Disney-Pixar Ratatouille

A colander becomes a climbing frame. A dropped ladle becomes a bridge. The smartest thing Heavy Iron Studios did with Pixar's cooking film was take the size difference seriously: because Remy is a rat, a Parisian kitchen stops being scenery and turns into a vertical obstacle course of shelves, hanging pans and gaps under the counter. The studio had already built two SpongeBob platformers on this template, and the muscle memory shows in how readable the geometry is.

Remy handles like a collect-a-thon hero with a rodent twist. He runs along narrow ledges with his tail out for balance, scrambles up wall seams, swings on hooks and shoves crates into place, and cheese scattered through each stage keeps the exploration honest rather than decorative. Human cooks are the real hazard. Get spotted in the kitchen and there is no health bar negotiation, just a broom or a boot and a restart at the last checkpoint, which pushes the levels closer to timid, route-planning stealth than the film's slapstick suggests.

Between chapters the game leans on cooking and chase minigames, most of them short, some of them repeated more often than they can bear. That is the honest weakness of the licensed structure: THQ needed the movie's beats hit in order, so the pacing lurches from a genuinely well-built rooftop sequence to a stirring-and-timing exercise that exists because the film has a stirring scene. The PS2 version also carries the platform's usual compromises next to the same year's Xbox 360 build, with flatter lighting and a shorter draw distance, though the art holds together because the source design is so strong on silhouette.

What still works is the movement. The controls are tight, the camera behaves in the tight indoor spaces where most tie-ins fall apart, and the sewer and rooftop stages have a genuine sense of speed and height. Nothing here is going to unsettle a Jak or a Ratchet, and the difficulty is calibrated for a player who might be nine years old. But it is a competent, unhurried 3D platformer at a time when the genre was thinning out on consoles, and it earns the license rather than trading on it.

Play it now and the surprise is how little of the film's charm is missing. Remy's scale gag survives the translation intact, and a kitchen you can only cross by rope, hook and countertop remains a better idea than most movie games ever get near.