divided by 1/3 is 45/6, not 5/6.

With all these negatives, why don’t we just fail Aymun and move on? Well ... because it’s fun. The dialogue is (mostly) amusing. The adventure puzzles are reasonable but rarely obvious. There are more puzzles, and more intricate puzzles, the higher the grade level you’ve chosen. Justino is along to give you hints when you need them, and his hints at the first grade level are much more obvious and immediate than his hints at the sixth grade level.

The multiple-choice challenges don’t scale as well (some of the first grade challenges are way beyond most first graders, and some of the sixth grade challenges are trivially easy). In addition, they rarely bear any connection to the adventure. However, this doesn’t matter as much to Jesse or Will as it does to critical-editor Dad — they still had fun solving them.

Aymun is a short game — it takes no more than an afternoon or two, unless you replay it at various grade levels. Although most of the game is spoken, if your young scholar doesn’t read, you’ll need to sit nearby to read the screen from time to time. The music is nice — appropriate and not too intrusive. Unlike many other game assistants, Justino is also appropriate and not too intrusive. The graphics are basic, but they fit the game well.

Will and Jesse give Aymun two enthusiastic thumbs up. It’s fun and it’s adventurous. They plan on playing it through a couple more times, at different grade levels. Aymun himself is suitably weird, especially his voice and his big pumpkin eyes. We’re looking forward to similar fun with Abby and Gordonne’s Secret.