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June Casual Games

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Joined 2004-07-12

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Just finished Dark Strokes: Sins of the Fathers

I took two days off as my bathroom was being remodled, and thus got to play the game non-stop while others were perfoming manual labor. I really enjoyed this game, coming, as it did, from Alawar Games who produced two other favorite games, Sacra Terra and Echoes of Sorrow.

The story is relatively straight forward. You and your fiance have been invited to visit your father. Along the way your fiance is kidnapped by some creature/entity who is turning townspeople into “faceless entities.” The creature soon captures your father as well, along with other key figures. You soon discover that a common thread runs through all the kidnappings. Your obvious obvectives are to solve the mystery, discover the identiy of the kidnapper and save your fiance, father and the other townspeople.

There is a surprise plot twist at the end, although it may not be that much of a surprise for those that play this type of game. I will say that the storyline and plotting were quite good. As the game neared the end, there was a palpable anxiety. Things started to move faster than expected.

The game is not without its faults. What voice acting there is is fair at best. I’m glad there wasn’t alot of it. On the plus side, none of the actors attempted fake accents which can can kill the atmosphere faster than anything. The cut scenes were almost amateurish. Static characters pop in and out of mildly animated backgrounds. The puzzles were not terribly difficult, although none had a reset button. Thus, if you make a wrong move, your options are pretty much limited to either Skip, or attempt to get back to the starting point manually. The HOG scenes were reasonable, although many of them suffered from my pet peeve. That is, when the story seems to be set in the mid-to-late 1800s, telephones and light bulbs in HOG scenes are not period appropriate. Both the Skip and Hint buttons recharge in about a minute in Casual mode.

The music and sound effects were quite good, but I turned both down to around 30%. Otherwise, it’s very distracting.

All in all I give it an 7.5 out of 10. Those that don’t mind inappropriate HOG items, or tend to skip cut scenes will probably give it an 8 out of 10. Defitely worth the $6.99.

     

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After enjoying Dark Dimensions - City of Fog, I decided i would give the sequel a go, so here is my review of Dark Dimensions 2 - Wax Beauty.

I got the CE but i haven’t played that segment yet. I will update the post when i do, but I doubt it will affect my review much.

The story of Wax Beauty is not an unusual one for a casual game, and infact is much the same as the story of the previous Dark Dimension game. Something has caused a Dark Dimension to open in a town and you are investigating it to try and save a bunch of ghosts from being trapped forever. Though this time, instead of Fog, there’s wax blocking your progress at every turn. The game takes a massive cue from the film “House of Wax”, and by that I mean it blatantly rips it off, but it does make for an interesting enough plot.

Graphically, the game is excellent. Very detailed scenery with lots of animated sections, and where the game excels is by having nearly every single scene in the game introduced by some sort of animation or event. For instance you might enter a room and a ghost will appear, or a bit of wall will crumble down blocking your way. I was impressed with how much this happened.

Sound is good as well, with decent voice acting and lots of creepy sound effects. The only issue here is that the voices don’t match up to the lips of the characters, not even close, but i expect the game was natively voiced in German or something which makes it understandable.

The HOGs are good too, and don’t suffer with the problems from the previous game. They’ve gone with a slightly more conventional “puzzle” method in this game where if you have to use one object on another, it doesn’t go in your inventory, it stays in the scene, which works better as you can’t forget you have that item.

There were also no problems at all with click detection. There was a fairly big downside to the HOGs though, in that if you play in the advanced mode, there are no sparkles for the HOGs and sometimes one you’ve already done will reactivate again, so you have to keep checking otherwise you might miss an important object. One time, a HOG reactivated in a scene i hadn’t been to for a couple of hours as it was in an area long cleared.

If the HOGs were OK, the puzzles on the other hand were a nightmare! I don’t think I’ve ever skipped so many puzzles in one game, but in this one I didn’t feel like I had a choice.

The instructions for some of them are so vague that it’s impossible to work out what you’re supposed to do, and some of them don’t seem to follow any logical pattern.

There was one in particular where the instructions didn’t specifically say so, but you had to get some lights to turn on in three circles by placing tiles with matching colours next to one another, but there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to which tiles worked and which didn’t, even to the point that placing two identical tiles in the same place, one would work, the other would not. Even after looking at the solution to the puzzle in the walkthrough I still had no idea how I was meant to do it..

Another one was a “solitaire” like game where you had to jump tiles until there were only 4 left to solve the puzzle, so i kept trying ways to end up with 4 left and couldn’t do it, and then randomly won the puzzle when there were 5 tiles left!!

