iActive Christmas Carol - Unabridged Review

iActive Christmas Carol - Unabridged, as the name may suggest, is an unabridged adaptation of the Charles Dickens Classic Tale: A Christmas Carol.

This app is without narration but includes both Victorian-inspired drawings as well as interactions that one can explore when reading this story.

The pages of this app have distressed edges, adding a vintage feel to this app that I appreciate, but the total lack of sound comes across as unfinished. I would rather listen to ambient sounds such as the crackle of a fire while on text pages or the sounds one would expect to find while performing included interactions, such as metallic or subtle ticking sounds one may expect if a watch were bouncing around the page or liquid sloshing sounds as a wine bottle is being tossed around the screen. I also find some of the interactions to be a little on the nose but can be fun to move about the screen.

I do wish page numbers could be included to keep track of one’s space in this book as there is no place-saving included.

It is worth noting that this app will open to the last page if iActive Christmas Carol is left running in the background of one’s iPad. This feature should be included intentionally as well.

A menu of pages is included that one can go through, but from a distance each of the pages without interactions looks the same. Readers can still take a few minutes to find the place where they left off.

Even with these notes, iActive Christmas Carol is worth taking a look at if one is in need of an unabridged version of this story that includes some interactive elements and illustrations.