The Famous Five Adventure Game

This highly interactive game has kids reading and deciphering clues to solve a mystery. The premise here is fun, and kids really do feel like the protagonist as they explore areas, decide how to talk to witnesses, and complete mini-games to gather evidence. Kids must be methodical, logical, and patient throughout a relatively long-lasting game to successfully find the correct culprit. If kids jump the gun and accuse the wrong person though, it's nice that they don't lose anything and can just continue playing to gather more clues. It's also pretty cool to read a story whose plot follows the exact steps you took towards solving the mystery. On the downside, the app's reaction time is sometimes slow, which can result in frustration when kids try to respond in a certain way but the app doesn't recognize it. And, though a single game can last a while, subsequent games use the same structure only with different details, which may start to feel repetitive. Finally, kids have so much control over so much of the story, it would be nice if they also could control the notes in their detective book rather than having the characters automatically come to conclusions and the notebook auto populate. If kids have gathered all the clues, there's little actual logic that kids need to use to find the culprit. But, overall, The Famous Five Adventure Game is unique and fantastically fun.