What looked at first to be a light month of casual games exploded in a hurry with a flurry of new hidden object hybrid adventures as the year drew to a close. There are recognizable names in this month’s lot, from Ebenezer Scrooge to House of Tales, and some familiar themes as well, including a Salem witch hunt, ancient Egyptian mythology, time-travelling, fairy tales and ghost stories. Whatever your preference, there should be something for everybody to like – assuming you don’t mind a bit of scavenger hunting to go with your lite adventuring.
Haunted Legends: The Queen of Spades
ERS Game Studios are quickly establishing themselves as one of the more prolific casual games developers. With successful series like PuppetShow and Dark Tales under their belts, the company is already right back at it with Haunted Legends: The Queen of Spades. Not surprisingly, the end result is once again a slickly-produced, often entertaining hidden object/lite adventure hybrid experience. The downside to cranking out content as fast as ERS, however, is that the games can start to have a rather assembly-line feel, with rehashed elements and cut corners that would have benefited from a little more attention, and this is certainly true of Haunted Legends. It won’t be enough to turn anyone off, but it does prevent the game from being the standout adventure it shows occasional hints of promising.
Once you’ve opened up the bulk of the locations, there’s a fair bit of backtracking involved, as items are often located far from where you’ll need them, and hidden object screens can be triggered elsewhere without warning. This is where Haunted Legends begins to show cracks in its otherwise solid foundation. There is no map to move quickly between locations, nor any hints at all during the standard adventuring portion, or even an objective list to help you keep track of what’s in progress where. There is a diary, but it only records the most obvious clues discovered, not guide you in any useful way. While it never takes long to click through screens in reverse, the game’s deceptive linearity means you can expect to retrace your steps many times. If you choose the “Regular” difficulty setting at the start of the game, interactive areas will occasionally sparkle, but without any direction, often these simply alert you to what you already know. You may have four or five obstacles confronting you, but in many cases you can only solve one of them at a time, the others awaiting just the right item or trigger to finally allow progress. On the flip side, many of the hotspot text comments are blatant giveaways about what needs to be done, so the only real question is when you’ll finally be able to, not how.
Fortunately, this is a nice-sounding, great-looking world that you won’t mind wandering around in. Sound effects are crisp, from crackling fires to straining ropes to deep moans coming from afar. The orchestral music can get repetitive over time, and doesn’t always suit the mood (one tune had me swaying to its somewhat Spanish-style vibe), but the hand-drawn graphics are stylish, with a dark, muted colour palette to help establish the ominous atmosphere. You’ll see dead bodies and skeletons, and even carry a head in a jar, but these aren’t to instill “horror” so much as being creepy reminders of what’s at stake. There are some wonderful little animations as well, like fish jumping and dragonflies hovering as you slowly row across a lake. And then there’s the grouchy little imp who keeps appearing in front of you but always running away when you try to interact with him. Figuring out his role in the tragic events of the manor will stay a mystery until the end. You’ll meet up with him again in the Collector’s Edition, which adds another 40 minutes or so of new content. Picking up immediately after the events of the main game, the bonus segment opens up a few new locations inside the house and around town, offering more of the same kind of gameplay, just a little more streamlined with many of the old areas now blocked off. At the end of that comes the promise of an entirely new Haunted Legend in future, as if there was any doubt that we’d be seeing more of ERS Game Studios working their casual magic once again.
Awakening: Moonfell Wood
After being roused from a hundred-year slumber, Princess Sophia could get no farther than the palace entrance in Boomzap’s Awakening: The Dreamless Castle. (Not that I blame her; I’m not much of a morning person myself.) But she soon discovers that she’s the only remaining human in the land, and to find out what happened to her people, the princess must now venture forth into the fantasy world beyond the gates in Awakening: Moonfell Wood. What awaits her is a much more ambitious, lengthy journey than the original, filled with magical creatures, items to collect, and puzzles galore, not to mention the odd goblin with an affinity for card games.
