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Casual Collection - June 2011 releases page 2

Casual Collection 10
Casual Collection 10

Why don’t hidden objects ever hide in sunny meadows filled with chirping birds, bubbling brooks, and children’s joyful laughter? Maybe sometimes they do, but last month’s round of casual adventures sure ain’t no picnic. From Dracula’s battle with the Queen of Vampires to witch’s curses, deadly plagues, and demons of the night, there’s a dark theme running through the newest hidden object hybrids. There’s a carnival to be explored, but it’s deserted and run by a deranged dwarf with an axe to grind (perhaps literally); there’s treasure to discover but sharks (both human and fish) who will kill to keep you from it. There’s even a lost world to find, but a demented nemesis is eager to make you a sacrificial meal for hungry pterosaurs. But hey, if wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t challenge, so if you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and dig right in, read on and pick your poison.

(Note: Several casual releases this month are not listed here, as The Fall Trilogy: Chapter 3 – Revelation, Tales from the Dragon Mountain: The Strix, and Sinbad: In Search of Magic Ginger will get full reviews of their own in the coming weeks.)
 



Dracula: Love Kills

by Shuva Raha

As the public fixation with all-things-vampire continues unabated, now we have yet another chance to schmooze with the fangtastic Count Dracula in Dracula: Love Kills. A hidden object adventure with an unusual pedigree, this is a casualised sequel to the full-fledged 2008 adventure Dracula: Origin by Frogwares’ internal Waterlily Games studio. It picks the story up some time after Dracula was ingloriously knocked into his casket and stashed in his crypt by his nemesis Van Helsing. Once back on his feet, the Prince of Darkness is informed by his fiercely loyal henchman Igor that the Queen of Vampires has hijacked his domain and intends to turn the human race into vampires. Now, in addition to rescuing his beloved Mina from the Queen's clutches, Dracula must fight off the challenge to his own dark supremacy. Being a vampire interferes with his plan to kill the Queen, however, so he's forced to propose an uneasy alliance with Van Helsing, who reluctantly agrees that the threat of vampiric world domination is far more insidious than the Count’s lovelorn malice.

Image #1Unlike Origin, which featured Van Helsing, Love Kills is played mainly from Dracula's perspective. The unlikely trio – including Igor, whose bickering with Van Helsing adds comic relief to the grim proceedings – flit between late 19th century Transylvania, London, Venice, Paris, Louisiana, Panama and Mont St. Michel, racing against time while the Queen's influence destroys the world, piling it with gruesome mounds of flesh and blood. A lengthy and enjoyable mix of inventory quests, hidden object searches and standalone puzzles, the game has two modes, the harder of which not only offers fewer hints but also increased difficulty for some puzzles. Dracula's vampire nature is laced into the gameplay as well: his superhuman abilities like telekinetic powers and x-ray vision require him to bolster his strength with blood – sourced either from vials hidden onscreen, or directly from the jugular veins of the Queen's racy young minions. However, indulging his insatiable thirst has consequences, which makes Love Kills a rare casual game worth replaying, as the surprising conclusion depends on the choices you make along the way.

The immense range of activities is sure to satisfy any fan of casual adventures, whatever the preference. Gathered inventory items are either used intuitively with other onscreen objects, often much later and in far-removed places, or help complete scenarios which yield new puzzles. The objects blend well into intricately designed screens, and though they sparkle occasionally, eliminating pixel hunting, seeking them all out is still pleasantly challenging. The two dozen hidden object screens are well-stocked, and each set of fifteen era-appropriate objects yields one useful item. Though these scenes are repeated once each, no objects found in the first search are included in the second round. The thirty-odd standalone puzzles and minigames cover almost every sort: jigsaws, object matching and sequencing, tile swapping, sliders, rotators, mazes, gears, checkers, and even mouse control challenges, varying widely in difficulty from easy to quite complex. Many have multiple levels to complete, though any puzzle can be skipped after a couple of minutes.

