"Da Vinci" is labored fighting, thick codes: Pray for patience

Jesus saves, but you won't be able to do that so easily in "The Da Vinci Code" game (2K, $29.99-$39.99, rated T for teen, PC, PS2, Xbox).

By now, odds are that you've read "The Da Vinci Code," seen the Tom Hanks movie, picketed about one or the other somewhere, or sued author Dan Brown. And you might not immediately think that the story — about an American professor and a French cryptographer racing to decipher clues that will shake the Catholic Church — lends itself easily to a video game.

It doesn't.

This mix of abstruse puzzle-solving, stealth and awkward fighting is like a video-game celise. (That's the spikey thing that Silas the killer albino monk, and other especially zealous members of the ultra-conservative Opus Dei sect, wrap around their thighs for penance.)

For starters, Leonardo would hardly be jealous of the clunky rendering of the characters — which are not in the likenesses or voices of Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Jean Reno. And yet the game character's hair still looks more realistic than Hanks'.

Apart from that, the game starts off exactly the same as the book and movie — and with so much cut-scene exposition that it's even duller than watching the movie. Unless I'm wrong, and what today's game-playing youth really connects with are long-winded explanations of church history.

You play as both symbologist Robert Langdon and police cryptographer Sophie Neveu, whose adventure starts with a murder and lots of clues at the Louvre in Paris. Use a black light to see hidden writings. Solve letter-substitution, anagram and assorted other types of puzzles. Mix chemicals to wipe a painting clean and get more clues. Sneak around guards. Have clumsy tussles when they catch you.

In Brown's story, Langdon and Neveu race around solving puzzles that get about as preposterous as the ones from The Riddler in the old "Batman" series. When is a door (to a holy sepulcher) not a door? When it's ajar!

It doesn't come quite as easily when you're the one doing the decoding. And, not being a symbological/cryptographical whiz, I got stuck several times and had to start cheating like Charlie Sheen at the Playboy Mansion.

Granted that your typical academic isn't much of a brawler, but the fights with Langdon/Neveu are way too ungainly. When you get in a clinch with a bad guy, there's no free-form mixing it up. You have to press buttons that correspond to the ones that appear at the bottom of the screen — for instance, you see A, A, B and then hit yours in that order, and if you're lucky, Langdon will sock the guard and then spin around with a fancy elbow to his head. It's as circumscribed as a master's thesis.

And as for the saving, you can't just save at any point in the game, so if you get stuck at a tough spot several tasks after, say, completing a difficult puzzle, you have to go back and complete the puzzle every single time you start over.

You need the patience of a saint to stick with "The Da Vinci Code" game. Turns out I'm no saint.

If it's preordained that big movies always get the video-game treatment, then it's almost as sure a thing that those licensed games aren't worth the powder to blow them to The Bad Place. Why not show a little creativity? For instance, I'd be first in line to go on a killing spree as Silas the Monk in a "Grand Theft Auto: Vatican City."

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com