This was due to a last minute re-edit of the last half-hour of the film by New Line Cinema, which could not be incorporated into the game, as it was based on the shooting script.

Lyra's levels primarily involve platforming, stealth and puzzle solving,[10] whilst Iorek's are mainly melee combat based.

The Ermine's ability is "Insight", which allows Lyra to discover information about her surroundings, find hotspots, and reveal secrets.

After releasing her from the pole, the player may then need to immediately use the "Glide" ability to reach the platform, necessitating a form change whilst Lyra is in midair.

She spends time with her friend and fellow student Roger Parslow and a few Gyptian boys, and then decides to sneak into the Master's Retiring Room so she can watch Asriel's presentation.

She hides in a wardrobe and sees Asriel present a picture from his travels in Svalbard showing "Dust" falling from the sky.

Whilst exploring Coulter's apartment, Lyra finds a document with the names of numerous children, including Roger's, and the letterhead of the "General Oblation Board," and she realizes that Coulter is the leader of the Board; an organization that abducts children, supposedly to prevent them turning into "bad" adults.

Coulter sends men to get Lyra and Pan back, but they are saved by Gyptians, and begin living on their ship, the Noorderlicht.

Lyra learns how to use the Alethiometer more proficiently than any adult, and is visited by the witch queen Serafina Pekkala who tells her where the General Oblation Board has taken the missing children.

[19] She sneaks out of the camp with Iorek, and inside the cabin they find a psychologically damaged child who has been severed from his dæmon; a nightmarish process called "Intercision," which is practiced by the Magisterium, the most dominant religious group in the world, in an effort to generate energy.

Using the Alethiometer, she learns that Asriel plans to perform an Intercision on Roger so as to generate enough energy to open a portal to a parallel universe.

Sega revealed there would be thirteen levels in the game, including several locations not seen in the film, and players would be able to control Lyra, Pan and Iorek.

Mechanics like the Alethiometer and hiring a game writer who was an extreme fan of the series was integral to proving that we care about the demographic that put this universe on the map.

Lyra uses her skills in subterfuge to gain access to key locations, learns valuable information and even uses rhetoric to further her own goals in side quests and non-critical path scenarios.

We have devised an entire deception mechanic within the game which is played out in a series of flowing conversation rounds where Lyra attempts to win over her opponent by means of persuasion.

The attempt to do this task and still be true to the universe is even more challenging but extremely necessary in providing the content that a game set in a world such as this deserves."

[7] The game was completed before the later editing the film received, therefore the Bolvangar sequences occurred before Svalbard (as in the original book) while Nonso Anonzie provides the voice of Iorek Byrnison, rather than Ian McKellen, who replaced him in post-production.

Given the grand scope of the game, the music was recorded with a full orchestra at Warner Brothers Studios in LA.

We finished the music just 2 days before my wife gave birth to our daughter, and I think that "Lyra's Theme" was in some ways inspired by that fact.

The producers of the game hired me to write a score based on my own style, and really left a lot of musical choices up to my own personal tastes.

[32]As soon as he was hired, Christopherson was shown footage from the game; Since I was brought onto the project at a very late date, all of the major animation was already completed.

Often I am only given a few early screenshots and descriptions of the characters and levels, which is great, but kind of like writing music for a film that hasn't been shot yet.

Sometimes Lyra will be in a frigid environment, and the music will play her theme but with instrumentation and harmonies that evoke a feeling of place.

"[45] Of the PlayStation Portable version, he stated "it suffers from incomprehensibly awful glitches that essentially break the game [...] there are four- or five-second loading times in the middle of nowhere, accompanied by the furious whir of the disc.

This can happen midjump or midattack, and rather than just freeze the onscreen view, the game cuts away to a black screen with a loading symbol.

"[44] Of the game in general, he was highly critical of the plot, arguing that if players were unfamiliar with either the novel or the film, they would not be able to follow what is happening.

[51][52][54][53] He was heavily critical of the deception and evasion minigames, and although he thought the Alethiometer gameplay was interesting, he felt its almost wholly optional nature in the game undermined it.

He was critical of the graphics; "Character models lack texture detail, animations stutter and fail to flow into one another seamlessly, collision detection is fuzzy and the environments are relentlessly bare and uninteresting."

Worse, the game has some distinct visual errors, such as geometry edges and the occasional chunk of flashing polygon.

"[41] GameSpy's Elisa Di Fiore rated the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii versions 1.5 out of 5, calling it "one of the worst licensed games of the last few years."