The first volume of American McGee's Grimm comes to a close with Episode 8, "Beauty and the Beast." Where previous episodes have stuck fairly close to the story, this one takes a meandering approach and explores a couple of tangents, including a drawn-out dream sequence that gradually morphs into a nightmare, with a whole scene devoted to pirates (huh?).

The classic Brothers Grimm version of the fairy tale is essentially a love story, where a young girl Beauty is sent to live with a frightening Beast in his castle, gradually develops affection for him, and gives him a kiss, which breaks the enchantment to reveal that the Beast is actually a handsome prince.

Grimm's Beast is hideous indeed.

McGee's interpretation basically paints everyone in the story as being horrible from the get-go, as opposed to being transformed that way over the course of the game, which is what usually happens. Beauty, the heroine, is portrayed as an airheaded dunce with two spoiled-brat brothers and a cowardly father who deliberately sells out his daughter to keep the Beast from putting him to death.

Halfway through the story, the Beast allows Beauty to leave the Castle to visit her family, which does parallel the Brothers Grimm version of the tale. But in a bizarrely humorous twist, Beauty dreams about the Beast dying and decides to go back to see if she's in the will. She decides she loves him somehow, and negotiates their "marriage" with such clauses as separate bedrooms and that he has to stay out of sight when she has friends over.

The latter part of the episode peters out into a dream sequence focusing on pirates. I'm not sure why most of the dream sequence featured pirates, but it was cool the way the men morphed into freaky guys with hooks for arms and a hook for a head. The ending, though, where Beauty revives the dying Beast with a zombie potion, is classic.

A kid meets his fate at the hands of a nasty snowman.

The highlights of the episode were related to the twisted transformations rather than gameplay, which continued to be straightforward with a few basic platforming elements tossed in -- including, for the first time, icy surfaces to slide on and holes to slide into (over and over again). The winter scene was fun for the ability to turn the pristine white snow into grungy slush, and for the snowman who turned rotten, grabbed a nearby kid, and started shaking him.

The Beast's hedge maze was also a fun level to go through as the perfectly manicured hedges exploded into spiky brambles and gaunt trees with glowing-eyed skulls hanging off of them.

Another idyllic medieval village transformed into a dump.

Looking at the first eight episodes as a whole, American McGee's Grimm has definitely been at its best when it goes for those surreal, larger-than-life moments that latch onto a particularly fantastical or gruesome moment in a fairytale and run with it -- like Beauty's dream sequence, or the level that took place inside the wolf's stomach in "Little Red Riding Hood."

The episodes would be even better if these key moments were connected by better-crafted action sequences instead of superficial platforming sequences. Here's hoping that the next set of episodes is just as twisted, but focuses a little more on gameplay.

Book Two of American McGee's Grimm begins on Oct. 20 with "The Master Thief," followed by "The Singing Bone" on Nov. 6.