The flow of the game however was much better than the first Dark Dimensions game. It’s probably one of the best flowing hybrids I’ve played in fact. There’s never too much backtracking involved and you’ll find that a lot of areas, once you’ve gained access to them are fairly self contained, with objects you need for a puzzle usually within 1 or 2 screens of the room the puzzle is in, but at the same time you’ll be finding objects to solve puzzles you couldn’t solve from earlier in the game and then opening up more new areas.

There were a few inconsistencies though, like how you’ll have to remove wax off several items during the game, and even though you’ve used your lighter to do it once, every other time requires some other tool for no apparent reason other than to make things more complicated, or you have an oven mitt in your inventory and need to pick up something red hot but can’t use the oven mitt, then later on you need to touch something red hot and the oven mitt is fine for that. I know this sort of thing is typical in adventure games otherwise the first time you picked up a hammer you could smash the lock in on every locked door, but when the item you have is so obviously designed for that particular use, not being able to use it is a pain.

Overall the game was good, but I did feel that the puzzle side of it let it down to some extent by being far too vague. It’s OK to be stumped by a puzzle because it’s hard, but not because it makes no logical sense or doesn’t work the way it’s meant to. I’ll give it a 8 out of 10 which is still pretty high, and the reason for a high mark despite the negatives is that the game is pretty huge for a hybrid game, with quite a few hours of play in it, so even with maybe 5 or 6 annoying puzzles in the game there are still many others that are fine, so it is possible to overlook the bad ones.

Hopefully if a third Dark Dimension game comes out, it’ll have the best bits of both previous games and will be a brilliant game.

     
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I didn’t dislike City of Fog as much as you. But, as I mentioned in an earlier post, this game, Wax Beauty, did not want to play on my machine. Based on your recommendation, I’ll give it another try. If I try the CE demo rather than the SE demo it may work. Or, at least when I get kicked out to the desktop I may get an option to run the game in a window.

     

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For what it’s worth, when you log onto Adventure Gamers, there is a link just below Forums called Casual. It’s primarily an archive of prior staff Casual Game Reviews. But, on the right hand side there are three newly released games. Click on any one of them, and click on User Reviews, and you will have an opportunity to Add a review of your own. There are no restrictions as far as I can see. If you want to review a demo, that would seem to be OK.

So if you want to expand your review audience, this might be the place.

     

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Stumbled across a nice little game today, by the name of “The Tiny Bang Story”

It’s a puzzler similar in style to Amanita games like Samarost but with hidden object elements and logic puzzles thrown in as well. It’s not very long at all, maybe 2-3 hours but it is fun and worth a go if you have £7 spare to get it on Steam.

     
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I might give it a try. Thanks for the tip.

I did give the CE version demo of Dark Dimensions 2 - Wax Beauty, and it worked perfectly. I’m not clear why it should work and the SE version would not. Maybe a post to BFG tech support is in order. Your review didn’t mention whether you thought the bonus material justified the additional $7US. I have a stated aversion to CEs as I rarely find the bonus material worth the additional funds.

     

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rtrooney - 24 June 2012 06:18 PM

I might give it a try. Thanks for the tip.

I did give the CE version demo of Dark Dimensions 2 - Wax Beauty, and it worked perfectly. I’m not clear why it should work and the SE version would not. Maybe a post to BFG tech support is in order. Your review didn’t mention whether you thought the bonus material justified the additional $7US. I have a stated aversion to CEs as I rarely find the bonus material worth the additional funds.

i actually still haven’t gotten around to playing the CE bit yet, as Chains of Satinav, Resonance and Tiny Bang Story all took my focus away from it..

edit: played it now and it wasn’t all that good.  Some random new character shows up and then gets in trouble and you have to save them.

About 6 hidden object scenes (the same 3 scenes twice each) and 2 or 3 logic puzzles, maybe 1 hour play time in all.

I would have liked more puzzles as there were lots of instances where you have to collect missing parts of a device, but when you collect them, unlike the main game, it just activates without a puzzle, and one of the times there was an actual puzzle, it was pretty much solved when it started for some reason. It’s one of those where you have lock pieces with different numbers of pins and you have to line them up with the edges with the same amount of pins, but half of them were already lined up and the other half were just one spot out of position..

The HOGs were alright except a few of them had objects with the wrong name. I spent ages looking for “Shall” not knowing what the heck that could be, for it to be a Shell, and spent ages looking for “Fish” for it to be a playing card.. (go fish perhaps?)