Progress isn't entirely linear, as Dracula has to juggle all available locations. Helpfully, screens where all tasks are currently done are marked as completed, though they're revisited in later chapters. A map marks active screens and specifies incomplete ones, allowing instant teleporting between them. With over a hundred meticulously drawn, subtly animated screens loaded with little flourishes, Love Kills is a visual treat that combines with the classical background score to create an immersively tense and ominous ambience. Character and event animation is smooth but limited, relying mostly on transitions of static images. There's substantial dialogue, embellished with snappy one-liners, and extensive voice acting both in-game and during cutscenes. But over-the-top renditions and hodgepodge accents, particularly the Queen's minions' hammy threats, make the production inadvertently cheesy, though Igor's oddball portrayal is weirdly charming.

Image #2There are numerous awards for achieving pre-set milestones, good and bad, including one for finishing the game under five hours, a fairly demanding ask even in the easy mode. In the Collector's Edition bonus chapter, Dracula searches the labyrinths below Notre Dame for the source of the Queen's power to keep the artifact out of the hands of other megalomaniacs. His team depends on the conclusion of the main game, as does the finale, which comes after another ninety minutes of superlative questing through several new locations, eight more repeated hidden object screens, a lengthy inventory obstacle, and a dozen-plus tricky puzzles.

With Dracula: Love Kills, Waterlily Games delivers big on genuinely high stakes. A shift from traditional to casual adventure could easily be dismissed as a downgrade for a series, but this game proves that a classic tale told with refreshing twists, diverse protagonists who play off each other's discrete personalities, a vast repository of thoughtful challenges, moral dilemmas yielding different outcomes, and impressive art and architecture will produce a winner irrespective of the format. Clocking in at well over six hours with the CE extension, this game has both style and substance, and is worth playing at least a couple of times for all fans of vampires and/or casual adventure games.


Love Chronicles: The Sword and the Rose

by Merlina McGovern

What’s a prince to do after saving an entire kingdom from an evil witch? Why, take a vacation on an isolated island, of course. Unfortunately for this prince, in Vendel Games’ Love Chronicles: The Sword and the Rose, the evil witch has beaten the prince to the punch and enchanted the place just before he arrives. As you help the prince discover the entirely unoriginal mystery behind the island’s curse, you’ll explore a world filled with beautiful animations, a new twist on hidden object tasks, and a bevy of logic puzzles to keep you in like, if not in love, with this casual fantasy adventure.

Image #3You’ll know immediately that all is not well as you pull up in your little boat and find the shoreline encrusted in frozen sea water. Fortunately, you’ll find a magic rose that just so happens to thaw ice. Bizarrely, rose petals that you are tasked with collecting throughout the game are also encased in ice, so it’s lucky that you have your magic ice-thawing rose to start off with. Collecting these petals isn’t just a fun add-on, as you’ll also need to thaw ice to move forward at certain points in the game or uncover inventory objects. Along with freezing everything over and turning all the island’s people into crows, the same witch who put an entire kingdom under her curse in Love Chronicles: The Spell has enchanted yet another fair princess who you must attempt to save. On top of all of this, there’s a mysterious beast prowling the island environs, which it seems you may have to contend with at some point.

Drastically altering its predecessor’s format, The Sword and the Rose abandons the fragment search concept in favor of a full inventory item hunt sprinkled with logic puzzles and traditional hidden object searches. As you make your way from the beach to a mysterious castle at the center of the island, you’ll be looking for all types of objects to help you discover and destroy a strange black crystal, the seat of the witch’s power. The scenes you explore, while pretty and fantastical, do have a bit of a retread feel. We’ve seen the moldering old forest with a wise old tree; the castle replete with drawbridge and spooky hidden passages won’t be unfamiliar to casual adventure aficionados (although a sitting room with a fountain in the middle is a bit unusual). However, lovely animations bring a sense of vitality to these scenes. As you travel through an outdoor passageway, pennants ripple in the wind as lightning strikes in the background, and fast-growing trees have undulating branches that softly glow pink, ice blue, and peach as they sway.

