The premise behind Spicy Horse’s highly accessible, episodic game is that the tales of the Brothers Grimm weren’t quite dark enough – sanitised beyond credibility. Following a puppet-theatre retelling of each tale, you take on the role of one of the two brothers in order to make the tales yet more filthy and macabre, tainting the environments simply by moving through the scenes. The first of these episodes to be released through GameTap is the Boy Who Learns What Fear Is, followed in subsequent weeks by Little Red Riding Hood and The Fisherman and His Wife.

While Grimm is aimed squarely at a prepubescent audience, delighting in bum-jokes and harmless Burton-esque macabre, it sometimes presents you with rather more sinister scenarios, often involving the bodily fluids that the diminutive protagonist emits during idle animations. In the days since Brass Eye’s inspired spoof of media hysteria about paedophiles, there’s something just a little taboo about playing as a grubby, hairy man who chases kids through a school playground. We’re also pretty sure that urinating on the still-twitching corpse of a child nailed to a climbing frame is frowned upon in polite circles. Grimm’s juvenile humour may be cut with the occasional alarming image but the pitch-perfect art style somehow renders it all as cheeky fun, rather than startling discord.

Sadly, the game underneath isn’t quite as engaging as its presentation – although it is presumably by design that it is so crushingly simplistic. As you run around the world, visiting the scenes of the fairytale as they were narrated to you moments before, it transforms from pastel pinks and blues to bilious greens and purples, twisting into new demonic forms. Fountains start to spew lava, skeletal hands reach out from the undergrowth, birds turn into bats, bunnies into rats. A meter fills, with each section bestowing upon you a greater radius of influence and periodically prompting you to butt-stomp objects throughout the level in order to progress.

Do-gooding fairytale denizens will try to scrub your muck away, but can be corrupted themselves once your percentage conversion of the world hits a certain level.

There is, unfortunately, little else to complicate proceedings, and though the twisted versions of the environments and their occupants continue to amuse, you quickly want for more powers and more elaborate platforming sections. Such things could well be delivered in later episodes, but on the form of the first three it’s difficult to see many adults persisting with the series – while it’s a well-worded and lively introduction to the many stories of the Brothers Grimm, the action is ultimately too plain to coax more world-weary gamers through what is otherwise little more than an interactive storybook.

Verdict: 6/10