The Detroit Free Press reports that the new video game “Brain Age” uses quotations from classic novels, including Jane Austen’s.

“He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’ ”

Ryuta Kawashima’s new game, “Brain Age,” deserves a 4-star rating if only for devising a clever way to convince gamers to read aloud from dramatic passages like this one by Joseph Conrad.

To rack up top scores in “Brain Age,” he requires players also to read aloud from Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville and Jack London. As the days pass, the readings turn out to be more than macho adventure tales. The game includes passages from Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and Frederick Douglass.

These excerpts from great literature certainly are the most unusual aspect in “Brain Age.” But there’s a lot more than reading aloud in this suite of 15 minigames developed by Kawashima, who claims to be a Japanese medical researcher with a specialty in improving the functions of the human brain.

Each day, players are supposed to fire up “Brain Age” and play several games involving math, vocabulary, short-term memory and critical thinking. Some days that involves reading aloud. Other days, it may involve a Sudoku puzzle or rapid-fire math problems.

What impressed us most was the possibility that a player just might get hooked on Conrad or Bronte and this little handheld game might actually spark someone to put down the electronic gadget for a while and pick up a literary classic. Now, that is really cool!

We’re thinking that the quotation might be from Northanger Abbey…or maybe it’s just wishful thinking.

A violent gust of wind, rising with sudden fury, added fresh horror to the moment. Catherine trembled from head to foot. In the pause which succeeded, a sound like receding footsteps and the closing of a distant door struck on her affrighted ear. Human nature could support no more. A cold sweat stood on her forehead, the manuscript fell from her hand, and groping her way to the bed, she jumped hastily in, and sought some suspension of agony by creeping far underneath the clothes. To close her eyes in sleep that night, she felt must be entirely out of the question. With a curiosity so justly awakened, and feelings in every way so agitated, repose must be absolutely impossible. The storm too abroad so dreadful! — She had not been used to feel alarm from wind, but now every blast seemed fraught with awful intelligence. The manuscript so wonderfully found, so wonderfully accomplishing the morning’s prediction, how was it to be accounted for? — What could it contain? — to whom could it relate? — by what means could it have been so long concealed? — and how singularly strange that it should fall to her lot to discover it! Till she had made herself mistress of its contents, however, she could have neither repose nor comfort; and with the sun’s first rays she was determined to peruse it. But many were the tedious hours which must yet intervene. She shuddered, tossed about in her bed, and envied every quiet sleeper. The storm still raged, and various were the noises, more terrific even than the wind, which struck at intervals on her startled ear. The very curtains of her bed seemed at one moment in motion, and at another the lock of her door was agitated, as if by the attempt of somebody to enter. Hollow murmurs seemed to creep along the gallery, and more than once her blood was chilled by the sound of distant moans. Hour after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three proclaimed by all the clocks in the house before the tempest subsided or she unknowingly fell fast asleep.