Some items can only be acquired by completing standard hidden object searches or various set collections. In an interesting twist, you’ll find an item assembly system early in the game that lets you put together the many objects you find to make one larger item. It’s a refreshing change to actually use all those gears, clamps, and other random detritus. Ever wondered how you could make a fire extinguisher out of a toy monkey, a watering can, and various unrelated items? Well, even if you haven’t, you’ll find out how to do just that in this game. The combinations aren’t very tricky as there’s always a pattern to follow, but they do require that you put objects together in a particular order to complete. You’ll also have to pair certain items in very precise ways in the environment itself.

Image #4There is a wide variety of logic puzzles along the way. These are all relatively simple, including the usual suspects like tile puzzles and memory games, but they’re complemented by some nicely integrated minigames, such as knocking beetles off a tree and capturing them, and a simple pattern game that cleverly disguises itself as a session of cross-stitching. The music is a pleasant backdrop to all the needlework and puzzle-solving, with the thumping drums and insistent violins that open the game soon settling down to the more soothing tones of xylophones and harps. The ambient sounds, however, distractingly repeat themselves. The same creaky door sound becomes tiresome after it’s repeated for the millionth time.

After almost three hours spent completing the main adventure, I found the nearly hour-long bonus chapter in the Collector’s Edition to be delightfully quirky, even if its story is just as flimsy. Here you are tasked with finding an inventor, though you’ll never really learn what he has to do with anything or why the witch abducted him. Regardless, your search takes you through a crazy realm populated by sleeping mushrooms that squeak and yawn when you click on them, and tree branches that grow around large, staring eyes. In this quest, you’ll encounter new puzzles and a larger proportion of hidden object searches than in the main game, but you won’t repeat searches in any old locations. Surprisingly for a game called Love Chronicles, there’s very little romance in either version. Still, The Sword And The Rose is quite an enjoyable adventure, though the change of hidden object focus may not be what you’re expecting from a sequel. If you’re new to the series, the unoriginal premise may turn you off at first, but the wide variety of puzzles and pretty animations will soon succeed in winning your affections.


Grim Facade: Mystery of Venice

by Robin Parker

With Grim Facade: Mystery of Venice, ERS Game Studios continues to do what they do best – making creepy hidden object adventures. The story is set sometime in Venice’s past, when the Italian city has been struck with a vicious plague. Most residents have left, and those who remain stay indoors and hide, praying for the illness to pass. Legend has it, however, that a secret society called “Redemption” blames the plague on the sins of the wealthy and selfish, and they plan to cleanse Venice by kidnapping those who best personify the seven mortal sins. Playing as an unnamed detective, you are employed by a bereaved citizen named Silvio, whose wife and daughter have been captured. But a mysterious masked man is watching you carefully, and you in turn must follow him for clues in this twisted thriller.

 

Image #5The game mainly involves hidden object searches and inventory-based puzzles, with a handful of traditional sliding-tile and logic puzzles thrown into the mix. The HOG screens on display here are nicely drawn; some items are very well hidden, but there’s no confusion caused by poor artwork or unfair placement. Some items must be interacted with before the objects on your checklist are revealed, but all actions are logical and some can be quite clever. The only real disappointment is the fact that many hidden object screens are recycled, as you come back to some of them three or four times. Obviously it’s less interesting to revisit and easier to find new objects after you’ve scoured the same image a few times.

