The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's ubiquitous quasi-historical and controversial novel which undermines the basic foundation of Christian religion, might not seem like the best candidate to undergo a video-game conversion (ha ha), but the developers at The Collective manage to use it as the basis of an interesting and challenging, although somewhat overly talky adventure game.

This isn't a game for everyone, and that's made obvious in the first few minutes. You start off with a first-person viewpoint, looking down at a splayed corpse that's arranged in a pentagram, and each time you click on a portion of the macabre scene, your character, Robert Langdon, goes off on a long-winded explanation for how the dying man's most minute actions serve to explicate various religious theologies or contain cryptic clues. Thank God you can skip the dialogue, though, surely, there are certain people who will relish the wealth of information spilling from the main character's pixilated lips--the same certain people who stay glued to the History Channel for hours on end, or who can't go ten minutes without checking Fark.com.

Anyway, from there, Robert is joined by sidekick Sophie Neveu, the French granddaughter of the dead man, and the race is on--the rest of the game is about staying one step ahead of the police, while following a bewildering trail of clues that leads you on a religious-themed "Let's Go!" travel guide to Europe.

The action portion of the game involves a simple "mini-game" style fighting mechanic where, once you've gotten tangled up with the odd policeman or albino Opus Dei enthusiast, all you need to do is press the buttons that flash on the screen to attack or defend. If fighting's not your style, stealth options let you clock unwary enemies senseless with one blow and drag them out of sight. The only real drawback to the fighting system is Sophie's AI when she's "helping" you fight. Occasionally you'll be one more combo away from knocking an enemy unconscious, when in a rush of adrenaline; she'll grab him away from you, yelling something protective, like "Leave him alone!" Meanwhile, you've got to get her out of the way, grab the enemy, and go through the motions one more time. Thankfully, she's usually capable of taking down an enemy on the side with her own bare hands, which comes in handy during moments when the two split up and you control her character.

The puzzle portion of the game is much more intricate, as should be expected by anything with the word "code" in the title. The first time you get a look at one of the letter-substitution puzzles, where weird symbols are used to represent letters and you're basically thrown in cold to guess what letter goes where in some infuriatingly long message, it's humbling and frightening, but ultimately rewarding once you de-crypt it. You even get a special "De-Crypted" cut scene featuring the Vitruvian man--the developers know you earned it.

Some puzzles are environmentally-based and require spatial skills, while others are mathematical in nature--the Fibonacci sequence comes up rather frequently, and if you don't know what that is, you're not alone. Most of the puzzles in this game are hard, and some require at least passing familiarity with English literature, particularly when you're trying to figure out the meanings of riddles in Westminster Abbey. Read any good Chaucer lately?

The Da Vinci Code doesn't seem primarily aimed at gamers, but rather at that cross-section of the gaming community that is also intellectually curious about history and religion. It's an odd niche, but a calculated risk on the part of 2K Games, considering The Da Vinci Code's broad name recognition as a brand, and the fact that despite some of the game's duller moments, it is true to the novel and is brave enough not to shy away from the novel's main contention, which was that "Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." Oh wait, wrong Grail-themed fiction. Guess you'll have to read the book.

Also See:

• Da Vinci Code Book Buzz


• The Real Holy Grail


• Fun with Fibonacci Numbers