You’ll soon stop listening to the music much anyway, as there’s so much else to occupy your attention. Whether you choose “casual” or “normal” mode to begin, Moonfell Wood is a fairly easy game for the most part, but it’s packed full of puzzles and minigames and tasks to perform. There aren’t many standard hidden object activities, and even those are varied. At times you’ll find lists of items, match pairs, and collect single-screen item sets, but usually you’ll have to find everything you need along the way. Some are groups of objects, like figurines for empty pedestals or acorns for territorial squirrels, while others are one-use inventory objects. The best inventory item is a little fire-breathing dragon that tags along until the end – no more hunting for matches! Most inventory obstacles have straightforward solutions: no stretch to know what a key or crowbar will do, though a few require more outside-the-box thinking to probe their far-fetched logic. If you need help, Mira the fairy once again serves as your hint guide, and will highlight interactive areas or offer tips on what to do next.
The rest of your time will be spent solving puzzles of all kinds. Or maybe not all kinds, as a heavy reliance on repetition begins to bog down the experience before you’re done. Still, there are jigsaws of different sorts (rotating tile-swappers, edge-matchers, broken part reassembly), sliders, a wide range of colour- and clue-matching patterns, and a host of conditional sequences to complete and arrange. Often you’ll need to find clues elsewhere before solving one, like identifying a rune code or discovering botany information to recognize flowers. Few are ever really rationalized, and it’s not uncommon to find as many as four different puzzles in single rooms. Yes, there are a LOT of puzzles in Moonfell Wood, though any can be skipped. You’ll also need to complete a few rounds of Tripeaks, a goblin card favourite that resembles a variation of Solitaire. It’s not a bad little game, and you can even replay it from the main menu, though chances are you’ll have had your fill by the end of the game. In fact, probably earlier than that. Awakening: Moonfell Wood is one of the lengthier, meatier casual games in recent times, but it would have been better served trimming some of the filler that mars the second half. Even so, it’s an easy game to recommend; compared to the many less ambitious casual adventures, the difference is like night and day.
Death at Fairing Point: A Dana Knightstone Novel
If you pulled Awakening: Moonfell Wood out of its fantasy setting and dropped it into the real world, it would probably look a lot like Death at Fairing Point: A Dana Knightstone Novel. That shouldn’t be surprising, as it’s from the exact same developer. Not content with merely one new release last month, Boomzap doubled up with the launch of a new series starring writer Dana Knightstone. Perhaps seeking ideas for her new novel, Dana arrives at a rural Scottish manor that offers her far more inspiration than she’d ever dare dream. Just after she arrives, a ghostly spectre of a young man appears and seems to be leading her somewhere, pleading for help. What Dana uncovers is a century-old tragic love story whose victims are still lingering until past wrongs are righted.
Apart from the setting and premise, just about everything else is carried over from the developer’s other series. Gameplay consists of a combination of light exploration, item collection, and a great many puzzles to solve. Only rarely will you encounter traditional hidden object activities, and even then you’ll more often be tasked with finding sets of themed items. Some are nicely integrated, like finding key images in a mess of old news clippings or spotting the differences between handwriting samples from an apparent suicide note. The same can’t be said of the numerous other obstacles, however. Some are fairly relevant, like repairing a bridge or fixing a fusebox, but there’s little attempt to justify the existence of most others. There’s really no rhyme or reason for what hidden compartment is hiding which item, or why these locations are riddled with brainteasers at all. Still, if you accept them at face value, they’re often entertaining diversions, though never particularly difficult. A task list keeps track of your objectives, the journal records all important clues (and little else), and twinkles will alert you to any active interactive areas onscreen. Some items in the main environments can be fairly concealed, but the rechargeable hint feature highlights anything you may have missed, or offers tips on what to do next.
The sheer quantity of puzzles and minigames is impressive, ranging from simple Simon exercises to Roman numeral math puzzles to weight balancing, any of which can by bypassed. Once again, however, the designers have relied heavily on multiple jigsaw variations, sequence arrangements, and colour-coded patterns. Fortunately, most are disguised well in context, so while you’ll often be solving the same types of puzzles, the game never feels like it’s fallen into blatant repetition. It’s not as long as its fantasy counterpart, clocking in under four hours, which makes the experience feel a little tighter, less padded. Of course, if you want more, there’s always the Collector’s Edition, which offers an in-game strategy guide and a bonus epilogue. The additional content sends Dana back to the original Scottish manor to learn what happened to the secondary characters in the original tragedy. There are a couple new rooms to discover, and a handful of additional puzzles to solve, several of which are ambiguously clued and needlessly difficult. There’s an extra hour of gameplay all told, but much of that is spent painstakingly searching for random tiny gems across the house, many of them barely visible. It’s more time for less value, then, but the core gameplay remains solid, and the teaser at the end already hints of more Dana Knightstone adventures to come.
