FLIPS Mr Gum (DS)

At first glance, FLIPS Mr Gum appears nothing more than a kids book, pushed onto a platform that has more chance of being used than its paper counterpart. Look a bit closer, however, and it soon appears that the newest FLIPS title is more than meets the eye.

Sure, it's colourful, there's no shortage of pictures, and at a little over 300 pages per book, you could be forgiven for dismissing the stories as for pre-teens only without even reading them.

Mr Gum is the world's grumpiest man with a grudge against children, animals, fun and laughter just to name a few things. In fact, the only things that Mr Gum likes are sleeping, glaring at people and his garden. In short, Mr Gum behaves exactly like most people do before they have had their morning coffee.

All of the stories follow the same pattern; Mr Gum is evil and nasty to anyone and anything (especially children – think the way that any of the adult characters in Roald Dahl stories act), before being defeated by someone or something doing good. So far, so basic – each story behaves in the way that you would expect a children's tale too, driving home the moral of the story (be nice, or you'll end up like Mr Gum). The clever part comes when you realise that each of the stories is written with the twists and language quirks that look like they have been taken directly off the page of a Neil Gaiman or Douglas Adams book.

The design works well to match the tone of the game; pages are covered in splashes of colour, you're never more than one or two pages away from a cartoon or two, and even the scroll-bars at the bottom of the page have been covered in colour and pictures, which makes a refreshing change from the plain design of previous FLIPS titles. Animations and sound effects are also scattered liberally across the pages to keep the reading experience from getting stale.

Like other FLIPS titles, there are items to collect within each book. Each collectible can be used to complete one of two areas.

The first is the “messy room”. There is a different room for each book, which can be completed by placing items collected within the book into the room. Doing this will fill up a score bar at the bottom of the page which will, when full, unlock a bonus book to read.

The second area is the “soundboard”. As the name suggests, this is just a selection of sound bites taken from lines said within the story by Mr Gum. There is no particular reward for getting every quote on the soundboard, other than the childish pleasure of hearing a line that you particularly like and playing it repeatedly, much to the annoyance of anyone else who is around to hear.

Collecting these items is less tedious than it has been in previous titles, possibly due to the shortened length of the book, but perhaps also due in part to the realisation that the intended audience isn’t going to have the patience to scour through the book to collect item after item. Each item appears as an animated image on the page that shakes to show that it is not part of the illustration and requires clicking on.

Unlike other FLIPS titles, bonus content is unlocked purely by completing the Messy Room extras for each book rather than sharing content across systems, a relief for those who had previously missed out on FLIPS bonus content by not knowing anyone else with a DS console.

Conclusion

For the intended audience, FLIPS Mr Gum hits the nail on the head by using the DS console to balance reading and interactivity that will reward players for seeing the story through to the end. And for those readers who are slightly older? The DS provides the perfect way to read and play without a pesky cover giving away that what you are reading is essentially a cleverly-constructed kids book.