Winnie the Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventure

Pooh is hangry and Christopher Robin is useless, so how do we sublimate our foundational Maslow's needs kids? That's right: through a plodding, linear... Metal Gear Solid fetch quest with training wheels? Apparently, Ubisoft's French development subcontractors identified slow-motion stealth segments (read: pathing puzzles) as a developmentally appropriate challenge and ran with the IP. And there's plenty of currency to collect while maguffining: the template is really for everyone. Who-hoo young parents in the early aughts! Ya failed the Zsters!

Outside of the aforementioned Tiggerific avoidacrawl naps, you're navigating a consistent set of maps across stages (nice idea, this enduring world... they almost had something), reminiscing about the Poohbah's good friends' birthday parties as you unlock Snow Mountain (way to imagineer a name Disney), a swamp of some sort?, a garden, and, um, a boring cave. In so doing, your (inner? please don't give this to a kid) child will master simple rhythm puzzles with Piglet (b/c they can't handle Paper Mario, right?), pop balloons on the run from the fuzz as the Poohnani, and chase down small forest sprites all conspicuously moving at the exact same speed as the sagely Eeyore. I only relate with Eeyore as an old; he is the real Calamity Bert.

The most I can say for this 120 minutes is the game would, I suppose, teach a wee-one the use of a mini map (huh!)... and encourage recalling item locations and A-->B paths in Zeldaesque map layouts. If Ubisoft had simply mapped the B button as run (or bash, burn, bombinate SOMETHING), this might have been more bear-able. But left to Christopher Robin's goodly graces, I'm left wondering why I'd rather find a copy of Fester's Quest than look at this again.

Actually, I could totally go for Fester's quest.