Marjorie Liu’s Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box
Written by Marjorie Liu
PassionFruit Games
Platform: PC
Release date: April 28, 2010

Romance writer Marjorie Lui can now add “computer game creator” onto her expanding resume. Along with penning the successful Dirk and Steele books and currently writing the Black Widow comic for Marvel Comics, Lui has teamed up with PassionFruit Games to adapt Tiger Eye into an interactive game for the PC.

Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box follows the story of Dela Resse, a woman who is thrust into danger after purchasing a mysterious riddle box in China. It seems some really bad guys want their hands on the box and to further complicate things, the box also houses Hari, a powerful warrior who was imprisoned in the box 2,000 years prior. With a journey around the world from China to the United States, Dela and Hari struggle to uncover the truth about the box and in the process maybe even find love.

Adapting a popular novel into a video game is hard enough as it is, but to adapt a romance novel into a mostly male oriented market? That is a pretty big mountain to climb but PassionFruit does its best to make the game work for any fan. The player is tasked with finding various hidden objects in each level. By finding all these objects, a puzzle would be unlocked and have to be solved to move the game along. Whether you have played video games all your life or Tiger Eye is your first, this game should be easy to play or understand. The game play is another entirely different story.

When producing a game that is potentially geared toward a relatively new gamer, the learning curve is not very steep. Boiled down to its essence, the game is nothing more than a prolonged version of Where’s Waldo. The puzzles were also fairly simple as well, which is book a good and bad thing. You want to make a puzzle easy to navigate through and solve, but you also want to make it challenging enough so that the gamer feels they’ve accomplished something. More often than not, this game does succeed on this.

Despite the fairly easy and to the point game play, I was rather impressed by the quality of the game overall. The story is top notch and the dialogue is succulent and moves the story along. I like the idea that the author had a hand in helping transition her book into a game. It definitely shows in the game. The art in the cut scenes were pretty well produced and worked very well with the overall look of the game. The voice acting was also pretty good. Plus, the game, or rather the first episode (the game is being split up into two episodes), is affordably priced at $6.99. There are also preminum/platnium packages of the game for any hardcore Liu fans who would like a little more out of their game. The package comes with extras such as the game’s soundtrack, sheet music from the game, and a strategy guide.

If you are looking for a cheap and easy to play computer game, look no further than Tiger’s Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box.