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Casual Friday

Today’s screenshot is from Nightmare Adventures - The Witch’s Prison. There is a sequel titled Nightmare Adventures - The Turning Thorn.

A strange thing about these two games. The titles came up on the Casual Games thread, and somebody was sure I played them. I said I didn’t think so. Turns out I found them both in my purchase history at BFG. So I must have played them, but I didn’t remember a thing about them. I reinstalled them both, and started playing Witch’s Prison. There was some vague familiarity, such as ‘I think I remember being in this room.’ but nothing more than that.

I didn’t remember any of the puzzles, and I should have. I like puzzles, and this game is loaded with them. And for those who want their casual games to be a bit more like straight adventures, there are no Hidden Object scenes. Or at least there aren’t any so far, and I’m about 1.5 hours into the game. I’m going to assume the same is true for Turning Thorn, but I don’t remember that game either, so that’s pure speculation on my part.

I like the story…so far. Apparently one of your ancestors did something quite bad that involved sorcery and withcraft. You are the chosen one, the only member of the 13th generation of the family. Unfoirtunately being the chosen one is not all fun and games because your primary responsibility is to atone for your ancestor’s sins, probably with your life. The other characters you’ve met by now include a groundskeeper who leads the cult that wants you dead, and some government agents who want to rescue you.

Beware those government agents. They have been on this site before. Nothing good came of their first visit.

There is a lot to like about this game. Again, so far. But there is also much to dislike about it. With most casual games whatever the game lacks in plot or puzzles is made up for with gorgeous graphics. For all the good plot and puzzles, the graphics are quite dreary.

Almost all of the cut scenes are told in the graphic novel style we’ve seen before in, for example, the Women’s Murder Club games. Most of those scenes in this game don’t come off nearly as well.

The game has no map, which is a real problem. Unless you take copius notes, which is not a common practice for casual gamers, you will frequently be confronted with the ‘What the hell do I do now?’ problem. The solution is the Hint button, and that really doesn’t help you very much. For example, if you are at a crossroads, and there are three avalable routes to take, and you hit the Hint button…you will be shown the three routes highlighted as options. There is an occasional concrete hint, such as ‘There’s some freshly-turned earth in the garden. You should investigate.’ There are also some miserable hints such as ‘The solution to this puzzle should be in your photo album, providing you’ve solved the puzzle in the bird room.’ Well, if you haven’t solved the bird room puzzle, and you don’t know where the bird room is, and the Hint button doesn’t lead you to it, there’s a bit of a problem.

All the puzzles have a skip option. The Skip button loads far faster than the Hint button. Which may or may not be a problem. I thought it was. In order to find out the purpose of the puzzle you have to use the Hint button. There is no “?” or similar device to tell you what you are supposed to do. And, to be honest, those puzzle hints do a fairly miserable job of telling you what the objective is. I’m speaking in generalities here, because there are a few hints that do tell you what you need to do, but you have to think about it for a long time before you arrive at the AHA moment. And you can’t use the Skip button until the Hint button reloads.

I think this game has a lot going for it. But it leaves me baffled as to why I don’t remember playing it. The only conclusion I have is that the negatives outweighed the positives. By the end of the game I decided I didn’t enjoy it, so I erased it from my
gaming memory. As for why I bought the second game, all I can say is I must have hoped it would be better. Since I don’t remember it either, all I can conclude is that it wasn’t.

I am not really worried about forgetting a game. I remember lots of them. We’re coming up on episode 40 of the Casual Friday series. I think I’ve written 36 of them. Thank you to chrissie and Becky for writing the other four while I was otherwise occupied. But this particular game stumps me. It should have been a memorable game based on what I’ve played so far. But it wasn’t. I pretty much replayed it up to the point I got a screenshot that illustrated what I wanted to say about the game. I really don’t plan to finish it unless things get really boring.

A quirk or a quark. Something happened in the space/time continuum that obliterated memory of this game from the Collective.

I’m now working on next week’s episode which, fortunately, I remember fondly.