Lost in Time: The Clockwork Tower
That finicky space-time continuum is on the fritz again, and naturally, only you can restore it. Of course, that’s only fitting, since it’s you who caused it in the first place at the start of Spark Plug Games’ Lost in Time: The Clockwork Tower. As feisty young Eliza, you inadvertently destroy your small town’s local clock tower, setting off a chain of temporal anomalies, including stasis fields trapping everyone you meet, disruptive time quakes that blend past, present, and future together, and both seasonal and night and day changes spiralling out of control. Oops! Lucky for you (and life on Earth as we know it), you’ll be assisted by a sentient, wisecracking pocketwatch, who has a firm grasp on what needs to be done to repair the damage you’ve caused.
Much harder to find are the numerous gears spread across the village. Your unusual pocketwatch not only talks to you through its holographic head, it also has four different time-defying abilities, ranging from spotting invisible items in your current timeline to moving time back and forth in certain areas. To do this, you’ll first need to gather increasing sets of gears, then arrange them correctly to enable each new ability. It’s too obvious when to use these powers, unfortunately, as a colour-coded glow informs you exactly when one is needed. That’s a far cry from the lack of help offered otherwise. There is a task list with one clue per objective and a rechargeable hint option, but often these are surprisingly redundant. In many scenes the hint will simply tell you to look at your task list for clues, which tells you only what you already know. This can be frustrating, because it's sometimes difficult to spot interactive areas. The cursor does change, but only to a spinning version of its default state, which makes it extremely easy to miss when sweeping the screen. Given the highly streamlined nature of the game, missing one hotspot can ground you to a screeching halt, the useless “help” feature offering no guidance at all.
Despite making it abundantly clear that the fate of the world rests on your shoulders, Lost in Time is often content to pester you with busywork instead. Each person trapped in a stasis field inexplicably needs a favour done to free them, which will have you baking muffins from a recipe, picking dandelions for tea, or restoring damaged paintings. It’s much more interesting when the obstacles are organic, such as putting out a fire at the toymaker’s store. Eventually there’s a fair bit of backtracking, but once equipped with the right ability, you can quick travel between locations from a map. Several environments display an obvious time flux, such a street corner blizzard mere feet from the lush, springtime park. Each background is nicely if rather simply designed in a hand-drawn, slightly cartoony style. Music is equally pleasant, and all dialogues are competently voice acted, from the young British heroine to the American-sounding, pun-loving pocketwatch. There’s nothing here to dazzle you (though a live dinosaur in a museum is always a nice touch), but the presentation is certainly solid. In fact, the same can largely be said of the game overall. It’s a shame more focus wasn’t given to its unique temporal consequences and abilities, but it’s more than just another clone of so many other new releases, so it’s not a bad way to pass the time for a few hours.
Eternal Night: Realm of Souls
Ancient Egypt has been a common setting for both adventure games and hidden object titles over the years. Namco’s Eternal Night: Realm of Souls takes players back there once again, but this time it’s not to the sandy deserts, majestic pyramids, or opulent palaces, but rather to the Land of the Dead for a confrontation with the gods themselves. Set has imprisoned Ra, casting both worlds into an endless darkness in the process, and the Pharaoh calls upon his people for a volunteer to cross into the heavenly realm to restore light once again. As a mere mortal, you bravely agree to venture into this strange, surreal afterlife, where you will have to help troubled deities with numerous problems, create amulets to empower you with divine abilities, and of course scavenge for many needed items and solve a variety of puzzles along the way.
Many of your tasks come from the gods, who often need your assistance before providing you with theirs, but there is a wide range of environmental obstacles to overcome as well. Some puzzles can be solved with simple inventory application, but several involve combining items in inventory first. There are standalone activities as well, including an entertaining board-like “maze” (complete with traps and protective items to see you through) and a pattern-pairing pottery task, along with more standard logic puzzles like rotating rings into their proper alignment. The downside is, these puzzles are repeated, so there isn’t quite the variety there could have been. Any can be skipped, however, assuming all conditions for solving it have been met. Some challenges can’t be overcome by mortal wits alone, so once you’ve collected all the necessary ingredients, you’ll also build special amulets that confer powers like cold resistance and water-breathing. Completing an amulet involves a simple orb-collecting minigame, and can then be used in the appropriate place much like an inventory item.
