Samantha Swift

Samantha Swift titles are casual gaming done right. Before getting into any deeper discussion of what they are and aren’t or do and don’t include, really that’s the bottom line. If you’re a fan of hidden object games, you should be making a beeline to pick up The Hidden Roses of Athena and The Golden Touch immediately. And if you’re a staunch adventure gamer wondering what all this casual gaming fuss is about, there aren’t many better places to begin to find out. They may not be enough to convince you, but they’ll certainly give you the right idea.

The premise of each game is simple enough for anyone to jump into straight away, and that’s exactly what you’ll do (in one game, quite literally). Samantha is a young archeologist who travels the world in pursuit of rare artifacts for the “Museum of Secrets Lost“ in New York, and if collecting historical relics doesn’t have “seek-and-find potential” written all over it, I don’t know what does. Indeed, combing many different screens across diverse areas of the world will be what you spend the bulk of your time doing, though not everything is just lying around in the open for you to find. We’d all be rich if treasure hunting was that easy. Along the way, you’ll need to solve some light puzzles, use plenty of your collectibles as inventory to overcome obstacles, and even do a bit of actual exploring between locations. Sounds an awful lot like a style of gameplay we’ve all come to know and love, doesn’t it?

Make no mistake, though: these games are casual through and through, offering a highly streamlined gameplay experience. Each screen provides you with a list of over a dozen objects that you’ll need to find, the sequel increasing the number required by adding a second set immediately after the first. Included in each list is environment-appropriate equipment that will help you find the rest of the items or unearth other important clues and passages. Not surprisingly, these are stored in a “tools” inventory for later use. Any object that can’t be seen without additional interaction of some kind is colour-coded in the list, so there’s no fear that you’ll waste your time looking for something you’ll never find. Their hidden (actually concealed, not simply hard to see) locations are similarly highlighted in the game world. This is obviously helpful, though inventory use is not always intuitive, an aspect of both games that represents one of my few gripes. You’ll easily know to use your shovel on loose dirt or a knife to cut interfering vines, but more than once I found myself simply sweeping the screen looking for that welcome (but sometimes very tiny) blue sparkle in places I’d never have thought to look.

Such instances are easily forgivable, however, because finding the many other objects are made even more user-friendly than normal. All decent hidden object games include a “hint” feature that pinpoints the location of particular items when you’re stuck, but Samantha Swift games go one step better. You can still pick a given object on the list (itself an option that many games fail to offer) and simply click a button to highlight its location. But come on. Where’s the fun in that? That’s not a “hint”, that’s a dead giveaway. Fortunately, in these games you’ll not only have to earn the right to continue using it by finding special symbols on each screen, you can minimize the need or even bypass it entirely through the use of Samantha’s scanner.

The scanner is a tool picked up in the early tutorial stages of both games, and highlighting any word on the item list will display the basic shape of the object in question. Now that’s a hint, but The Golden Touch has another trick up its sleeve (not available in Roses, unfortunately). In the sequel, the scanner features a hot-warm-cold method of targeting, the object shape gaining colour the closer your cursor is to the item. In this way, you can all but point yourself directly at the missing item in question without ever using the other system. If you have any control at all, however, you’ll stop yourself when you see the colour begin to change, as then you know you’re at least on the right track. Maybe this is offering too much praise for the help system in a game designed to make you look for hard-to-find items, but it’s impressive to see that developers are already approaching the issue creatively.

Rapid (and incorrect) clicking can break Sam’s scanner, but even then only briefly. These are clearly games intended to avoid player frustration, and for the most part they succeed admirably. Neither title has any time limit to contend with, and cursor changes even let you know when you’ve chosen the right tool for the job (why doesn’t every adventure do that?). That’s not to suggest there’s no challenge at all, but here it’s appropriately provided by the gameplay rather than the interface. Added complexity comes from a degree of locational connectivity, as puzzles can’t always be solved immediately, and the tools you collect are often carried over between areas for use elsewhere. Like the Mortimer Beckett titles, this integration gives the Samantha Swift series a much more adventure-like feel than many hidden object games. The experience is still largely linear, as you’re told in pop-up text when you can’t complete a room or individual puzzle just yet, and often you aren’t allowed to leave until you’ve done everything you can. Still, even the illusion of freedom and a small chance to explore make the games feel less restrictive than lesser casual experiences.

