Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira

Duration: Just short of 3 hours This is not a HOPA. It is a HOP. There is no adventure or mystery here to uncover. Just cheesy narrative between HOP scenes. Between each HOP is also a mini-game, either spot the difference, 18 piece puzzle etc... they are not challenging and just time wasting to fill-in between. You may replay with one of 5 different narrators and try to beat your score. I'd rather play something else. 4/10

"Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira" is an ancient game from 2010. It's a whopping 13 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. It's a Hidden Object puzzle game, the type you normally see on mobile app stores or even as browser apps. There's literally hundreds of these on Steam, mostly published by Artifex Mundi, many of them free on mobile app stores, but this one will cost you money on Steam. There's a wild west theme to the game, but this is a just a veneer over a tired and overdone set of hidden object minigames and Adobe Flash tier puzzles, wrapped together with a bunch of static screens that you "move" through by tapping your finger on your iPhone screen. While these kinds of games are popular amongst casual gamers, it's difficult to argue this is a great value proposition as a PC game, especially considering the price of this compared to the hundreds of free HOGs on the mobile app stores. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game construction kit/toolset, Adventure Game Studio. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. This is a really old game, and if they had made it today, it would be on the mobile app stores, but it predates those. It's not clear why they didn't try to dump this on the app stores (since it clearly seems to be here as some kind of nostalgia gouge). Maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. "Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

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Before they were known as Himalaya Studios, the devs lovingly recreated three titles from two of my favorite franchises... King's Quest and Quest For Glory. They are fantastic and I recommend them to anyone who enjoys point and click adventures. They are so good, in fact, that I will give this irritating, 800 x 600 eye-destroying quick cash-in monstrosity a free pass. You're welcome, guys.

Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira ist ein Wimmelbildadventure basierend auf dem Point'n Click Adventure "Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine". Man merkt dem Spiel an das es schon einige Jahre auf dem Rücken hat, die Auflösung ist sehr klein und das ist dann auch die Hauptschwierigkeit des Spiels. Entweder spielt man es im Fenster oder wenn auf Vollbild dann wird es entsprechend hochskaliert. So oder so, es ist sehr schwer zu erkennen was man im klassischen Wimmelbild-Minispiel als Suchauftrag hat. Generell typisches Oldschool Wimmelbild im etwas weniger aufwendigen Comicoptik des P&C-Spiels. Kann man spielen wenn man Wimmelbild mag aber gibt mittlerweile doch deutlich bessere Spiele in diesem Genre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Xb2xtTxiw

This is by far the ugliest HOG I've played. Not only are the graphics low-res and dated; everything looks like they've smacked a bunch of clipart on top the background. And when they couldn't find matching clipart, they had someones cousin render some awful 3d graphics. If you can see past this - which I really can't - I guess it's a decent HOG. With focus on HOG. Unlike most other games in this genre, there are no logic based puzzles whatsoever, nor any exploration. So if you want pure HOG with ugly graphics, go for it.

Quite old HOG, lo-res, small objects, grey colours, sometimes it is necessary to do a pixel hunting, more location but still the same objects. HO + 3 other puzzle games. It is not possible to compare this game with a modern HOG. It could have been quite good in 2010 but it is interesting only for fans of HOG history now. I enjoyed it from that point of view but it is generally boring.

a very old HOG that is very boring and repetitive. Pros. ok voice acting Cons. very repetitive it has only 4 puzzles that keep in rotation.... low resolution nothing else to say about... for me it just seems like a cash grab for the the trading cards.... i don't really mind that as i do prefer games with trading cards... even bad ones like this one overall i give it 2/10 +1 for the cards = 3/10 not recommended

[b]Pros[/b] +Relaxed mode which removes the timer [b]Cons[/b] +Crazy mouse acceleration in game +Low resolution graphics. Difficult to see items clearly +Runs at a strange 42FPS? +Score is meaningless Another game that I could go either way on recommending. Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira is a very barebones HOG. You can choose between 5 characters in the beginning to be your guide as you go around the town to the different HO scenes. There are 29 scenes in total, here’s how they breakdown. You are given items to find in a typical HO scene. Once completed, you get a puzzle to do as well which finishes out that town’s location. Rinse and repeat until you hit all 29 locations. The HO scenes graphics are dated and low-res. So much so that it’s difficult to make out certain objects which can be frustrating. For a game that says it was released in 2010, I don’t know why they are this bad. Fortunately, you’re given a generous amount of hints you can use if you get stuck. The puzzles that follow each HO scene are either jigsaw, tile slide, rotating disc or spot the difference. All of which are easy and shouldn’t trip you up too much. Except for the spot the differences. Each picture has 20 differences, but some of them are very subtle and you will have to look very closely. Again, the poor resolution doesn’t help this. You can go through the game normally or in “relaxed” mode, which removes the timer for each scene & puzzle. I enabled relaxed mode right away as I like taking my time on these games. Doing so, you will miss out on extra points for completing a level quickly or finding items in rapid succession. However, points don’t have any meaning in the game. [b]Conclusion[/b] In the end, I can’t recommend this game unless you are a big fan of the genre. [b]4/10[/b] Below Average

Not sure if this game is hard or I am just bad at it, but I couldn't find any reason not to recommend it.