The Spiderwick Chronicles is a game based on the movie of the same name. The movie is based on a set of books of the same name. I haven't read the books, so I'm not sure how close any of this is to the source material, but the game is extremely close to the movie (at least so far).

Mallory, Jared and Simon Grace arrive (along with their mom) to live in the dusty estate of their Aunt Lucinda (who is not in residence). Mallory is the older sister with a fencing medal (so you know she's good with a sword). Simon is the cerebral twin — your go-to guy for inventions. Jared is the more aggressive twin, more than happy to get physical with his baseball bat and definitely most likely to leap headfirst into danger.

On their first night at the estate, Jared can't settle down for the night. He does what any bored and adventurous child would do — promptly goes poking around the nooks and crannies of the house. You won't be going outside just yet — even he has more sense than that. Eventually Jared finds (if you do a decent job of looking around) the hidden study of Great Uncle Arthur Spiderwick (Lucinda's father). Jared opens the field guide, ignoring the prominent warning, and learns about the unseen world around us.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is clearly designed for the younger gamer. The rating is E10+, but I would probably let my 8-year-old play if she were so inclined. Items of importance are clearly marked. You can't pick up anything until you are in the quest that needs it. Each quest explicitly lays out what you need to progress. While it helps if you remember where you've seen things (that you'll need to go back for later), nothing has been completely hidden.

There is a lot of combat in The Spiderwick Chronicles. You won't be slaying spiders (since the game is named for Arthur Spiderwick, not some monstrous spider queen), but you will be fighting a nearly unending stream of goblins. Mallory has her sword, Jared has his bat and a slingshot, and Simon makes a special weapon as part of one of the quests. With the hand-to-hand weapons, you either wave the Wii-mote around (like swinging a sword or bat) or hit the A button. You use the B button to target things with the slingshot and then hit A to let fly your missile. You'll just use the A button for Simon's weapon.

Along with combat (and some task-solving), you'll be collecting faeries. Don't worry — it's live catch and release, and no actual faeries are hurt during the collecting process. After you've successfully netted your faerie, you have to paint a picture of the faerie for the book to complete the capture. This consists of holding the A button and basically "painting with water" with the Wii-mote to make the picture appear. You have to fill in the picture before the timer runs out in order to capture the faerie. You can have up to three faeries captured at one time. Each faerie has a special power you can use to help your adventure — healing, combat, running speed, etc.

You adjust the camera angle by holding the C on the nunchuk and moving it around. I actually struggled the most with the camera in this game. Sometimes if you get too close to a solid object, like a wall or giant rock, the camera angle shifts so that you can't see yourself, and this is an issue if you're in combat and can't see what you're trying to hit. I ended up not using the C/nunchuk combo for camera after a bit. I found that by holding B on the Wii-mote, you can adjust your view by moving the little stick on the nunchuk. When you let go of B, your view is adjusted accordingly. This was much more accurate for me but still doesn't help if you're in combat when the view gets messed up.

Movement is with the little stick on the nunchuk. I learned a very important thing about moving in some of the platform stages. You'll find that with the camera issue, sometimes the camera is not going to be pointed the same way that your character is facing. When you move, the direction is relative to camera-facing, NOT character-facing. I can't tell you how many times I stepped off a narrow ledge and had to retrace my steps because of this.

You'll play through the main story as four different characters: Jared, Simon, Mallory and Thimbletack, though Jared seems to be my primary character at this point. As you progress, you'll find yourself playing a specific character. This is not something you'll choose. Apparently after you've solved the main story, you open up some additional quests, and at that point, you can pick your character, but I'm not at that point yet.

Between each chapter of your adventure, you'll have a cutscene from the movie with a narrator bringing you up to speed (if you've somehow lost track of what's going on). As a player, I'm definitely on rails as far as the order of events from the movie. Between each chapter, though, I do have a fair amount of leeway to explore the areas that are open to me.

Camera issues aside, I've been pretty happy with the graphics in Spiderwick. The goblins are scary but not too scary for the younger gamer. The environment is nice. I like the touch of little dust clouds billowing up as you walk through the house. The faeries are pretty and sparkly. The characters are decent enough likenesses. The cutscene movie footage is fine. I really liked the little watercolor pictures of faeries you see during the capture process. They're very nicely done.

While I generally don't like games that don't let you save whenever you want, I'm more accepting of this with Spiderwick, because the game saves, and checkpoints are frequent enough that I haven't lost a huge amount of ground if I fail at a task. At first I was worried that some of the checkpoints happened when my health was awfully low. I've played games before where these saves are completely unviable. You restore to that point, but you have no hope of survival. This was not the case with Spiderwick. Oh, I also want to mention that you can have multiple profiles within the game. If you have multiple family members that want to play, at least four of them can each have their own save game.

I like how failure states are handled in Spiderwick, given that it's designed more for the younger gamer. Yes, you can take enough damage to kill your current character, but there's nothing graphically disturbing in the death, and then you have the option to exit the game or continue from the last checkpoint. I was pleasantly surprised to see that when you do restore from that checkpoint, you're back to full health.

The game box has a little "2" on the Wii-mote picture indicating it can be a multiplayer game. This is slightly deceptive. The main storyline can be played only in single-player mode. Apparently as you play in single player, you unlock minigames that can then be played in the multiplayer mode. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but don't get the game thinking you can have two kids at the controls at the same time in the regular game.

I've enjoyed playing The Spiderwick Chronicles. I did get frustrated in some parts, but I was not frustrated enough to give up and go away. My daughter hasn't played yet, but she did sit and watch me play, offering commentary and basically backseat driving. The parts with Thimbletack (and my accidentally making him run into walls) made her laugh the most. The puzzles in Spiderwick aren't going to challenge an experienced gamer, but I think they're just right for the younger player. This has been one of the better movie-based games I've played. Yes, you're pretty much following the movie storyline (there are some differences), but I think you'll enjoy the journey.