As is the case with a lot of ERS games, backtracking comes into the equation quite often. When you find new items and collect different artefacts while you explore, you sometimes need to travel halfway across the game world to use it. Fortunately, there are one or two points following a cutscene or a major event when you find yourself in a new area of the map, and further backtracking to the previous area is minimised or eliminated completely. Most inventory puzzles are fairly straightforward and intuitive. The logic puzzles are more taxing, but none of them are fiendish, and in most cases players can even stumble into the solution through trial and error. For those who do get in trouble, there is always the traditional hint and skip systems in place throughout. Extra hints for HOG screens can be gained by collecting ladies’ fans, avoiding the usual recharge time. The journal also helps keep track of clues gathered and events that have occurred. Another interesting addition is an in-game shop and currency. You must collect coins throughout Venice in order to visit the general store and buy certain items needed to solve puzzles. These are all necessary, so the shop doesn’t provide any real choice, but having to find money for purchases adds a different dynamic.

Image #6

Graphically, the game displays the standard hand-drawn ERS style, being spooky and atmospheric with high attention to detail. Character models are boldly illustrated and impressive, and the setting suitably conveys an old Italy feel. The grimness and danger of the Venice underworld is nicely portrayed as you descend from the docks and police station into underground tunnels and secret lairs. The voice work is a bit of a mixed bag, however. Silvio’s accent sounds believable, but his wife sounds more Eastern European, while his daughter and the police chief both sound American. Some sort of continuity in the dialect would have been far more authentic. The music more than makes up for this, fortunately, as voices don’t crop up very often and the moody, tense atmosphere is supported by the suspenseful soundtrack, though it doesn’t always play.

In the Collector’s Edition, after the main game has been completed a bonus chapter introduces several new scenes to explore that weren’t available originally, and with it some all-new hidden object screens. The storyline carries on directly from the events in the main game, expanding on some of the background information you’ve discovered and leading to a more satisfying ending that wraps up many of the loose threads. The extra chapter is not particularly long, adding about an hour at most to the total play time to the three-plus hours offered in the standard version. In either edition, The Mystery of Venice proves a complex one, with many hundreds of years of history behind it, and despite its repetitive nature at times, tracking down those who wear the Grim Facade is one of the more fascinating casual adventures available today.


Secrets of the Dark: Temple of Night

by Jason L Blair

Orneon’s Secrets of the Dark: Temple of Night wastes no time getting players into the game. A quick cinematic shows you rushing to the side of a journalist friend just as he is dragged off by a monstrous figure through a golden gate that shuts quickly behind them. From there, alone in a Central American town, you wander between two worlds: the normal world of daylight and the mystical overlay that appears when an area is cast in darkness, each with numerous puzzles to solve and hidden object searches to complete. As you explore, the backstory is exposed via video tapes you find, which are remnants of your friend's investigation into this town's eerie past. This narrated camcorder footage reveals a tale of demons that have existed on the grounds for hundreds of years.

Image #7Most scenes have two phases, a light side and a dark. For the most part, you control the change between states, which you’ll do multiple times throughout the game. When in the light, the environment looks as you would expect and leads to certain standard areas. A hotel lobby leads up to stairs which lead to guest rooms. When in the dark, the room takes on an ancient Mesoamerican look, and different routes and puzzles branch from there. The hotel lobby, now done up in Aztec-inspired décor, leads down to a trap-laden chamber. The main game has a total of five general locations with most of your time spent in four of them, though this number is more than doubled once the light/dark mechanic is taken into account.

The main game favors standalone lgoic puzzles over hidden object searches. Some of the obstacles are rather light but more than a few offer a fair bit of challenge, though sometimes the greater difficulty comes from figuring out what you're supposed to do in order to solve them. One puzzle's instructions were, essentially, “arrange the squares until it looks right.” Still, most are types that adventure fans have seen before and the goal is easily inferred. Though I enjoyed the puzzles overall, unfortunately there isn't a wide variety. You will encounter numerous slide puzzles and flipping tile puzzles, often dressed differently though the goal is always the same.

