[u]Recommendation[/u]: A sometimes-fun, sometimes-frustrating hidden object game with a story that stands out as bonkers even in a genre that is universally known for kooky plots.
[u]Critique[/u]: This game is diverting, but some of the entertainment comes from the fact that it's a huge mess. The nonsensical story is hilarious. The animation is clunky, with the characters in the cut scenes stretched vertically. Characters are introduced - and the voice acting in this game is some of the BEST I've heard in any hidden object game! - with very clear attitudes and motivations, and then they forget about those attitudes the next time you see them. The villagers are furious with you for disrupting the sacrifice at the beginning of the game....then they act like nothing happened in every interaction after that. Your sister is contemptuous and disappointed in you, and resigned to your fate, but the next time you see her, she's fine with events (and absolutely [i]not helpful[/i]). It's very, very silly.
But there are other problems with the game that are much more frustrating and sometimes even aggravating. Like nearly all hidden object games, this is a combination of an adventure game (in which you move between screens collecting useful items that you use to solve problems and, as often as not, open doors so you can progress through the game) and hidden object puzzles (where you have to find all the items on a list in a very cluttered screen). But this game blends the two elements in a very frustrating way: the locations you travel through in the adventure game part are just as cluttered and visually dense as the hidden object screens, and the game gives you no clues as to which items you can see are interactive.
"Is that big door with the skull on it something I can look at? No..."
"I clearly need a lever to open this trapdoor: it even tells me 'I need a lever to open this' when I click on the door. I see a broom, a mop, a glaive, a lance, a long stick, an iron bar, and a pile of thigh bones on just this one screen. No, no, no, no, and no...nope, I can't pick up any of those items...."
"I've got this skull I've been carrying around for ages, but I don't know what it's [b]for[/b]...do I put it in the pile of skulls? Nope. Do I give it to the skeleton? Nope. Do I put it in the skull-shaped hole on that gate? Nope. Everything on this screen does nothing when I click on it. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO??"
Again and again, I needed to pixel-hunt, randomly clicking all over a screen to find the completely uninteresting rock sitting in between all the useful items that do nothing to shift it to the side to find a keyhole for some weird object I didn't even realize was a key. "Wait! The BUTTER CHURN opens that door??!? From OVER HERE??!!??"
That's just frustrating. The aggravating part is that there are a bunch of in-game achievements that don't correspond to Steam achievements, and they're all the most tedious type of achievements: find all the REALLY HIDDEN objects on the adventure game screens that have nothing to do with the plot or your inventory. That's annoying, but it's not the aggravation. The aggravation is that, like most hidden object games, there is a "Bonus Chapter" that is unlocked when you finish the game...but that Bonus Chapter doesn't REMAIN unlocked. So I started the game over to try to find some of the tedious hidden objects, and it locked the Bonus Chapter back up again. You can't play the Bonus Chapter at any point except right when you finish the main game! You know what that means...I'm never going to play that Bonus Chapter, because playing through the entire game a second time is NOT WORTH IT.
The hidden object scenes are decent, albeit filled with the sorts of ambiguously-named objects that make these games annoying: cloth, club, container, ring, gold, and many other words that could apply to any of a dozen objects, so you still [i]don't know what you're trying to find[/i]. OK, OK, that adds a challenge, I suppose, even if I don't like it. But there are also a bunch of other types of puzzles, each with its own unique interface, and none of them come with any useful explanation of what you're supposed to do. Instead, you get generic statements like "Free the witch," which doesn't tell you anything about combining symbols in a correct order to make certain shapes or the order that you're supposed to do that.
Ultimately, I felt relief at having finished the game, but there was a lot of frustration (and a bit of aggravation at the end) along the way that leads me to NOT recommend the game.
[u]Review[/u]: This is going to be hard to summarize, as the story makes so many right turns and introduces wacky elements out of the blue again and again that it's hard to hold a plot straight in my head, and I just finished the game. That said, here's my attempt: [spoiler]There's a rustic village that is being oppressed by an evil wizard. The villagers appease the wizard by offering themselves as sacrifices - they gather in the town square and a few are picked up and carried away by harpies. It's a little bit [u]Dragonslayer[/u] and a little bit [u]The Hunger Games[/u]. But as the game begins, your parents show up, worried about you, their daughter. Predictably, they get nabbed by the bird-women. You try to stop them and they start to carry you off, too. Fighting your way free, you fall back to earth, and the villagers are furious at you for trying to disrupt the ritual and risk bringing the wizard's wrath down on their heads. They toss you in jail, but then they're totally cool with you breaking out of captivity and wandering around town gathering materials and talking to people like nothing has happened. Apparently the attitude is "the only people who belong in jail are the ones who can't break out of it." A guard tries to hassle you, but when you fix a peddler's wagon and steal it [i]and his horse[/i], the guards just let you go. Determined to rescue your parents, you venture through dark woods and hills split by lava streams on your way to the wizard's dark fortress. On the way, you fight and injure a werewolf, temporarily inconvenience a manticore, and gain a druid, a dwarf, and a robot as traveling companions/assistants. You find that the wizard was keeping the harpies' queen captive and you witness her phoenix-like death. Her ashes form a new royal egg, which you use to convince the harpies that they were betrayed (????). The harpies decide to just up and leave, and vanish from the story completely. You find a dragon and ride it to the wizard's dark fortress, where your parents are totally unharmed and waiting for you in wood cages like handmade fish traps. You solve a bunch of puzzles that lead to you dueling the wizard and then you turn him into a rabbit. You release your parents and the game ends.[/spoiler]
