American Girl Kit: A Tree House of My Own (Windows)

With the film release of Kit Kittredge: American Girl based on the Valerie Tripp book Meet Kit: An American Girl 1934, the American Girl doll Kit Kittredge has become all the rage. This game, AMERICAN GIRL KIT: A TREE HOUSE OF MY OWN, features Kit, but in a limited manner. In this game, Kit's tree house (which is prominently used in the movie version) has not yet been built and the focus of the game is for Kit to earn six tools so that she can build her tree house. Kit earns the tools by helping six people by playing six casual games. In one, you help Kit's mom make pancakes for the boarders by combining ingredients and cooking them in a limited time. This gameplay is very similar to the play patterns that made the Cooking Mama series so popular. The other games include a word scramble, a side-scrolling game where you collect musical notes, a shoot-balloons game where the goal is to clear a screen of colored balloons by matching colors, a catch-dropping-laundry-into-a-basket game, and one in which you draw circles around moving chickens.

Since these casual games each offer 20 levels of gameplay, after you have earned the tools by completing the first level, you can earn decorations for the tree house if you keep working your way through the levels. Our testers didn't consider this much motivation to keep playing, and only kept playing those games that they were interested in. The falling-laundry game wasn't much fun, but the shoot-the-balloons game rocked. And you have to like word scrambles to keep working through that game.

Wrapping a Kit Kittredge storyline around this series of casual games doesn't work very well because the game doesn't focus on Kit's story. She is a plucky heroine who rises above her difficult circumstances of facing financial ruin when her father loses his job during the Great Depression. Basing a Kit game around playing arcade games just doesn't feel right. It trivializes Kit's powerful story and character and seems like a poor use of a great license.

Available on: Windows
Not available online
Genre: Girl
Developer: THQ, Valusoft
Released on: June 30, 2008
Price: 20
ESRB Rating: E