The Mouse Who Woke Up For Christmas

This one quickly set itself up to be wonderfully charming: Christmas, small anthropomorphic garden animals in the style of "The Wind in the Willows", a quest to do something nice for your daughter ... it just tugs at the heart strings. At least until we meet the foul-mouthed pigeon and the former crime boss squirrel, but even so. Maybe it's a little more "Watership Down" than "The Wind in the Willows"; there's still a lot of that English hedgerow charm about it.

(Part of the quest involves finding beer for yourself. No, I don't think there's anything particularly inappropriate-for-children about descriptions of alcohol consumption. I don't recall, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Water Rat had a few bottles of beer packed into his picnic basket, and I don't mean ginger beer which is not the same thing at all.)

The puzzles are pretty hard, though. Or, perhaps, they seem harder because there seems to be very little to do outside of the quest itself. It seems to me that the ability to poke around the world gives the illusion of progress, which in turn reduces frustration when there is in fact no real progress made. It might even give ideas as to how to proceed. In this case, I found myself simply rattling from room to room with nothing to do. And that's a shame because it's a world with a lot of inherent charm and potential.

(I did get as far as acquiring beer. That was nice. I might need it.)

For breakfast, I think it's blueberry pancakes, somewhat underdone, and hot chocolate with marshmallows; after which we're going straight back to bed and not getting out again until Boxing Day.