Disney Princess - Enchanted Journey

The clever bit arrives before the first level: you do not play a princess. You build a girl of your own, pick her hair and dress, name her, and then get sent off to visit Cinderella, Belle, Jasmine and Ariel as a guest. For a licensed tie-in aimed squarely at seven-year-olds, that is a smarter framing than it needed to be. The fantasy on offer is not being Belle, it is being invited into Belle's castle and told you are needed there.

What you actually do is gentle collect-a-thon work. Each princess's world has been drained of colour or order by a vague magical blight, and you restore it by waving a wand at scenery, gathering gems and completing small errands for the resident cast. There is no combat, no fail state worth the name, and almost nothing that could frustrate a child playing alone. Movement is slow and floaty, the camera does most of the framing for you, and the wand is essentially a single-button interaction key dressed in sparkles.

Technically it is a late-generation PS2 title with no interest in showing off. Environments are broad and clean, lit brightly, with the flat surfaces and low detail counts of a game built to run on several machines at once. The princesses themselves are rendered reasonably and voiced by the usual replacement cast rather than the film originals, which registers immediately to anyone who knows the movies and not at all to the intended player.

The honest criticism is that it is thin. Four worlds, a repeated loop, a couple of hours of content stretched by backtracking and by an unlockable wardrobe that functions as the real reward structure. Kids who care about dressing the character will get more out of it than kids who want somewhere to go. An adult looking for the kind of craft Disney's action licences occasionally managed in this era will not find it here.

Still, there is something worth noticing in how deliberately unthreatening it is. Games for very young girls in 2007 were mostly minigame collections and quizzes; this one at least builds continuous spaces and lets a child walk around in them at her own pace. It is a small kindness of design, and it outlasts the sparkle effects.