When a hidden object screen is encountered, it is one of two varieties. The traditional hunts have you seeking out various (and mostly contextually-relevant) objects in a densely-filled screen, including some that must be combined first. There are some oddities in terminology but nothing egregious, though in one instance a “bag” is required from a screen that has at least three items I would consider to be bags. You’ll revisit these scenes multiple times, however, so finding new items gets less difficult on return trips. The second kind of search presents you with a list of items to place into the proper setting on the same screens, such as reconnecting a jaw onto a skull or attaching a feather to a headdress.

Image #8The presentation is quite polished and, in keeping with the macabre theme, includes a few jump scares and some nice rewards for those who take their time and pay attention to the subtle animations. The game features realistic artwork of mundane world locations such as the police station and museum, as well as altars and tombs found in the mystical realm of the dark. The sound is also well done, especially the energetic electronic soundtrack. While not the most fitting thematically, it is nice to bop to while working through puzzles or eying over a screen trying the find the last moth or stack of coins.

The Collector's Edition comes with two bonus adventures that unlock in succession. Finishing the main game unlocks the first, which continues the story and tasks you with the rescue of the town's residents. Completing that unlocks the second bonus, which has you revisiting the areas from the main game and first expansion to hunt down a couple dozen crystals in order to bring the town fully into the light. Both chapters rely more on hidden object screens than the main game, and most of the standalone puzzles are rehashes. The second also requires a bit of clicking on random objects to unearth the missing crystals, causing some frustration near the end. Neither chapter really enhances the main game's ending, so playing them certainly doesn’t feel necessary, but both add about an hour each to the original four-hour journey, and you can replay any of the completed puzzles via the Options menu as well.

Secrets of the Dark: Temple of Night offers quite a bit for the casual gamer. The game is polished, moves quickly, and, while not having a wide variety of puzzles, can offer a real challenge. Despite being light on story, the objectives are clear and they really pulled me in. Even if you consider yourself on the fence when it comes to casual games, give this one a look. When compared to some of the softer offerings in the hidden object adventure category, the difference is night and day.


Dreamland

by Jack Allin

Dreamland sounds like such a lovely place, doesn’t it? Except when it’s an abandoned amusement park plagued by supernatural terrors, traps, puzzles, and a possibly-demonic dwarf with an axe to grind. Just why the diminutive villain of astargames' Dreamland holds a grudge is never revealed, but your younger brother has already fallen prey to the curse of his carnival, and as a young teen girl it’s now your job to follow in his footsteps to save him. Once inside, however, only by completing a host of hidden object hunts and solving all the madman’s maniacal riddles can you hope to escape, and while that isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds, it should take several hours of solid casual adventuring to accomplish.

 

Image #9Dreamland’s story never really extends beyond its simplistic premise, but escaping a deranged carnival offers plenty of twisted fun in its own right. Despite the dwarf’s periodic taunts, the mix of light inventory puzzles and standalone brainteasers are all quite easy. You’ll never carry more than a few items at a time, and most of the logic challenges are common types like several jigsaw variations, ring rotators, sliders, and pipes. Others are more memorable, like assembling the components of an ever-evolving robot in the correct sequence, and several make clever use of the setting. You’ll need to find parts and clues for adorning clown mannequins correctly, complete a Mastermind-like puppet show task, and perform a magic trick once you’ve collected all ingredients and learned the correct mouse-based wand maneuver.

Even the hidden object hunts make good use of their unique locale. While many are standard lists of items in extremely cluttered close-up screens – with one rather unintuitive interactive component per screen – a couple really stand out creatively. The shooting gallery has you targeting (non-moving) items for points needed to win necessary prizes, while the automated café attendant must be “fed” with a sequence of foodstuffs found behind him. These are welcome tweaks to the usual formula, especially since there end up being so many of the standard searches, especially towards the end. Each scene is visited at least twice, and occasionally more that that, and while they do randomly activate anywhere and everywhere, for once a developer has played fair. Every time a new object hunt has triggered elsewhere, the map icon pops up to alert you, and you can quick travel directly to that location. It’s still a rather cheap way to extend play time without regard for integration, but kudos to the developers for the heads-up.

