Adventure Gamers - Forums

I just finished Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek, and although the story was really strong, I honestly couldn’t wait to be done with it. Caveat: I played Enigmatis: The Mists of Ravenwood prior to this game, and I really liked it. I realize I played them out of order, but now that I’m done with Ghosts, I want to go back and replay Ravenwood! The differences between the two games, to me anyway, is like night and day.

The graphics in Ghosts was fine, in Ravenwood better. The biggest difference I saw was that the HO scenes in Ghosts, especially later in the game, were more muted…fuzzy even. That often made it very difficult to find a few of the items. As I recall, that wasn’t the case in Ravenwood. Another issue in many of the HO scenes in Ghosts was the mislabeling of certain objects, which pretty well irked me. Take, for example, the following scene:

I’ve circled the “Lug bolts”, and the “Penknife”. Looks like lag bolts and a pocket knife to me! It got worse further into the game. I’d give more examples (there were plenty), but I’ve already flushed them from the corners of my mind.

Lastly as far as the HO scenes were concerned: some are fun, necessary even in this genre, but there were probably 10-15 HO scene locations in Ghosts which had to be revisited at least 2-3 times each, some as many as four times! Every time I turned around there was another one, probably 40+ altogether! I honestly don’t recall that being the case in Ravenwood. Why the devs needed to have you hunt for most needed objects in HO scenes instead of the environment is beyond me. Not fun!

Again, the story is what made this game good. The music was also very good, although I usually turn it down fairly low so as not to disturb “she who must be obeyed” while she works and I play. The graphics were fine. The puzzles were okay too, but some of them had very vague instructions which made them a PITA.

All-in-all, Ghosts was one of those games I’ll ultimately forget about simply because of the way the HO scenes were handled. If they had been done more like they were in Ravenwood, it would have been excellent in my book!

I agree with you whole-heartedly. But there are probably two, if not more, reasons why things turned out the way they did.

First and foremost, Ghosts was the first game. And while in far too many instances the sequel is not as good as the original, that is not the case here. Mists is far better than the original. (Even while keeping several of the main characters from the first game.)

The second reason has a lot to do with the differences between the two games’ HO scenes. The developer, Artifex-Mundi, was working on a new HO engine called Spark when Ghosts came out. Mists was the first game that actually used it. And the difference in quality and variety of HO scenes in Mists is very noticeable.

Many casual game developers are now using the Spark Engine, with more than a few of them showing the engine in the end-game credits.

While it’s too technical for me to understand in its entirety, there are, nevertheless, some interesting articles on the Spark Engine and its capabilities online. A Google search on “Artifex-Mundi Spark Engine” will yield a fair number of hits.

@ Mike: if you replay Mists of Ravenwood, I suggest you do so alongside the Casual Playthrough.

In fact, you may want to browse the CCPT thread for Ghosts too, as we played them back-to-back.

TimovieMan - 20 May 2016 06:45 AM

@ Mike: if you replay Mists of Ravenwood, I suggest you do so alongside the Casual Playthrough.

In fact, you may want to browse the CCPT thread for Ghosts too, as we played them back-to-back.

Thanks for the suggestion, Timo! I think I will use the playthrough when I replay Mists. Going to wait awhile though, as I just played it about two months ago. Got to let the brain cells deteriorate a little more so it’s not so fresh in my noggin… 

Recently finished Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart, and I thought it was….good. It’s fairly long, too….including the bonus chapter, it took me 7 hours in Casual mode. But for my tastes, too many HO scenes.

Interestingly, the objects in the HO scenes during the main chapter were all identified correctly…a “pearl” was a “pearl”, a “kitty” was a “kitty”, etc. But during the bonus chapter, several scenes had objects misidentified and/or misspelled, and I mean badly! That “pearl” became a “perl”, and a “top hat” became a “cylinder”! It’s like there were two different groups of HO scene description writers for the different chapters, one that localized the English correctly, and one not so well. (Or maybe they rushed the bonus chapter and QA missed the issues?) Kind of caught me off guard, and made many of those scenes in the bonus chapter difficult to finish because of the identity problems. Here’s an example:

Click on the thumbnail for a larger pic!

And, as Tim (RT) mentioned in an earlier post, many of the HO scenes from this game had objects that were waaaay out of their historical period…I mean, how often would you find an electric radio in the 1600’s?

The only other gripe I had with the game was the whiny, entitled daughter of our protagonist. I think the designers could have come up with a kid that was more likeable, but maybe it was their intent to make me barf! 

I finished Royal Trouble. An absolutely delightful game. While it isn’t a hidden object game per se, there are several instances where it gets pretty close. E.g., finding the table setting pieces or finding the potion ingredients.

A really good variety of puzzles. I did reach a point in the game where I thought I had hit a dead end. The in-game hint book didn’t give me anything, and the BFG blog walkthrough was telling me to do things I couldn’t do. (Combine the bridge rope with the curtain rope.) But the next time I loaded the game it apparently healed itself because there were things in inventory that weren’t there before. So I was able to continue.

Like I said on the voting thread, the game reminded me a bit of Emerald City Confidential. Although the scope of ECC is/was certainly much larger.

I really enjoyed Green Moon, Colpet, but I haven’t played the sequel.  I’ll have to see if it’s available for Macs.

I haven’t been playing much either, except for community play-throughs. I have piled up six credits at Big Fish! But I am going on vacation next week and plan to play as much as possible on my iPad. 

I have a question: How many of you play casual games on your iPad or other mobile device?

Since my multiple retina surgeries my eyesight is sufficiently bad that I enjoy playing games using my somewhat massive Samsung monitor. Playing games on tablets or phones is not something I think I am capable of doing. Someone on another thread asked me why I had a smartphone if not for playing games. I hope I responded that it was for making/receiving phone calls. And they are useful for so much more, but playing games is not why I bought it, and is not how I will use it.

I spend so much time on my desktop computer that I just never felt the need for a portable.  I carry a flip phone for emergencies and buy minutes yearly from Tracphone.

Some games are not available for the Mac, or they are so old they won’t work with the latest system, so I do those on the iPad if possible. I also found them too squinty until I accidentally discovered that you can zoom in on the HO scenes (using the spread fingers gesture like you do for photos). About 200% zoom, which is enough to make them quite tolerable (probably not enough for you, Tim). No zoom on the regular scenes, so I play on the sparkly setting to make it easier to find inventory items. One game is long enough to get me through a plane flight.