The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Traveller's Tales spent 2005 making two games with the same skeleton. One was LEGO Star Wars, which changed the studio's fortunes for the next fifteen years. The other was this Narnia tie-in, and once you notice the resemblance you cannot stop seeing it: a party of characters you cycle through with a shoulder button, each with one ability the level was built around, a second player able to grab a pad at any moment, and shiny things scattered everywhere to sweep up on the way through.

The four Pevensie children divide the work neatly. Peter swings a sword and does most of the fighting, Susan handles range with her bow, Lucy squeezes into gaps the others cannot reach, and Edmund fills in where a second blade is needed. Levels are corridors dressed as Narnian landscape, and the puzzles rarely go further than working out which sibling to be standing in front of an obstacle. One character gives another a leg-up to a ledge. Somebody shoots a rope. It is the LEGO grammar before the LEGO games codified it, without the humour that made that grammar sing.

Combat is where the difference in tone shows. Enemies are wolves, goblins and the Witch's soldiers, and they come in small waves that you clear with a light combo string and the occasional team attack. It is soft. Hits land with no weight, the camera drifts in tight spaces, and death is barely a punishment. That is a deliberate choice for a film licence aimed at children who had just come out of the cinema, and it means an adult will walk through the whole thing without ever having to think hard about a fight.

What it does get right is the film's texture. The snowball fights, the frozen river, the thaw creeping across the world as the story turns — the game follows the movie's beats closely enough that the changing seasons actually register as progress rather than set dressing. Character models are stiff and the voice work is mostly a summary of what you just saw on screen, but the art direction understands that Narnia is a place before it is a plot.

As licensed work goes it is competent and unusually generous with its co-op, which was still not standard for this kind of release in 2005. Play it now and it functions best as an artefact: the studio's shared-ability, two-player template running in a game nobody remembers, months before the same idea landed on a Star Destroyer and turned into an empire.