Many of the puzzles involve simply using your newly-found inventory, but there are other types as well, from coded lever positions to jigsaws to Match 3 challenges. There are also Concentration-like tasks, tile puzzles and even a maze in the first game. Pretty conventional stuff, in other words, but never overused and generally good for a diversion. There are also some engaging non-puzzle tasks included, like using a sonar detector to highlight buried items, operating a crane to clear a path, and a neat little mini-map recreation assignment. You might call these “minigames”, but there’s no real competition involved and you can’t really lose them. Each title also has its own distinct endgame sequence much different from the rest. In Roses you’ll need a mildly steady hand (for the one and only time) to navigate traps, while Golden Touch presents a multi-stage inventory challenge, which unfortunately relies a bit too much on trial-and-error over reasoning. The sequence is very cleverly done, however.

Any other variations between the games are largely superficial. Both see Sam heading to exotic locations around the world, just to very different places. The first game sends her off to such locales as Rome, Tibet, and Japan, with other stops at the Louvre and Buckingham Palace. There’s even an extended underwater dive. The sequel racks up the air miles equally, with trips to the likes of Egypt, Turkey, and Thailand, with detours to an Irish henge, the old haunts of Jesse James and Blackbeard, and on to Solomon’s Temple. It’s a widely diverse range in each, and helps Samantha discover quite the impressive collection of cultural artifacts to display at the museum, whose expanding exhibits you can pause to see any time.

Gathering such valuable treasures might help pay the rent, but Sam’s main goal in each game is to track down six particular objects. In the first game it’s the titular roses of the Greek goddess Athena, which, when combined in a special golden shield, will make its bearer all but invincible. In the sequel it’s a set of vials to fill a unique artifact once belonging to King Midas, which together will help uncover the ability to alchemically create gold. Naturally, with powers this incredible, there are bad guys after them, too. Each game features a different antagonist who’s either attempting to thwart Samantha’s quest or capitalize on her discoveries through nefarious means. Remember how Belloq kept lazily swiping all of Indy’s hard-fought items? Yeah, like that. (There had to be an Indiana Jones reference in here somewhere.) Fortunately, Sam does have some friends as well, in the form of museum curator Dr. Butler and a symbologist and myth expert named Adam, who pop up occasionally with some useful advice or information. Adam is even playable for a short period in one game, though this doesn’t affect the gameplay in any significant way.

The presence of allies, enemies and the epic nature of the quests may give the impression that the Samantha Swift games are fairly story-oriented, but really they’re not. There are a few impressive comic-styled cutscenes interspersed between levels, but mainly these serve as window dressing to set up the next sequence of treasure hunting. Darn impressive window dressing, mind you. The vividly coloured, slightly stylized artwork is very pleasant, and the wide range of culturally-specific music rounds out the production nicely. There is even a generous amount of animation sprinkled throughout, making the game feel far more lively than most casual games. The only thing missing is voice acting, which actually might have come in handy, as Sam pokes her head on screen fairly frequently with useful commentary, and her pals contact her through her PDA once in a while. There’s even a Moroccan bar scene full of NPCs to lightly interact with in Golden Touch, each posing a different requirement to fulfill.

Both Samantha Swift games offer 50-odd individual locations and about 4 hours of play time overall, and unless you’re completely opposed to hidden object gameplay, you’ll undoubtedly find it time well spent in both cases. The relatively high production values and light adventuring elements help distinguish these titles from the countless seek-and-find games on the market, and while their slight storylines and easy puzzles make them decidedly “lite” fare, as casual games go these rate among the best. So whether you call them adventures or not, the The Hidden Roses of Athena would still smell as sweet, and The Golden Touch pays off in ways that would make even Midas proud. If you're looking for something to fill in the gaps between larger, tougher adventures, then, don't hesitate to grab these when you spot them.