Before entering each new exhibit, you’ll first need a ticket, which can only be acquired by finding a coin and playing a Match-3-styled minigame, which begins to get repetitive but offers a nice change of pace. These activities start off easy, but grow progressively more difficult with the introduction of new obstacles. Your travels through the park take you to all the usual haunts, from roller coaster to house of horror, from carousel to circus tent, plus a few unexpected surprises like a pirate ship and moon rocket to keep the locations diverse. The nighttime graphics are nicely hand drawn but not particularly crisp, and despite the ominous premise this really isn’t a horror game, with just a few macabre touches sprinkled here and there. The music and sound effects are rather plain as well, really missing an opportunity to ratchet up the tension. The only voice acting is from the dwarf, whose verbal taunts sound far more threatening than his carnival machinations actually are. Even so, it should take well over three hours to reach the end, about an hour of which feels more like casual filler than adventure, culminating in a definitive ending that still manages to leave a major question bizarrely unresolved. In all, Dreamland won’t blow you away with its production values or scope, but with a few nice gameplay ideas weaved into a solid hidden object hybrid, most casual game fans should find it worth the price of admission.


Hide & Secret: The Lost World

by Jack Allin

With a name like Hide & Secret, you’d probably expect a garden variety hidden object game, but as Anarchy Enterprises’ long-running series hits its fourth iteration, you’ll do a fair bit of light adventuring and exploring of The Lost World as well. There are still plenty of standard scavenger hunts that threaten to bog the game down at times, but before all is said and done (often again and again), you’ll spend a good three hours or so puzzling your way completely through these prehistoric lands.

Image #10Drawing only the loosest of inspiration from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, the game casts players in the role of Anna, who travels to the Lost World (which apparently isn’t so lost) to rescue her friend Professor Columbia. Hide & Secret’s recurring villain Jacques has kidnapped the antiquities specialist and plans to sacrifice her in a ritual that will grant him immortality. And so Anna and three colleagues take off on a rescue mission, but when their planes are shot down and the escaping parachutists scattered, you’ll need to find and rescue your cohorts as well. There’s really no further “story” developed here, as the entire game is spent simply combing the island, though there are various tasks to perform along the way, like stopping toxic waste from spilling into the pristine waters, collecting medicinal herbs for salves, and mastering your opponent’s hi-tech telescope and tunnel-travelling elevator.

You’ll collect some inventory to accomplish these goals, displayed a little too prominently at all times in an on-screen task list, though all but a few items are found in the hidden object searches. Apart from the odd set of items to collect, these are entirely traditional close-up screens with lists of completely random junk (hockey sticks and rubber chickens on the Lost World? Really??) to find. At first the searches seem reasonable, but the more you progress, the more the game relies on arbitrary activations of new searches at old locations, sometimes far from where you’re currently stationed, which gets really frustrating. There is a quick travel map, but it doesn’t identify currently active areas, so you’re left wandering aimlessly in any case. The text-only hint system isn’t very helpful either, as it merely provides a single clue to all current goals, and you may inadvertently see tips for goals you can’t accomplish yet. Standalone puzzles are standard and generally easy, from ring rotators to various jigsaw types to tracing tangled wires, but there are also several clever instances of matching widespread idol symbols, so you’ll need to keep an eye open for clues in the environment while you roam.

