Nigel may be a bit nonchalant, but that doesn’t mean the puzzles will take it easy on you. The first few hours are virtually puzzle-free, but the closer you get to the end of the game, the more intense the puzzles become. They range from the very simple, like walking around a small area picking up pieces of a sign to put back together, to the incredibly complex. One puzzle seemed particularly unfair. You must recreate a multi-note melody on an organ, and while you’re given a few notes to start with, the rest have to be discerned by listening to a recording. If you’re fairly tone deaf, this puzzle will be virtually unsolvable.

Luckily, the game's not all hopeless guessing at sounds, as there are puzzles of enough variety to please almost anybody. Inventory puzzles, logic puzzles, puzzles where you rotate decorative plates, riddle-driven fetch quests, and more. Most of the puzzle solutions will come from paying careful attention to the mountains of information you’ll receive as you go. There are several books to read, as well as journals, newspaper articles, and museum exhibits. To complete the game without a walkthrough, you should closely scrutinize every nugget of data, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. Though, to be completely honest, even if you don’t pay a whit of attention, even some of the hardest puzzles will only take ten minutes longer by randomly turning every millstone or spinning every gear until you stumble across the answer.

Whether you’re on the ball or guessing your way through, either way you’ll have to endure a lot of Nigel saying "That’s not right” over the twenty-plus hours of gameplay. It becomes very clear early on that there was only so much time available in the studio to record this game, as many vocal samples are re-used to the point of absurdity. If you love clicking on hotspots, you’ll hear Nigel say “Symbolic images, or ancient graffiti?” possibly two or three dozen times in different locations. Other times, you’ll be having a conversation with someone, when you’ll suddenly recognize a line of dialogue as being identical to the way they described some inventory object you showed them a few hours ago. You could even forgive this if it didn’t make Nigel seem like such an oaf. When there’s a ghost staring you right in the face, and all he can think of to say is “Am I alone in this place?” for the 30th time, you’ll wish the developer could’ve scrounged together the money for another few hours in the recording studio.

For that matter, you’ll wish the game's budget could’ve afforded some better voice actors. Though a few of the townspeople are voiced competently, or even well, many of them are difficult to suffer through. Nigel himself is a complete disaster, adding strange pauses to the middle of his sentences and emphasizing words for no reason. “Do you live … … near here?” At least players could have been given the option to turn voices off, as you could certainly do better with your imagination, but you're not even allowed to skip a conversation forward. So if you should happen to click on the ocean again, you’ll have to suffer through yet another excruciating round of Nigel shouting “Hello!” at it, then making some remark about “next stop, Norway.”

Turning the volume off completely would be a tragedy, however, as almost all the other sounds in the game are well done. When you enter a haunted area, the background music is soft and eerie, and does a wonderful job of drawing you into the environment. The incidental sound effects, like a sign creaking in the wind or Nigel stepping over some broken plates, are perfect. Most remarkable of all, the EVP cassettes you collect sound absolutely wonderful. The creepy mutters, the bangs and crashes, the otherworldly screams, are all terrific, and will foster a true sense of unease within you.

Ultimately, it’s the setting of The Lost Crown, between the brilliant sound design and the superb art direction, that will give you the most pleasure, and a great deal of praise for these elements is due the game’s creator, Jonathan Boakes. Except for some graphical effects, Boakes created the entire game, including the story, the puzzle design, and the art, wholly by himself. He even provides the voice of Nigel, though maybe that’s a point against him. As a work of art created by a single dedicated developer, it's easy to be mightily impressed by this game, but as a product competing for your entertainment dollar, it doesn’t matter if it was created by one person or a hundred. Is the game fun or isn’t it? Well, that depends. There’s a certain messiness in many elements, from the awful voice acting to the repetitive dialogue, through sometimes unfairly difficult puzzles, culminating in a bizarre non-ending that leaves a half-dozen plot points unresolved. If those caveats aren’t deal-breakers for you, however, and you’re looking for a lengthy, unique adventure title with tons of challenging puzzles and a bit of mystery, you’ll find it in The Lost Crown: A Ghost-hunting Adventure.