Hansel and Gretel
© 2018 Nosy Crow
7/18/2022 discontinued. Another classic fairy tale gets the Nosy Crow treatment. The result is a rich language experience with features like automatic text highlighting. You help the two children (Hansel and Gretel) collect items to outsmart the witch. These include collecting pebbles to mark your path back to your home, exploring a forest maze, finding watering can to grow a pumpkin, avoiding moving bats, catching eggs and more. There's plenty to do -- content includes a 15 room house to explore with three games and seven interactive screens. Testers noted that moving items in the house can be clumsy. For example, there are times when you need to move a block onto a switch to open the door, but the block doesn't always "stick" to Gretel's hands. This is not a deal breaker. We like the well designed table of contents, which lets you jump around in the app. Those familiar with the original fairy tale will know that there are some dark underlying themes to this story -- things like kidnapping, imprisonment, child abandonment and being burned up in a hot stove. Each is handled in an appropriate manner -- staying true to the original narrative without unnecessary gore. The witch is shown being shot out of the chimney (rather than burned up); and the children make it back home with their loving father. The app features illustrations by Ed Bryan original music by Steve Burke. Tom Bonnick was the producer. The child narrators (Freya, Cora, Joe and Willow) are the same as the other Nosy Crow apps. We've been informed by the publisher that that this will be the last interactive fairy tale to be released by app team at Nosy Crow. They will release one more app, Flip-Flap Dinosaurs, based on Axel Scheffer’s book of the same name.
$4.99, iPad, iPhone
Teaches: reading, logic, spatial relations
CTR Rating: 94%