American Girl Kit Kittredge Games for PC and Nintendo DS: Intriguing for Your Tween

Kit Kittredge is a young girl facing hard times during the Great Depression. First her mother’s friend and her sickly son move in with her family, then her father loses his business and has to leave home to search for work. To make ends meet, the family takes in boarders. The movie Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is in theaters now, though it is sometimes difficult to locate. In conjunction with the movie, THQ released two video games: Kit, A Tree House of My Own for PC and Kit Mystery Challenge! for Nintendo DS. My 8 year old daughter and I reviewed both of these games.

In the Kit Mystery Challenge! game, Kit finds that her home’s boarders have intriguing puzzles that she can help solve. You help Kit talk to people and gather clues from her home and neighborhood to crack six different cases. The first five cases can be done in whatever order you like, but the last case can only be unlocked by cracking the first five cases. The first case centers around who left the latch open on the chicken coop and let all the chickens out. In the second case you help Kit locate her mother’s missing pearls. Next, Kit is curious about one of their boarders who leaves early in the morning. She hopes that he has found a job and can help her father get a job there. The other mysteries involve a Cinderella costume and a missing rose.

This game is rated E for everyone, but be aware that it is very reading intensive. Both my daughter and I found this frustrating, because you had to wait for the words to scroll across the screen. If your child has any trouble with reading at all, they will lose interest in the game quickly. It would have been nice to hear the words as well as read them, instead of just hearing a music soundtrack that gets old very fast. I found the interface to get Kit to walk around difficult to deal with, because it was hard to line her up so she walked straight instead of tottering off into the street. Getting in and out of rooms around doors was frustrating as well. That said, I found the cases themselves interesting and absorbing, and I was willing to stick with the cumbersome interface and the reading to work on them.

The Kit: A Tree House of My Own game for PC was a much more fun game for both my daughter and me. In this game you and Kit play six different games to first gather tools and then to win items to decorate your treehouse. The interface is simple and easy to control, and the people actually talk so you can both hear and see the words. The games themselves are fairly challenging, though, and once the first couple of levels have been achieved, they might be too challenging to hold the interest of younger (age 8-10) players.

Each game has 20 levels and on some the highest I’ve been able to achieve is level 4. One of the games that is particularly challenging is similar to Scrabble, where you are given seven letters and need to come up with words that you can spell using those letters. I have an English degree and can’t get above level 15 in the short 2 minute time they give you to complete it. Not only that, but it disallows words that I know are words (that are not inappropriate or slang words) and includes words that are spelled wrong. Despite that, it is a fun game and my daughter and I both played it for hours on end, until we had to get up because our necks hurt.

Written by Mary, who is a thirty-something SAHM of four under the age of eight. She is a lousy housekeeper, a voracious reader, and dabbles in art and music in various forms. She blogs to maintain her writing skills and her sanity in The Fish Pond.