While more interactive encyclopedia than traditional game, Little Mouse’s Encyclopedia has a beautiful aesthetic with an emphasis on learning about nature along the way. For what it’s worth, my daughter said she would have scored it at 7 for its “cute art and mouse”, but by the last area even she was skimming the fact cards and wanting to go back to her regular games.

There are two ways of looking at Little Mouse’s Encyclopedia. It is a children’s reference book that happens to be on the Xbox, and as such it’s lovely to leaf through for a few minutes. The watercolour art could happily grace the walls of a nursery, and that’s intended as a compliment. But while it does a great job of putting names to animals and plants, it does a less successful job of making you care about them, or telling a child anything that might stick. It could feasibly form an hour-long home-schooling lesson, but you’d struggle to make a curriculum out of it.

Xbox_Alive

Little Mouse’s Encyclopedia is an interactive book for the younger gamers in the household, that can serve as teaching and research tool for the littles and the parents alike when looking up tidbits for a school project or just to enlighten some question about the critters and creatures generally found around the house in the county side. You join Little Mouse through four areas of interest, and most subjects you come across has a small factsheet of information that I myself haven’t even know about, so if the kids have something to ask about the inhabitants of the garden, join them and learn a few things or two. The art style is that of a flat 2D picture book, with the exception to plants and trees, insects and small animals move around when interacting with them, all while your ears is soothed by a relaxing tone of music that resembles the atmosphere of this title. The actual level of detail of the imagery would appeal more to a very young audience to help them have fun while learning about everyday creatures of nature around them. The levels themselves are almost that of a maze that Little Mouse moves through, with paths connecting to each to avoid the feeling of being to linear as a book of the same nature, mind the pun, is also open-ended to read what you wish, so to is it easy to access the subjects. This in turn has also be simplified if a certain subject need to be looked up via the index. The controls are basic as it gets to have it easy for small hands to hold the controller with ease and to access the controls for interacting with the world of Little Mouse. It is a quaint adventure in an interactive digital format perfect as the intended educational tool for curious minds. For the price of admission is fair, but it would have been nice if even more content was available for the young gamers in your household. The title definitely delivers on what it aims to so if you’re looking for a game in the genre for your household be sure to head over to the Xbox digital games store and check it out today.