Unlike many casual hybrid games, there are very few distinct hidden object tasks, and even these are quite different from the usual fare. Instead of finding all items on a single screen, at times you’ll have to rotate an urn covered in hieroglyphs to find the listed requirements. Other times you don’t get a list at all, as instead you must locate the items missing from a mural. This is far more difficult, as it’s often unclear what you should be looking for, though a rechargeable hint feature will help you out when necessary. Once these handful of items are found, you’re then asked to place the objects back into their correct spot in the image. While you explore the ever-expanding main environment, you’ll also need to keep a sharp eye out for sets of items needed for other tasks, whether runestones for a holy pedestal or crystals to activate guardian statues. This is no different from traditional adventures, just concentrated with more items in fewer locations. This makes Eternal Night a good option for anyone getting bored with the deluge of traditional hidden object hunting, yet even those who aren’t should find it a refreshing change from the norm. Who says ancient Egypt has to be tired, dusty, and old?
Curse of the Ghost Ship
Adventure gamers are used to seeing the names House of Tales on such games as The Moment of Silence and Overclocked. Now, however, the German studio has followed the likes of Frogwares, Kheops, and Deck13 in casting off towards casual game territory. Their first offering, a modern day supernatural mystery called Curse of the Ghost Ship, strands players aboard the Pride of the Atlantic, a luxury ship that sank 80 years earlier with a precious royal diamond aboard that was stolen by thieves (no, not the Heart of the Ocean). On each anniversary of its tragedy since then, the boat reappears to relive its final few hours. If you’re to escape the fate of its original passengers this time, you’ll need to find the diamond before disaster strikes, as only by returning it to the mortal realm will the ship be freed of its eternal curse.
Gameplay is what really matters, of course, but it’s not very smooth sailing in that regard either. There are some hidden object scenes, but rather than lists of items, here you’re given a specific theme. One may have you identifying nine objects that roll, while another challenges you to find things that need to be repaired. The variation is welcome, but the implementation is lacking. Some of the items are very small, and the hazy graphics make it even harder to find things when you don’t know for sure what you’re looking for. The answers are inconsistent as well. I’m pretty sure a book and an umbrella can be opened, but apparently the developers are not. A rechargeable hint system will help you through, but you may find yourself using it more often than you wish. Standalone puzzles are few and far between, but you will occasionally need to beat a chess challenge to open a box, complete symbol patterns to clean off a plaque or solve towers of Hanoi to unlock a safe (none of which have anything to do with the task at hand). At least a skip option is available for any puzzles giving you too much difficulty, and some may do that. Even a familiar activity like following tangled wires is exceedingly challenging when you lose sight of them completely in a brutally jumbled mess.
The bulk of your time will be spent exploring the ship and collecting items, some of which need to be combined in inventory before using. Most of these are fairly straightforward: rusty hinges and screws are overcome in predictable ways, as are the many locked doors – including one that requires a piece of paper and pointy object (I still can’t believe House of Tales actually went there). Occasionally the ship’s lone inhabitant, a ghost who claims he can only remember fragments of the past, will lend his ethereal powers to your cause, serving as an inventory item. It’s not at all clear what his powers are, but as he can only be used on the screen where he appears, it’s never too hard to figure it out. That’s not always true of the main objectives. A skimpy journal lists the main goals, but the hint feature often just highlights an interactive puzzle area, which is no help at all. Or maybe it is a little, as hotspots often cover ridiculously wide areas, so you’ll never be sure if you’re clicking something new or the same thing you just tried, resulting in a lot of repetitive clicks. The ship layout is confusing with no map to guide you, either, so expect a lot of disorienting backtracking along the way. There’s enough traditional adventure gameplay here to warrant a look if you’re in need of something lite and new, but not nearly enough to choose over other, better alternatives. House of Tales fans will want to steer clear, as this first foray into casual adventure waters is a disappointingly bumpy ride.
Lost Chronicles: Salem
Salem seems to be a popular destination for casual game developers these days. The latest to visit the puritanical New England village during its infamous 1692 witch hunts are Vast Studios and Nat Geo Games, who combined to bring us Lost Chronicles: Salem. The story is entirely made up, as players control the child of a woman arrested for witchcraft, and must now seek to clear her good name by discovering the real reasons behind her wrongful imprisonment. In a nod towards authenticity, however, the game is sprinkled with “real” people and places from the historical era, so you’ll travel to such spots as the Salem Common and Gallows Hill and meet characters like Judge Sewall and Tituba the slave. Encyclopedic entries about each true historical fact is recorded in your journal, giving the game a minor educational component beyond its entertainment value.
