Disney•Pixar Ratatouille | Nintendo DS

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Disney•Pixar Ratatouille on Nintendo DS follows Remy, the small rat whose talent for food brings him into the human world of a Paris restaurant. His partnership with Linguini gives the adventure its purpose: help the kitchen succeed while keeping its unlikely chef out of sight. You spend your time gathering what a recipe needs, getting around spaces built for people, and then preparing dishes with the handheld's touch controls. The DS game combines a three-dimensional platform adventure with cooking activities, so playing through the story involves both movement challenges and practical kitchen tasks. Remy's size makes an ordinary restaurant into a much larger obstacle course.

In the adventure sections, you guide Remy through levels by running, jumping, climbing, and looking for the objects requested by the mission. He can scramble up walls and use wall jumps to reach places that a straightforward run across the floor would miss. Thinking vertically is useful: the next ingredient or route can be above or beside you, rather than at the end of an obvious corridor. Remy's sense of smell helps locate the things you are searching for. That ability gives exploration a clear goal, letting you concentrate on reaching an object once you have worked out where it is.

The Nintendo DS version offers a choice between directional-pad movement and stylus movement, with the control setting changeable through Select. That flexibility matters because the same little character must negotiate both open spaces and more precise climbing routes. Learning the distance and timing of his jumps is part of getting comfortable with the adventure. The platforming is built around collecting and reaching objectives rather than developing an arsenal for fighting enemies. The pleasure of a successful route comes from using a rat's agility to move through a human environment and arriving with the required item safely collected.

Staying hidden introduces a second concern during the journey. An exposure meter tracks the danger of Remy being noticed by humans, making his progress about more than moving quickly. Sneaking through a space and choosing a sensible route can be as important as making the next jump. Cover gives you a way to manage that danger: enclosed hiding places such as boxes and cans can shelter Remy while the meter settles. This turns a food-gathering assignment into a small planning exercise. You look for the ingredient, judge the route to it, and keep track of how exposed Remy becomes along the way.

Cooking shifts the action to the touch screen after the necessary food has been gathered. You help Remy, Linguini, and Colette turn those ingredients into dishes within a time limit. The process moves through preparation, cooking, and presentation, giving the recipe a recognizable beginning, middle, and finish. Preparation involves following indicated strokes with the stylus to cut ingredients. These tasks reward attention to the screen's instructions and a steady hand. They also give the collection missions a tangible payoff: the things Remy risked finding now become part of a meal, rather than disappearing into a score counter.

The cooking stage asks you to watch several pots and manage their contents and temperature. Ingredients need to go into the appropriate cooking vessels, and stylus stirring affects the heat. When a pot becomes too hot, blowing into the DS microphone cools it. This creates a different rhythm from the platforming, because your attention moves between several small jobs happening together. The final plating tasks use taps and traced patterns to add finishing touches. Completing the sequence means both cooking the food and making it look ready to serve, a good match for a story about a character who cares deeply about meals.

Progress comes from completing the story's assignments and alternating between Remy's fieldwork and the kitchen. The cooking game is also available separately, so you can return to that part of the experience without working through an adventure mission first. This is useful when you want a compact session centered on stylus accuracy and timing. The game's appeal depends on enjoying those two recurring forms of play: finding and collecting ingredients, then preparing them. Its focus gives it a clear personality as a movie adaptation, with the restaurant's everyday work providing the objectives for an athletic little protagonist.

The presentation uses three-dimensional environments for Remy's travels and more direct food-and-utensil views for the cooking tasks. Story scenes combine still images with written dialogue, while music evokes the film's Paris setting. The scale of the environments is especially important to the atmosphere: shelves, kitchen surfaces, and storage spaces become places to navigate from a rat's perspective. This is a handheld interpretation of the characters and setting, with the DS screen and input features shaping how the story is played. The North American Nintendo DS release is rated Everyone with Comic Mischief by the ESRB.

The main adventure is for one player. Local Single-Card Download Play lets two to four players compete in the cooking minigame, with each participant using a compatible handheld and one host cartridge supplying the session. The shared activity is kitchen competition; the story remains Remy's solo adventure. A working DS touch screen, stylus, and microphone matter to the cooking controls, so those built-in features are part of the experience. For someone choosing this version, the central attraction is its combination of small-scale exploration, exposure management, and hands-on food preparation, all tied to Remy's unusual route into the restaurant.