The story of The Ugly Prince Duckling is conveniently told like a fairytale, where HC Andersen himself begins by reading the opening passage of the game, describing the events that lay ahead in your adventure. You play as a young Hans Christian Andersen in his pursuit of fame and success. The game is set in the city of Copenhagen in the 1800s, where Hans tries to help almost everyone in town by fulfilling odd jobs, and eventually trying to save the beautiful princess from danger and returning her home. Just like typical fairytale fashion, the loveable and peaceful town of Copenhagen has a turn for the worse, with the town being invaded by evil trolls, and the leader of whom is after the princess’ hand in marriage. It would seem that Hans is not only destined to climb the society ranks from being a poor, unknown person to a respectable member of the community, but also to save the princess from any danger.
Gameplay is of great importance in a point-and-click adventure game, and if things are over simplified or poorly implemented, then you can be sure the final game will suffer quite dearly. The Ugly Prince Duckling is a game that provides slight glimmers of enjoyment, though the majority of the game implements some terrible design decisions that ultimately hurt the entire game. First of all, there are three methods to control Hans during the game: click on areas of the environment, click and hold and then direct Hans or use the arrow keys. All of these methods suffer from one or more issues that eventually cause a bit of frustration during the game. A common problem is that despite directing Hans to move in one direction, he’ll often flip and begin walking in another direction. This isn’t so much of a problem while in the open, but when navigating through small rooms it causes a lot of issues.
Loveable locals that unfortunately populate a dull game.
Further problems persist by the game’s simple puzzles and tasks that Hans is required to accomplish throughout the game. A good portion of the game is devoted to simple fetch quests where you’ll need to run around town searching for items and then returning to the character who asked for your assistance. There are only a handful of proper puzzles, but even then they are quite simple to accomplish. Unlike a lot of other games in this genre, most of the game is hindered in experience due to the lack of item combining puzzles and further environment interaction. There are very few times when you’ll be stuck on a puzzle because it’s hard, but instead you’ll likely be stuck in areas due to the game’s poor click recognition. Some items aren’t recognised as being clickable until you’re directly in front of them, so you’ll often bypass many items despite previously hovering your mouse over them.
The game progression is also a tad irritating too. There will be times where you have absolutely no idea what is required to progress the story, or where in fact you need to be. It often becomes a game of luck where you’ll just press buttons or buy items for the sake of hoping the game will progress. An example of this is where a character asks for your assistance, though the character never mentions what he actually needs help with. Another small issue with the game is the implementation of a frustrating camera system. The camera is fixated in static locations, so there are some areas of the map that you can’t see. Though you’d expect as soon as you move out of the line-of-sight of the camera, it would move to the next. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen as quite as often as you’d hope, meaning you’ll sometimes blindly run into walls or become stuck on objects without knowing.
Though, there are a few neat ideas implemented into the game that often makes you want to finish the game purely because of the loveable cast of HC Andersen characters featured. The game features a nice character recognition system where Hans will often turn his head to areas of interest, as well as other non-playable characters often dropping into conversations with one another – giving the game a slightly more realistic feel to it.
Expect to perform plenty of standard fetching tasks.
From a graphical stance, the game is a terribly seesawing experience. The game incorporates a pre-rendered approach where everything besides the characters are pre-rendered, giving the game a more realistic look. While this approach often looks fantastic, and helps to relive the fairytales themselves, there are still a handful of issues that quite clearly standout, namely the poor reflection methods and the sparse locations. Character models are well animated to fit their corresponding personas, though lip-syncing is always out of time and character models are of standard quality. Audio isn’t much better either, with the soundtrack often feeling a tad too quiet during dramatic scenes. Voice acting is well done though, with most voices suiting their characters perfectly, and fitting the period of time the game is set during.
The Ugly Prince Duckling isn’t particularly an awful game by any means; it is just that the design choices hinder much of the experience. The camera perspectives often hurt in knowing where you are on the screen, controls aren’t always accurate and the entire gameplay progression is terribly flawed – there’s absolutely no sense of direction, and very little to accomplish outside of executing simple errand runs. It has its moments of enjoyment, and the developers should be pleased with some of their efforts, though the issues far outweigh the positives, firmly placing The Ugly Prince Duckling as an average game.
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