Sprung had a lot of promise. It was to be a melding of two genres now rarely seen, backed up by Colleen McGuinness, a not-inexperienced sitcom screenwriter. Who wouldn't like a cleverly-written text adventure / dating sim? It's a neat idea, but nobody warned us that it wasn't going to actually include a game.

Sprung is, on its face, a dating "simulator," as you pick an on-the-rebound female or hapless male avatar as you head to a ski resort full of eligible men and women. Hilarity ensues, as you bounce from pairing to pairing and deal with the consequences of doing so. It's well-trodden territory for movies and sitcoms, but it makes for an interesting departure from the more teenaged-male-centric settings and premises that most games offer.

To navigate this offbeat story, you'll be faced with dialogue tree after dialogue tree. The top DS screen will have the talking head of one of the other twenty-somethings that populates the ski loft, and the bottom your own character's face, along with your response options. Navigate the arbitrary right path, and you move onto the next chapter.

Unfortunately, the right path isn't quite clear. It could be a simple, pure-guess choice: for example, you're going to be expected to guess that one character will want to be bought a mint julep simply because she has a slight southern accent. It could be a too-vague objective: more than once in Becky's storyline, you'll be expected to flirt with guys without coming on too strong, with no real feedback on what is laying it on too thick and what is too soft a touch. Wrong answers, too often, go straight into dead-end game over screens, with little rhyme or reason. A game over means you'll have to go through the parts of the dialogue tree you have solved, often over and over and over again.

That's all that Sprung has to offer in the way of gameplay, sadly, save for an occasional logic puzzle presented as a word problem. (You know, like those word problems they gave in middle school math class.) Besides progress through the story, rewards for doing well are limited to some concept art and a short hidden chapter if you blunder into all of the Golden Lines, some one-time clever one-liners.

It's a shame that the game itself is just so frustrating, because the story is sharply written, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. The light romantic hijinks are brought to life with snappy writing, courtesy of Colleen McGuinness's writing talents. The characters, while mostly two-dimensional, are compelling enough to carry the story, and there are a handful of hilarious moments and lines to be had. There's enough funny and smart here to fill a successful date movie, or a promising sitcom pilot.

What a movie or television pilot can't offer is Sprung's one interesting use of video games as a medium; the results of actively trying to fail. Slip a friend some laxatives when she's getting ready in the morning, or hit on the grandmother, or act like a total idiot, and you'll be rewarded with some sidesplittingly funny disasters. If all of the game over results were this funny, and were navigating some of the later dialogue trees not so annoying, Sprung would be considerably more entertaining.

It's not as though Sprung is a tour de force of presentation. There's some strictly-functional background music, and the talking heads are fairly attractive if somewhat lacking when it comes to animation...and that's it. The dialogue is all text (the DS has enough storage for spoken dialogue, especially in a game this minimalist), the faces shift from expression to expression with little animation between. It isn't that the minimalism isn't attractive; it's that there's more than one missed opportunity here. Well-voiced dialogue could make the somewhat-flat characters more identifiable, or better animation could make determining someone's mood easier.

Sprung is that: a missed opportunity. It's an interesting departure into a sort of story games don't often tell, and it's a clever story, but the game is too weak to carry the weight. It would be another interesting game for the non-hardcore gamers who seem to have taken to the DS, if it weren't so frustrating or arbitrary. Too bad.