One of the inventory puzzles near the start was a bit annoying because when you go to pick up an object it says you can’t get to it and you need to scoop it out with something. Just so happens that the first 3 or 4 objects you collect all have the ability to act as a makeshift scoop but none of them work..

There was still a decent production value for the scenes though, with animations on a couple of them as you enter them like walls crumbling or floors collapsing so they didn’t get lazy there.

Overall, not worth paying extra for this content as it doesn’t really expand on the main story enough, has too little in the way of puzzles and is over too quickly.

     
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I thought I would repost this here in case some didn’t look at the discount thread.

The Steam Daily Deal today is on the Midnight Mysteries games.  This is one of the more popular HOG/adventure hybrid series.  Each of the games is 67% off.  Or you can get all four games for $9.99 together.

Link

     
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Just finished the last 2 Mystery Tracker games. The Void was standard fare and pretty routine. I basically clicked my way through the game. I found Black Isle much more enjoyable. There were lots of puzzles and some even took some thought, given that I never use the info button. The HO scenes were fair, but took some time. Thank goodness for the map, since there were many scenes to explore. Some of the tougher parts of the game were just trying to remember what was left to be done. All in all, a good game.

     
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Is that Steam pack good? I should save some money since I just ordered some books for over 60 euros. But that’s 2,5€ per game, not too bad.

     

Currently Playing: Dragon Age Origins: Awakening
Recently Played: Red Embrace: Hollywood, Dorfromantik, Heirs & Graces, AI: The Somnium Files, PRICE, Frostpunk, The Shapeshifting Detective (CPT), Disco Elysium, Dream Daddy, Four Last Things, Jenny LeClue - Detectivu, The Signifier

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millenia - 30 June 2012 03:49 AM

Is that Steam pack good? I should save some money since I just ordered some books for over 60 euros. But that’s 2,5€ per game, not too bad.

have been playing the first one today, about Edgar Allan Poe, and it’s not very good. It’s a few years old now so I don’t want to criticise it for not being like the latest games because it isn’t likely to match up to those, but if you’re used to playing modern ones, this might disappoint.

It’s more or less straight-up HOG, with the odd logic puzzle every now and again (2 so far). It does have puzzle items in the HOGs but they’re pretty easy because at the end of the HOG scene it gives you a couple of the items you’ve found back, and you use them to find another couple of items, and the objects are fairly obvious, like a key in a scene with a chest or a rake in a scene with leaves, so it won’t take more than a couple of seconds to find them.

The HOGs themselves are a bit daft, with objects just randomly strewn around the scene with no attention paid to size or perspective, like there was a bike the same size as a spider on the roof of a shop. Plus to try and make things harder they have used some really daft/cryptic descriptions of some of the objects. It doesn’t really make things harder, just unintentionally funny. Prison bracelets anyone? Bird prison? Sneeze catcher?

The graphics are adequate but not particularly good compared to recent games, and there’s little to no sound other than some repetitive background music and a noise when you click on an item. There’s lots of talking in the game but sadly, not voiced.

The hint system is fairly unique, in that there are hidden crows in every scene, and finding one adds 1 to your available number of hints, so in order to be able to use them you need to first store some up. I like the idea but I guess if you’re over reliant on using hints then you’ll be out of luck because if you can’t find the main objects you probably won’t find the crows either..

I haven’t finished it yet because it’s a bit tedious to play for long spells at a time due to being mainly HOG after HOG after HOG, but I think I’ve played enough to give it a 4/10

     
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I just bought it before you posted Wink
Not feeling too bad atm, for what I gathered the first one is the worst one and the sequels at least should have more than just HO-scenes in them. I’ve also wanted to try out more of these casuals.

     

Currently Playing: Dragon Age Origins: Awakening
Recently Played: Red Embrace: Hollywood, Dorfromantik, Heirs & Graces, AI: The Somnium Files, PRICE, Frostpunk, The Shapeshifting Detective (CPT), Disco Elysium, Dream Daddy, Four Last Things, Jenny LeClue - Detectivu, The Signifier

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millenia - 30 June 2012 01:00 PM

I just bought it before you posted Wink
Not feeling too bad atm, for what I gathered the first one is the worst one and the sequels at least should have more than just HO-scenes in them. I’ve also wanted to try out more of these casuals.

got to what i think was the third and final section of the game and decided to stop playing for a while. Just loaded the game back up a minute ago and was greeted with a message along the lines of “the profile for this game was corrupted so it has been deleted”

f**k you too Midnight Mysteries!

Guess that’s it for the June thread too!

     

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