Journey to the Center of the Earth has its heart in the right place. It's an unpretentious point-and-click adventure game where you explore an exotic world, collecting countless inventory items and solving puzzles with them. From that perspective, fans of old-school adventures should warm up to the game immediately. Then again, the game is marred by bugs, design problems, low production values, and general sloppiness that usually overshadow its genuine charms.

Ariane finds herself in a strange underground world.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is inspired by Jules Verne's classic novel of the same name, but if you haven't read it, don't worry: The game's story stands on its own (even if it's very wobbly on its narrative feet). Taking part in a popular adventure game trend, Journey puts you in the shoes of a young female character, in this case a photojournalist named Ariane. Ariane is poorly fleshed out, though, and certainly won't make you forget better-written adventure game heroines like Nico Collard, April Ryan, or Kate Walker.

Ariane finds herself in dire straits from the get-go. A helicopter sets her down by the edge of a volcano in Iceland so she can take pictures. Soon after, a rockslide destroys the chopper, and when Ariane ventures into a nearby cave, she tumbles down into darkness.

She finds herself standing on a sunny beach, of all places. Talking to a nearby stranger reveals that Ariane is now in a secret underground world. It's your job to help her back to the surface while exploring the mysteries of this secret world. Along the way, you'll find a forest of giant mushrooms, tamed dinosaurs, a village of friendly giants, and a quasi-Victorian city of the future that melds 1800s technology with contemporary ideas like surveillance cameras and speedy cable cars. Thanks to a laptop computer, Ariane gets occasional e-mails updating her on the progress of her rescue party and other news from topside. In the strange underground world, she becomes enmeshed in a plot of manipulation and deceit with two possible endings: At a vital juncture, choosing one path will cause the game to end rather abruptly, but the other choice opens up another hour or two of gameplay.

Despite all the potential of the story and setting, they have about as much sophistication as the '70s kids' TV show Land of the Lost. In fact, it can be hard to tell if the game was intentionally geared toward kids or is just very poorly written. Ariane mostly seems to take her fall into another world inside the Earth in casual stride, and the inhabitants of this lost world usually don't blink an eye at the intruder in their realm. Most of the characters are paper thin, so don't expect the sort of memorable, even touching, characters you find in smarter adventures like Syberia or Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. The setting is a mishmash of ideas, and the dialogue is juvenile and stilted--imagine a bad children's cartoon--to the point of eliciting laughter during the serious bits.

Ariane visits a city that blends the past and the future.

Still, if you can shut off your critical faculties and just go along for the ride, Journey's world can be fun to explore. The game taps into the perpetually enticing idea of some fantastic realm of adventure lurking just behind the humdrum facade of everyday life. In Journey, you'll fly in a hot-air balloon, travel in a submarine, and see shamans levitate, pterodactyls soar overhead, and giants herd mastodons.

Of course, Journey isn't just about exploring; it's also about puzzles--lots of them. Here's where Journey's faults are harder to forgive; to some extent you can tune out the story, but not the puzzles. Most of the puzzles are based on finding or combining the right inventory items. Most of your searching will take the form of "FedEx" quests on behalf of the characters you meet, people who are apparently too lazy or inept to walk down the street and grab the items themselves. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to overlook items during your searches because they're tiny, or they're dark and placed against a dark background, or because the cursor doesn't let you know you're over a hotspot unless you position it perfectly over a tiny area. Sometimes you can't pick up an item when you first notice it; later, after tripping a hidden trigger in the game's logic, you can mysteriously pick it up. That can involve laborious backtracking across many screens to get to it. You'll often receive inventory items from characters, but usually your only notification is a tiny, easily missed sound effect.