Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Peeves leaves puddles of glowing ectoplasm on the flagstones, and the only cure is Skurge, a spell whose entire purpose is janitorial. That detail says a lot about how this adaptation works. Rather than string together set pieces from the film, it treats Hogwarts as a building with corridors, locked doors and staircases that reward walking down them, then hands you a small toolkit of spells that double as keys.

Argonaut built the PS2 version from scratch rather than porting the PS1 game, and the difference shows in the geography. The castle is one connected space, more or less, dotted with side passages, hidden rooms and Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans in place of coins. Beans buy Wizard Cards from the Weasley twins, and the cards are the collection that keeps you poking at scenery long after the plot has moved on. Lessons teach spells through short minigames — Rictusempra for combat, Spongify for reaching high ledges, Expelliarmus for the Dueling Club — and each new one quietly unlocks parts of the map you had to walk past earlier.

The rest is a tour of the book's greatest hits, sanded down for a young audience. Gnome-tossing at the Burrow, greenhouse work with mandrakes, Quidditch matches played on rails rather than in open air. None of it is difficult. Combat amounts to holding a lock-on and firing spells at spiders and pixies until they pop, and the platforming is forgiving to the point of being weightless. This is a game built so a nine-year-old finishes it, and it never pretends otherwise.

What holds up is the atmosphere. The lighting is warm and gloomy in roughly the right proportions, the score borrows Williams' themes without wearing them out, and the load-free stretches of castle give the place a continuity that later, glossier Potter games traded away for open-world sprawl. Voice work is mostly not the film cast, which grates at first and then stops mattering.

It is a licensed tie-in, and it carries all the compromises that implies: short, easy, structurally repetitive across its four school terms. But it is a tie-in made by people who understood that the appeal was the school itself, not the plot. Years on, the pleasure is not in beating the basilisk. It is in finding a corridor you had not noticed and a card you did not own.