Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is unsurprisingly based on the film of the same name starring Jim Carrey, which in turn is based on a series of novels from British author Lemony Snicket. The three Baudelaire children – Sunny, Klaus and Violet - awake one morning to hear their parents died in a fire during the night. Arrangements have been made, however, for the trio to live with the mysterious actor Count Olaf, a relative they've never met. Count Olaf is an eccentric, sinister fellow who doesn't seem to have any of the children's interests at heart, and the books, video game and film all follow the children's adventures to escape from Count Olaf's clutches.

It's not that Amaze Entertainment has crafted anything particularly terrible with their interactive adaptation. On the other hand, it's actually fairly remarkable that the game has turned out as well it as did; there is a recognizable attempt to create a cohesive gameplay formula from level to level that succeeds to a certain degree and the in-game characters mimic the film's take on the book's characters is well-done. Jim Carrey actually voices Count Olaf in the game, there are no voice-alikes in this game, which is a surprise, even for a high-profile game like this.

The developers have divided gameplay concepts between the three Baudelaire children, and it creates a decent amount of variety. Violet is a genius inventor who can create anything out of everything, allowing the children to escape from dangerous situations thanks to her ingenuity. You pick up different items to create inventions, and all three characters will receive her creations. Klaus might receive a powerful boxing glove while Sunny straps on a fire extinguished-based rocket booster. Klaus, however, is mostly useless, delegated to using Violet's inventions and helping Violet out with miniscule tasks. Unlike Klaus, Sunny is extremely tiny and can fit through holes that lead to the game's numerous 2D adventure stages, which are admittedly much more fun than the 3D ones. It's telling of the state of the medium when we're actually nostalgic about side scrolling movie video games. Last Action Hero, anyone?

As the game progresses, Violet comes up with more inventions and new environments are explored, but the underlying concepts do not change. There is no single element of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events that doesn't work; I'll implied that it's all dreadfully boring. Gamers are doing the same types of events repeatedly, and there's really no thought process involved whatsoever. There's an attempt to toss in some creativity with the invention creation process, but more often than not, all of the items are available in the room that requires the item and putting the pieces together only asks you to flip an item around and tap A. The entire adventure has a been there, done that sort of feel, and even though the characters are surely charming in the film, they don't carry across to a video game format as well. You can engage with Harry Potter because the characters and environments are so fantastically out of this world, but it doesn't click as well here. Previous fans of the series may disagree on this point to an extent, but there's little argument for the overall blandness to be found here in the gameplay execution and the overall visual elements. Everything just screams, "I'm part of a movie tie-in game."

An element of sympathy goes out to the designers at Amaze Entertainment because working on this type of adaptation can't be any fun, but someone has to do it, and there's been a valiant effort made here. The result is simply a boring, run of the mill adventure that likely would not have turned out much different if there were six months tacked onto the development time or another developer was at the helm. There's a limiting story setup here, and unfortunately, it seems like Count Olaf won this round; Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events just does not work well as a video game.