The production values certainly won’t dazzle you, but the graphics offer a pleasant depiction of the (presumably) Amazonian waterfalls, lakes, jungles, cliffs, and even a tribal village. Sprinkled amongst the action are some minimally-animated cutscenes, many of which include hungry pterosaurs circling (but never attacking) their would-be sacrifice. It’s all rather silly, but amusing in a hokey-looking way. There is no voice acting outside the rare maniacal cackle or terrified scream, but there’s very little dialogue to speak of anyway. The music, strangely, isn’t particularly evocative of the unique setting, instead relying on decent-sounding but rather mundane instrumental tracks to provide an utterly forgettable backdrop. And perhaps “forgettable” is a good word to describe Hide & Secret: The Lost World overall. It has its moments of mild entertainment, but it runs out of ideas about halfway through and merely pads the remaining time with increasingly annoying repetition. So unless you have a passion for B-movie prehistoria (and hey, if you liked the 1980s Lost World movies, maybe you do!) and you’ve blown through the better hidden object hybrids available, don’t go looking too hard to find this one.


Mystery of the Missing Brigantine

by Jack Allin

While most hidden object adventures task you with collecting tons of useless junk, gfi’s Mystery of the Missing Brigantine sees you collecting tons of useful junk instead. Some of that is sunken riches, as the game puts you in the flippers of four colleagues on a treasure hunt aboard the Princess Victoria, which has been lying at the bottom on the Indian Ocean for centuries. At least, that’s the goal, as you’ll need to do a whole lot of prep work and a little sleuthing first, in between a few rounds of (gasp!) shooting and a variety of first aid treatments along the way.

 

Image #11This game is really more of a hyper-streamlined lite adventure than traditional hidden object fare. There are no distinct screens full of clutter to scour, though there are many inset sub-screens to examine close up. Instead, as each new objective is added, whether it’s stopping a gas leak as rival goons leave you for dead; repairing broken compasses, radios, airplanes, and windmills; or lifting fingerprints with only makeshift tools at your disposal, all items needed to complete it are displayed at the bottom of the screen. Only two or three screens are ever accessible to you at any one time, so you simply move between them looking for the required inventory, at times encountering other small obstacles that must be completed first.

Areas with new or active objectives are highlighted with sparkles, but regular close-up screens are not, making them easy to overlook without sweeping the screen for the cursor to change. Some scenes are packed with items, like a diving shop full of scuba gear, but for the most part the enviroments feel pretty organic. No random zodiac signs, rubber ducks, and false teeth here, which is a welcome change from the norm. Some items are fairly small or obscurely placed, but the rechargeable hint system will highlight any interactive object on the current screen you may have overlooked. The environments themselves are nicely designed in a realistic style, taking you from your rainy home base in England to a sunny tropical beach to boats both floating and submerged, with the odd splash (literally) of animation slightly livening things up. The audio does little to support the atmosphere, unfortunately, with no voice acting, repetitive music that never feels suitable to the locales or the action onscreen, and few relevant sound effects. Nothing is particularly bad, just utterly generic.

At first there is little to do besides collecting items, sometimes assembling them afterwards in a simple, cant-fail process. The further you get, however, the more varied the tasks become. Most are fairly common standalone puzzles like jigsaws, ring rotators, Concentration, and pipes sequences that feel entirely contrived, but you’ll also pick locks, plot a flight plan, and spot differences to identify a forgery, which feel more relevant to the story. Many are quite easy, but a puzzle skip option exists if you’re stuck. There are also a few minigames, like some light shootouts and maintaining attitude through turbulence in a small plane. Even the most reflex-challenged gamer will find these laughably easy, existing more as a refreshing change of pace than a serious challenge.

Unfortunately, the story is far too sparse to effectively tie all this gameplay together. Many casual games give storylines short shrift, but here it’s meant to be integral to the experience, and it’s simply too scattershot to be effective. Characters are suddenly thrust into the mix with no introduction, including the four leads (though the bare-bones journal does offer a profile of each), scenes lurch from one location to another with no coherent progression, and the “mystery” background is doled out in meagre documents you can’t even read in full. Then again, it’s hard to tell much of a tale when you’re cramming an entire game into barely two hours of play time. A little more depth and attention to continuity between events would have made for a much more complete, cohesive adventure. As it is, Mystery of the Missing Brigantine is a pleasant enough change-of-pace hidden object excursion while it lasts, though its generic puzzles, patchwork storyline, and short length ultimately miss the boat.


