It's curiously sluggish, visually flat, and manages the rare feat of being simultaneously easy yet frustrating. The idea is to guide a red line through a scrolling course, avoiding abstract obstacles and beating the system's countermeasures to the finish. It's a pretty shameless rip-off of the WiiWare title – itself owing a not-insubstantial debt to Tron's light cycles – but with little of that game's style. First up is Trace Route, or Art Style Light Trax, as it's otherwise known. There's a not-so-subtle reference to 'cake' in one of the mini-games which is presumably a half-hearted nod in Portal's direction. Though they made it look a lot more fun than it is here. There's so much hacking going on that you half expect Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie to turn up.
Periodically, the pair will come across a door that needs hacking or an airlock that needs hacking or a space suit that needs hacking, or any number of tenuous reasons to pull out DeLille's all-purpose hacking machine. Her first line is a "that's what she said" gag, and neither the dialogue nor the performances really get any better from there. The former's a bit of a personality black hole, reacting to impending peril with all the concern of a man who can't remember whether or not he left the landing light on, while the latter aims for 'lascivious' but hits 'irritating'. For much of its brief duration – you're looking at 90 minutes to two hours for a first play through, though there are branching paths and four different endings – you'll watch a series of comic-book scenes featuring expert hacker Franco DeLille and his feisty companion Sarah Anderson. Ignition is an "interquel", ostensibly dealing with the arrival of the Necromorphs on The Sprawl, the huge space station on which Dead Space 2 is set. An interactive comic with hacking mini-games is a new one, though. From novels to comics to viral web campaigns, publishers are understandably keen to explore other ways of keeping a brand name in the popular consciousness.
As this maturing medium grapples with the intricacies of interactive storytelling, it's little wonder we're seeing digital worlds expand beyond traditional boundaries and into other media.
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