Arcana Sands of Destiny

Kicsit olyan fapados érzetű játék és még csak nem is kizárólag a látványvilág miatt. A műfajnak sajátja a logikátlan helyen lévő dolgok és nem túl észszerű megoldások, de a jobbak legalább próbálnak valami hintet adni, hogy mi is itt a feladat és kb mi kell a megoldáshoz. Itt többnyire vagy kitalálod magadtól vagy segítséget kérsz, ahol a következő következő lépést mutatja, és ha szerencséd van, akkor érthetően. Pl. volt egy rész, ahol úgy kellett továbbjutni, hogy kinyitsz egy rejtekajtót. A játék segítségként bekarikázta azt a helyet, ahol majd a nyíl lesz, ha kinyitod a rejtekajtó zárját, de az azonos képernyőn lévő nyitómechanizmusra nem hívta fel a figyelmem, ahogy arra sem, hogy mit kéne csinálni vele. Vannak azért jó pillanatai is, de nem annyi, hogy kárpotolna az amatőrségekért.

nice artwork, lots of puzzles. some of the items (scarabs) you need to collect for the quests were need to be collected in order, so had to keep going back to them until it worked which was a bit frustrating. there are some good lets plays on youtube if you get stuck and are wanting to not use the hint button for the achievement.

This game was interesting to compare against Artifex Mundi games in the same genre, but unfortunately for this one the comparison mostly made me realize that Artifex Mundi does a lot of stuff well that I wasn't giving them credit for. Relative problems with this game: * The hidden object segments are mostly hiding things by making everything sepia, rather than by clever design. * The hidden object segments hide objects such that they're not even on the screen, without indicating that it has done so (*sometimes* it does indicate, which makes this even worse!) * The map doesn't indicate where there's stuff still to do, and for half the game there is no map. * The non-map navigation is just awful - the mouse turns to an arrow in completely arbitrary parts of the screen sometimes, and there's no indication of why, e.g. "up-left arrow from this basically empty area" leads to "a wall full of spiders", like if someone told me the three exits from a room lead to [description of where they go] and asked me to predict which of the three exits goes to which of the destinations, I would have not even an educated guess. * The story animations take forever, in a really uninteresting way. For example where artifex mundi would animate a rising staircase with the steps going up like one at a time but overlapping, so the fourth step starts about when the first step ends, for example, this game animates the steps rising one at a time, *slowly*. The entire animation should be about 2 seconds, if that, but instead it takes like 30 seconds. Nobody wants to watch stairs appearing for 30 seconds! If you have it already, or if there wasn't anything else, this is an okay game. But given the existence of tens of Artifex Mundi games, if you like this genre, play one of those instead.

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