Note: Though graded as a standalone adventure, Les Misérables is one of three installments bundled together in the Enter The Story trilogy.

Chris Tolworthy is a man with an ambitious dream to create the world's largest adventure game. At first glance, this makes him no different from any other would-be game developer aspiring to create the next great epic, most of whom burn out after a few weeks and never finish. In Tolworthy's case, however, he's been working on his project in various forms since 1997, and twelve years of patience and dedication later, he has finished the first installment of Enter The Story, a work of art that aims to adapt classic novels in interactive form and synthesize them as a story greater than the sum of its parts.

The first novel adapted for Enter The Story is Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, famous for its themes of overcoming poverty and injustice against the backdrop of nineteenth century France. The story centers around Jean Valjean, a man convicted for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving sister and her family, and follows his life's journey into redemption as he escapes from prison, becomes a factory owner and mayor, adopts a young orphaned girl named Cosette, and aids the revolutionaries in the Paris Uprising of 1832. It takes place in both the city and several small surrounding towns, featuring a varying cast of morally ambiguous characters, from a self-righteous parole officer to a pair of corrupt innkeepers to a kind-hearted prostitute. Many previous adaptations have been made of this classic tale in other media, from plays to movies to a very popular Broadway musical. As such, the challenge to create a successful game adaptation is a great one; given that the story is so renowned and enduring in its traditional, linear form, how can one preserve the quality of the narrative while still making good use of the interactive properties of the video game medium?

What Tolworthy has done in Les Misérables: The Game of the Book is cast the player not as one of the characters in the story, but as an inspirational spirit — specifically, that of Peri, the stillborn daughter of Valjean's sister. At the start of the game, she meets with the spirit of Victor Hugo, who tells her that she has a grand destiny to fulfill, the first step of which is guiding Valjean and the other Les Mis characters along the path to the story's eventual resolutions — victory for the revolutionaries, reunion for a pair of young lovers, and atonement for Valjean's actions in his past life as a criminal.

To achieve these goals, the protagonists will have to perform various activities, from getting a job at a factory by successfully selling one's skills to the current factory owner, to fixing a broken-down carriage in order to get to the nearest town in time for an important court trial, to escaping from the police by sneaking through dark alleyways and climbing up walls, all of which Peri will have a hand in orchestrating. In other words, your goal as the player is to complete the story, and as such, the gameplay lies in figuring out what decisions the characters must make next in order to achieve this goal.

The way this is presented to the player is through a mouse-driven interface. Double-clicking on any character will reveal their thoughts. Right-clicking on anything in the game, then right-clicking on a particular character, forces that character to think specifically about the original item, and when applicable, motivates them to take a related action. For instance, if you find a prison guard looking for the release forms he needs, you can travel to where the forms are located, click on them, then return to the guard and click on him in turn, causing him to release the prisoner.

While possible to move about in first-person view as the ethereal Peri, at points in the story where Valjean is the focus (which is roughly 80% of the game), the player can guide him onscreen from one location to the other by right-clicking on him, then right-clicking on exits. This is sometimes necessary to solve puzzles where Valjean needs to show up at a specific place at a given time, but for the most part it's completely optional. There's no inventory manipulation, which is fitting, as Les Misérables is a story about people rather than things, and the vast majority of goals are presented one at a time, which keeps the main story thread focused and linear. In essence, this game adaptation is not very complex as an adventure game, at least in the traditional sense of the term. Fortunately, the story being played is gripping and interesting with many plot twists, making the linearity far less of a problem than it would be in a lesser story.