There are plenty of choose-your-own-adventure style games out there and one form of this genre that has been increasing is the live-action movie format. Recently, Wales Interactive created Mia and the Dragon Princess to give players a chance to enjoy an action-filled comedy movie where they decide what path the characters take. Even though they aren’t the first to hit this genre, they had a mix of good ideas and missed opportunities when it comes to the overall experience.

Story

After waking up from an unexplained slumber, a woman from an ancient tale arrives and ends up under the care of a young woman named Mia. Mia is a barmaid for a tavern that has been around for ages and holds some secrets of its own - as well as a few enemies. Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t be worse as a group of apparent thugs appear at the bar and begin causing a problem - so much so that one person calls the police.

As it would seem, the one who called the police actually ended up calling his boss who is a wealthy man with hired hands. His appearance leads to the knowledge that the tavern is actually connected to a past, one that could lead to treasure if the stories were true. Now Mia is faced with escaping the danger this man poses while keeping the new stranger and her colleagues safe!

Gameplay

There really isn’t a lot of actual gameplay. There will be moments that are stalled shortly to give the player a chance to make a decision on how to proceed. There is a time limit that is pretty short and an automatic choice will be made if the player doesn’t select one. If you pause the game, you can look over the story tree that shows the different choices that could have been made and the pathways they would have taken you through.

The problem is that I couldn’t rewind at all and even after watching it all the way through, there is no scene selection. Luckily, you can skip over videos you have seen before, so you can start a new movie and skip through each scene, making the same choices as before, in order to quickly jump to the scene you want. There also aren’t a lot of actual choice moments, so the space between choices does have quite a few scenes in them as well.

Audio and Video

Overall, Noa Bleeker (Mia), Michael Geary (Sebastian), Steve Meo (Collins), and all the other actors and actresses in the film did a pretty decent job with the acting and Taekwondo-based combat. Having big names like Paul McGann, Brian McCardie, and MyAnna Buring likely helped really pull off the scenes. Although some of the dialogue and general scene-to-scene transitions weren’t always well done, I don’t have any complaints about the actual acting and was entertained by the combat sequences.

Replayability

It is a choose-your-own-path movie with 10 different outcomes, so I would say there is plenty of replayability for those who want to fully explore the different scenes. It’s even easy to make sure you see them all thanks to the story tree.

What It Could Have Done Better

As I mentioned, some of the dialogue wasn’t great and transitions between some scenes weren’t very smooth. These details could have been improved upon with a bit more time or maybe even another set of hands on them.

Also, for a game that’s only control option is to select choices throughout the movie, there should be more choices. This honestly felt like I was just watching a movie that disguised itself as a game. While that is fine for the most part, the interactivity was quite low for a game where that is the only actual gameplay.

Last point, why isn’t there a scene selection option? I can go and look over the story tree, but I can pick one of the scenes and start the movie from there - why not? Even actual movies have scene selections in them, so I don’t understand why that option wasn’t available.

Verdict

Mia and the Dragon Princess is a pretty decent movie with only a handful of gameplay controls in it. While I did enjoy the movie and found many moments to be quite humorous, there were a handful of things that could have been better. If this team wants to keep making titles like this one, I hope to see more player-interactive moments and to let the number of choices feel more impactful in the future.

Mia and the Dragon Princess is available now on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, Mac, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Mobile via iOS and Android.