Adventure Gamers - Forums

Becky - 30 May 2015 08:27 AM

There’s also an Extra Bonus game that starts out by allowing you to return to certain locations and locate any of the collectible owls that you may have missed on your initial journey through the game. It appears that there’s further gameplay after that, but I made the mistake of agreeing to replay the Bonus Game after I’d completed it already (trying to access the strategy guide for that one owl I couldn’t locate). Since I’ve restarted the Bonus Game, I’m now locked out of the Extra Bonus Game until I finish the Bonus Game yet again.

Does this make sense? I mean, does what I’ve just written make sense? Or, now that I think about it, does having the game do this to a player make any sense?

So there’s a “Bonus game” and there’s also an “Extra bonus game?”
And you can’t continue the “Extra bonus game” without restarting the “Bonus game?”
Or is the interface just so confusing you end up restarting the “Bonus game” by accident?

I’ve lost track of the number of CE’s where I couldn’t find the bonus game and had to look it up on the Internet to make sure I wasn’t restarting the main game and losing access to the bonus game by accident.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for developers to put a clearly labeled “Bonus game” icon in the main menu.

Thanks for your review, Becky.
It sounds like a pretty good game despite the problems/interface bugs with continuing the bonus games.

Hi crabapple—

Yes, you can start the Extra Bonus game as soon as you finish the Bonus game. And it’s clearly marked. But you don’t seem to be able to get to it until you’ve collected all the owls. And the owl collection screen doesn’t give access to the strategy guide. So when I couldn’t find that last pesky owl, I thought—let me go back into the first Bonus Game and look at the strategy guide to see where that last owl is. Well, I found it in the strategy guide (and it is VERY well hidden), but I didn’t take into account that simply restarting the Bonus Game would reset everything after that, thereby locking up the Extra Bonus Game.

What I should have done was to go back into the regular game and start over under a different player name in order to access the strategy guide without locking myself out of the Extra Bonus level.

Curse, you autosave-only! May your descendants overcome your genetic shortcomings and all be born with manual saves! 

The HOs, as I recall, are fairly evenly spaced throughout the game. The highly interactive HO screens feel more like puzzles to me than HOs, actually. But they are in the minority overall. I would imagine that the interactive versions require considerably more development time than the standard list-based HOs do, which might explain why we don’t see more of them.

Now I’m playing the Dead Reckoning: Silvermoon Isle.
My first impression is positive. The game is very well done technically, but lacks on “soul”. This company of HOG must center in improve the plots instead of releasing a lot of games per year.
Nevertheless I will play the sequel.

I’ve finished Silvermoon Isle game.
Nice graphics, a lot of money invested, but very humdrum.
I do not recommend it.

I’ve started the Nightmare Realm one, the same company as “Fright”, one of the best games of its kind. I’m enjoying it, at this moment…

rtrooney - 12 June 2015 06:41 PM

I’ve played Nightmare Realm: In the End. I’m not sure if it is the same game as Nightmare Realm. From the description on the BFG website, I don’t think it is.

Nightmare Realm: In the End is the sequel to the original Nightmare Realm. Both are very good games.

Hmmm. A twosome. Maybe good for a community playthrough?

Dark Realm: Queen of Flames

The Dark Realm is a fantasy world with a medieval flavor. You assume the role of Valera, the daughter of a blacksmith in the provincial town of Northpearl. As the game opens, Northpearl is suddenly under attack by banshees. Your father insists that you escape, but only after collecting a medallion fragment and magical boots inherited from your mother. You then puzzle your way out of the burning town and into the Dragonwoods in search of the rest of the mysterious medallion and any family secrets that might surface along the way.

Queen of Flames’ greatest strengths are its graphics and its occasional tendency to wander off the beaten HOPA path. The graphics reveal a 3D hand-painted effect. Interior rooms contain elaborate furnishings—draperies, columns, stonework, cracked tile floors, statues, and flowering plants. Outdoor scenes often give a vast sense of perspective and include monumental architecture and views of complex cloud formations and colorful skies. Each environment contains ambient animations. For example, one scene in a crumbling tower is enlivened by flames, swinging chains, glimmering sunrays, and flying birds viewed out a gaping hole in the stonework.

As for the gameplay – expect lots of inventory challenges, pattern-based mini-games, and varied Hidden Object screens. The medallion also grants different powers that you acquire as you go through the game. The most dreaded challenges for me were the pattern-drawing sequences – most of these are timed. One such sequence requires such fast, accurate mousing that I failed despite many, many attempts and ended up using the skip function.

My favorites among the Hidden Object scenes appear as pages in a book and provide backstory.  Time spent searching in HO scenes is enhanced by lilting background melodies. A particularly memorable scene in a cave features an eerie lullaby with harp-like accompaniment. The more dramatic music in this game involves full-throated vocals that evoke a sense of urgency and primitivism almost too startling in their intensity.

The voiceovers in this game are expressive, though the accents aren’t always consistent—Valera’s accent, for instance, is very different from her father’s.  Facial expressions during dialogs look slightly rubbery; lip synch is reasonably good.

At a time when HOPA games tend look and play much like all the other HOPAs, this game doesn’t shy away from the occasional novelty. A pixie in a fantasy game isn’t unexpected, but Queen of Flames’ pixie sports a botanical-punk outfit and has a voice like a bartender. A couple of the journeys are pleasantly unconventional, like the Alice-in-Wonderland butterfly escapade and the night march from a top-down perspective. The physical appearance of some of the villains is also unusually creative – including the spider-like monster with the serpentine lower extremities and the crystal rock creature.

I played the CE version of Queen of Flames. The Bonus gameplay is an extension of the story that is only tangentially related to what’s happening in the SE portion of the game. The additional storyline isn’t necessary – the chief reason to play the Bonus portion, in my experience, it is to view the spectacular locales.

rtrooney - 14 June 2015 01:48 PM

I saw chrissie’s post for the AGSotD. It dawned on me that I hadn’t played Mystery Case Files: 13th Skull.

I liked that one and would recommend it for a casual CPT. I thought it was more of an adventure game than most of the other MCF games.