Description

After being sucked inside a kid's computer game, a family can only return home if they win the game--which entails outwitting classic fairy tale characters, fighting killer beasts, and the wicked fairy they're playing against--all before the laptop's battery dies and they perish along with it.

INSIDE THE GAME takes place in a computer game called Fairy Tale Land and is a comedic adventure fantasy infused with magic, heart and damn scary thrills. What, you don’t think fairy tales are scary? They’re sissy baby stuff?

Hah! Let’s see if you make it out alive when you’re trapped in a small cottage with three hungry and very pissed off bears who want to rip you a new one for eating their porridge and busting up their fine furniture. Oh, and you’re also trapped in a ludicrous too tight dress with Goldilocks’ curls fused to your skull. This is the family’s first game challenge in the deep dark scary forest and dad bravely, kinda, faces it.

And it only gets worse. Much worse. Can you say man-eating ogre and fire breathing dragon? But that ain’t all. Besides the bizarre killer creatures trying to annihilate them, the poor family has to simultaneously play against their opponent, Vileena, the most wicked, disgusting and vile fairy in the history of history. Hell, she would send Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter screaming into the night.

But it isn’t all brave heroic feats of derring-do you have to do. Nope. You gotta have brains and be clever with ‘em. Besides the role playing tasks, you score points in this wacked out game by outwitting and out guessing what the eccentric fairy tale characters are going to do before they do it. Or you have to figure out what objects they’re going to want to trade for. There’s no money involved, just crazy trades, favors and plots.

Perhaps the Three Little Pigs demand something in Little Red Riding Hood’s cottage. This, of course, means dealing with that killer Wolf. There’s actually a logic to everything, but it’s a twisted kaleidoscopic logic that’s a challenge to decipher and changes from one fairy tale to another and in different sections of Fairy Tale Land and I’m getting a headache just thinking about it. Let’s just say it ain’t predictable and it’ll twist your brain with a corkscrew and keep you guessing and on your toes.

But the heart at the heart of this story isn’t found in the exciting game--it’s found in the family. A frayed and fractured modern family who are at the breaking point just before they get zapped inside. Thusly, we have a couple of the most compelling themes in story telling unfolding here: the classic journey back home, and a family’s rediscovery of their love for each other as they learn to work together again as a caring team. (I also hid morals and wisdoms amongst the fun, but don’t tell anyone. Hmm, kinda like they do in fairy tales, now that I think about it)

As I was saying, before rudely interrupting myself, this family, the Millers, were being pulled apart by the all too familiar pressures and distractions of today’s hyped-up-always-on-online -modern life. The three Miller siblings are constantly fighting and bickering and teasing, or even worse, totally ignoring each other’s very existence.

Maya, 5, extends an olive branch by asking her sister to play the Fairy Tale Land game which was recently improved by her new little friend, Alice, an alien (more on the sweet alien family later). But her sister won’t even glance away from her own computer, and Maya complains “but you’ve been Facebooking for hours and hours. Play with me a minute.” No way.

Maya goes to her brother, but he’s hypnotically chained to his multiplayer Xbox Live and is slaughtering his online Halo3 nemesis playing in China. Maya shoves her laptop in his face, but he just pushes it away and doesn’t even notice her game is now bulging right out of the freaking screen!

And dad is the worst. He hit the big 5-uh-oh!, and is having a mid-life melt down. When he’s not at a