Bible Game 2005 By: Crave Entertainment

Overview:

"Bible Game" is a good natured attempt to forge a nexus connecting organized religion and video games. Spreading the word of God through video games would seem like a good way to reach a younger audience. Unfortunately, the audience that "Bible Game" targets is far more sophisticated than the generation that came up on the "Oregon Trail". The gameplay is uninspired, redundant, boring, and frustratingly terrible, even for a kid targeted title. "Bible Game" is understandably all about the content, the game's goal is to expose its audience to Bible scripture, but "Bible Game" fails to provide any context for its content, making the scripture immediately forgettable and completely unrelatable. "Bible Game" missed the opportunity to cultivate interest in its subject, or even address the underlying messages of the scriptures.

In "Bible Game", the player must collect God's armor to protect against the Devil. The armor has been broken into six pieces, and hidden amongst six churches. The player must recover the church keys from the Devil's minions to restore the armor and banish the Master Deceiver from the Bible Kingdom. The player must defeat the Devil's minions in trivia contests to recover pieces of the key. The trivia contest aspect of "Bible Game" is problematic at best. The player is asked questions regarding scripture and must select the correct answer from a possible three or four responses. The questions are extremely difficult, and completely unsuited for the age range that the game is targeted to (or anyone save perhaps Theology students). The questions are verbatim bible verses complete with archaic wording and lexicon. There is a difficulty setting, but it only changes the number of questions that the player must answer correctly to defeat the minion, it doesn't actually adjust the difficulty of question. The questions force the player to actually write down the scripture that is found on scrolls because the player is only allowed to look at the scripture once. Surprising that a game seeking to connect its audience with scripture would restrict that audiences' access to the material.

The rest of the combat consists of jumping up and down on ants, not a thrilling enterprise. There just isn't anything interesting about the gameplay at all. While I appreciate any artistic project that seeks to promote a message of love, "Bible Game" falls flat on its face simply by offering a vastly inferior product in a market saturated with quality games.

Directions:

The player must find and unlock six different churches to recover the Armor of God. To recover the church keys the player must defeat minions in trivia battles.

The player has three lives at the beginning of each quest, represented by hearts on the left side of the HUD. Losing all lives will start the quest over again. If a deceiver is defeated with a perfect score, the player will gain a life.

Players will be confronted by a variety of bugs that have the potential to drain the player's spiritual health. Player's can squish bugs by jumping on them.

Health can be replenished by collecting hearts found on the ground. Losing all spiritual health causes the player to lose a life.

Holy Water can be used to stun a minion. Crosses can be picked up and exchanged for Holy Water with Bible kingdom citizens.

Scrolls contain the answers to the trivia battles. After picking up a scroll, the player can press SELECT to read it, but the scroll can only be read once.

There are three levels of difficulty to choose from at the start menu.