The gameplay itself is a standard mix of hidden object searches and lite adventuring in almost equal proportions. As you wander through the village and nearby countryside, you’ll need to collect inventory, solve the occasional puzzle, and scour screens for lists of items in order to open new areas and push the story forward. The hidden object screens are on the easy side and contain items that have no bearing on the context, but they are generally well done… the first time around, anyway, as you’ll often need to revisit the same scene and find many of the same items. The standalone puzzles range from uninspired (non-overlapping route tracing, 4x4 slider) to fairly creative, like a sin-and-virtue symbol-matching puzzle and a miniature town model to complete, though the latter is far too simple. Most are simply shoehorned in awkwardly, however, as gates and chests are invariably locked with absurd brainteasers for no apparent reason. Inventory challenges are straightforward and sparse, but the item you’ll need the most is a dreamcatcher heirloom to use on “familiars” (animals) you encounter. This launches a simple timed-clicking minigame that is marginally fun the first time, but far less so the following 15 or 20 times. These are strictly optional, but each reduces the hint recharge time by one second, and you can simply try again if you happen to fail.
Unfortunately, Lost Chronicles is one of the buggier casual releases in recent times. Already updated once since its initial launch, I still encountered one crash and another place where all my inventory disappeared and a dialogue failed to trigger. Later, the hint feature kept repeating a specific puzzle instruction no matter where I used it, and then told me to look at the map for locations to missing components. The map, however, showed nothing. None of these errors proved fatal, though some required a restart to overcome. Meanwhile, the storyline that begins with such promise becomes little more than an afterthought much of the time. There’s a clear attempt to establish a very human motivation at the heart of the witch hunt, but the mystery often gives way to fetch quests, favours performed, and other menial tasks that completely undermine the urgency of the situation. This lack of focus throughout its three-hour duration results in a rushed ending that resolves everything in a flurry of non-interactive cutscenes. The anti-climactic finish doesn’t negate the good parts that come before it, but it does take the edge off what is an otherwise solid lite adventure hybrid.
Other Games of Interest
Twisted: A Haunted Carol
Christmas may be over, but somewhere Charles Dickens is probably still rolling over in his grave. In the acclaimed author’s holiday classic, old Ebenezer Scrooge was a miser of the worst sort, but who knew he was really a murderous lunatic? That is the premise of Twisted: A Haunted Carol, a seasonal hidden object/lite adventure hybrid from Casual Arts and Gamers Digital. Apparently Scrooge’s own night of terror, haunting, wretchedness, and despair wasn’t twisted enough, so here you’ll get to play his business partner, Jacob Marley… make that ex-partner, as we see Scrooge killing him in the opening scene. Now a ghost yourself, you’re given a temporary reprieve of one night to explore Christmases past, present, and future to determine the full extent of Scrooge’s evil plans and stop them from coming to pass. Unfortunately, the journey is anything but compelling, marked by simplistic scavenger hunts and easy, repetitive puzzles that combine to barely last longer than the Alastair Sim movie.
The Curse of the Ring
You’ll likely spend about 90% of your time scavenging for items in Flywheel’s The Curse of the Ring, though don’t expect a standard hidden object game. Instead, this is one of those highly streamlined lite adventures that continually asks you to search for necessary items as you explore the main environments – just exponentially more of them than usual. When young Isabel unwittingly tries on a mysterious ring, she finds herself bound to the curse of Captain Flint, and now has only ten days to track down and return six stolen artifacts. The ensuing treasure hunt takes her on an exotic but frantic journey from Barbados to Peru, with a few stops to explore the lost ships of Cortes in between, both above and below water level. These locales won’t give up their valuables easily, however, throwing a lot of inventory obstacles and standalone puzzle challenges in your way. Fortunately, they’re fun to explore and lovely to look at, with a bright, colourful palette and pleasant hand-drawn art style complete with little animated touches like an excitable octopus extending its inky welcome. Various musical pieces capably complement the action, though there’s no voice acting to support even the static cutscenes between chapters.