Sandra Fleming Chronicles: Crystal Skulls

by Jack Allin

You may have thought you’d seen the last of crystal skulls when Indiana Jones returned his to its rightful owner in the last movie, but apparently there were three more still scattered around the world. Now it’s up to the titular archeologist in Deep Shadows‘ Sandra Fleming Chronicles: Crystal Skulls to find the rest of the legendary artifacts. It’s an ambitious undertaking that sees the young heroine and her colleague Tom fly across the world, from sunny Caribbean beaches to snowy Nepalese mountains to the lush jungles of the Amazon, though for the most part their adventure consists of standard inventory challenges, generic logic puzzles, and the periodic hidden object search.

 

Image #12The diverse scenery is perhaps the game’s greatest strength, presented in a crisp, realistic art style supplemented by ambient animations like rolling waves, bubbling lava in an underground cave, and mist rolling across a tropical swamp. The audio is far less impressive in establishing ambience. The soundtrack is pleasant enough to listen to, but makes no attempt to capture the cultural essence of the exotic locations you’re exploring. The game is largely voice acted (with very limited success), with one notable exception: Sandra herself. For some inexplicable reason, your own character “speaks” only in text dialogue while all others have full speech. That would have been fine if the lead role were anonymous, but for a game obviously intended to introduce a new franchise-worthy protagonist, her silent contributions and rare cutscene appearances render her entirely irrelevant. It’s odd to have Tom regularly popping onscreen to verbally converse with a mute, unseen protagonist.

Not that there’s much dialogue worth remembering. Through discovered notes and clues, eventually a mystery emerges regarding your museum boss’s previous expeditions, but for the most part the story here is little more than a thin excuse to explore ancient pyramids, repair mine elevators, generators, and cranes, and even dodge hungry crocodiles. To do this you’ll need to collect various inventory items in your travels, some by completing hidden object searches. These involve standard lists of items in repeating locations, with one or more object requiring interaction to find, some of which are intuitive, some not. Why a “necklace” sitting right out in the open isn’t good enough to grab is never explained, at least until you waste a hint to find out you need to replace its missing gems first. And hints are precious here, as the feature recharges at an insanely slow pace. You can collect coins across the environments to stockpile a few more hints, but the coin:hint ratio is absurdly high. What’s worse is that many hints simply point you to the nearest objective, which is the very puzzle you want a hint to solve. Hardly a good investment of your hard-earned change.

This lack of helpfulness extends to the standalone puzzles as well. As you encounter garden variety challenges like rotating tiles into place, redirecting mirrors, and guiding a mouse through a maze, it’s not always clear what the actual goal of the puzzle is as it’s never explained. Okay, actually it is, but only if you click the task list, which I learned purely by accident. Even then, many tasks can be very problematic. Assembling a crossbow with no directions, tracing a blowtorch pattern, and colouring a paint-by-numbers mural are annoyingly finicky. Most are very easy otherwise, so you’ll likely beat the glacially-charging skip function if/once you figure out what you need to do. Continuing the theme of unreliable help, while wandering the five or six scenes per location, some interactive areas twinkle while others do not, exits are not clearly marked, and certain locations suddenly begin scrolling although none had to that point.

Despite these mounting criticisms, the game isn’t all bad by any means, as there are lengthy periods of solid casual gameplay throughout its nearly three-hour play time. It looks good and feels suitably adventurous in its range of reasonably integrated tasks, but ultimately it’s too rough around the edges to recommend over other, better games of its type. If there are to be more Sandra Fleming Chronicles in future, here’s hoping the developers can eliminate the frustrations that will have you banging your four skulls on the desk in this sometimes-rocky debut.


Note: Adventure Gamers is a Big Fish Games affiliate.

 

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