Scrubs

Funny games are a tough sell. Striking the balance between gameplay and punnage requires a steady hand and a good ear for a laugh-out-loud joke.

Then, of course, there's the problem of the player spoiling all of your finely constructed jokes by messing about like an inconsiderate buffoon. You know, like players do all the time.

Throw a licensed property on top of all those stresses and you're left with a recipe for severe medical problems. And that leads us nicely to Scrubs, HeroCraft's game version of the hit US medical comedy series.

Perfectly timed to coincide with the fact that the television series was cancelled more than a year ago, Scrubs is one of the strangest games to grace the Android Market for a while.

At its heart, it's a hidden object game. You're presented with a screen full of bits and pieces of junk, and you have to seek out a variety of objects that have been placed around the mess, tapping on them once you've found them.

You're shown what you need to find in a picture list that sits in the corner of the screen. You can move the list around so that it doesn't obstruct your view, and objects disappear from it once you've found them.

The searching part of the game is pretty well-designed. The images you're rooting through feature enough red herrings and cunningly concealed finds to make things interesting. Special near-invisible pills give you hints, reaction-testing sections keep you on your toes, and puzzling mini-games keep things fresh.

And so you move through different rooms in Sacred Heart Hospital being given tasks by characters from the show. Except that these digitised versions of the stars are freakishly deformed, with bobble heads and glazed, dead expressions.

The dialogue feels like it was written by someone who's never even heard of Scrubs, let alone seen an episode of it. The atmosphere of whimsy and sincerity that permeated the nine series of the television programme is replaced with a strange, Lynchian unease.

You're tumbling through a vaguely familiar world, populated by gargoyles that resemble faces you know, but whose only intention is to set you maddening, neverending tasks. They spout garbled English, then leave you to root through the detritus of human life.

Scrubs is a game of two very distinct halves. On the one hand, as a hidden object game, it performs perfectly well. It's fun, just difficult enough, and well constructed. It's no leap forward for the genre, but it does its job adequately.

On the other hand, it's a bizarre use of an out-of-date licence that will bemuse fans of the series.

If you can deal with the horrendous veneer, you'll find a rewarding and funny little game. And we don't mean 'ha ha' funny.