Where the Wild Things Are (video game) levels allow Max to traverse background and foreground layers of the stage. "Where the Wild Things Are" received "mixed" reviews on all platforms according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. While acknowledging its graphics and other elements as commendable, the majority of critics noted the game's lack of depth as a major pitfall. Seth Schiesel of "The New York Times" considered the Wii version "more than a little disappointing." He also noted that while it's "not a sloppy or slipshod game," "The combat in "Wild Things" could charitably be described as minimalist in that all you ever have to do,
Where the Wild Things Are as an escape from their chaotic weekly visits, on Sunday afternoons, to his family's Brooklyn home. Sendak, as a child, had observed his relatives as being "all crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes", with blood-stained eyes and "big and yellow" teeth, who pinched his cheeks until they were red. These relatives, like Sendak's parents, were poor Jewish immigrants from Poland, whose remaining family in Europe were killed during the Holocaust while Sendak was in his early teens. As a child, however, he saw them only as "grotesques". When working on the 1983 opera adaptation of the book with Oliver