Adventure Trip: London

Pros: I played for just shy of 20 hours, for only CA$4.24, which is okay gaming value. Cons: I think by the end I was pretty much hate-playing it. For those of you used to modern hidden-object games which play more like adventure games, this isn't that. This is just a bunch of hidden-object scenes. That's fine by me, honestly. The first real stumbling block was discovering that a lot of the objects are just named wrong. Some of them might be cultural differences (I assume a pacifier is actually called a 'dummy' somewhere, and the no-entry sign in North America really might be a stop sign in some other country) and some is just poor english (I'm sure a 'tape measuring' is just poor translation for measuring tape), but some are flat-out incorrect. Since on the normal difficulty level it docks you 1,000 points for a wrong guess, this is a real issue. If you decide to buy this game, for the love of everything play on easy so you won't get docked the times you have to just guess. (Pro tip: They think cauliflower is cabbage. And I'm pretty sure that's a dove, not a pigeon. ) Beyond that, there are 20 locations, but to complete the game and pick up all the bonus objects, you need to visit each location ten or twelve times (I didn't count -- somewhere in that range). It gets really mind-numbing by the end. Making it worse, after each go at a level, there's a minigame. There are only about four or give minigames, and some of them are REALLY tedious. So since you're going to be doing, say, 220 or so hidden object searches in the same locations and there are, say, five minigames spread across them, you're going to play each of those games about 44 times. "Mysterious hieroglyph word search," really does not stand up to being played 44 times. After all nearly 20 hours of this mind-destroying drudgery, you do unlock: a) "Endless mode", which is completely bizarre and pointless given how many times you have to replay every level as it is, and; b) the "final puzzle". The problem here is that the final puzzle is the most trivially easy puzzle in the whole game. It's unlike any other puzzle in the package, and it took about 20 seconds to solve. There's no big whiz-bang finale after, just a "Hey, you solved it," and that's it. Which is kind of a huge let-down. In the end, will this scratch the itch of clicking objects in a hidden object scene? Yes. The bar is incredibly low for these games, and this one pretty much sits right on it, but it does let you find objects in a scene. And for four bucks, there's a limit to how incensed I can be about it. However, I'm pretty sure picking ANY other hidden-object game available on Steam, including many free ones, will give you a better play experience than this.