Pahelika: Revelations

Tags: Adventure - WC - Hidden Object Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library TLDR: Dated walk clicker in small chapters with increasingly tedious tasks to reverse engineer for progression. Guilty of item chain reaction, pixel hunting and loose plot contextualization. I played a bit past the two thirds point of the game at which point the puzzle complexity spikes up dramatically, leaving you stuck in the same areas longer and longer as you collect more and more small components to solve seemingly nonsensical puzzles. The whole thing is tied in an odd reality sliding story in which the modern world and some odd fantasy elements get tied together in a sorcery, good against evil theme. The game is very forgettable and very few moments stand out, I liked the puzzle in which you have to answer wisdom-oriented questions but the quality of the answers felt a bit subjective to the author or his lense. Otherwise puzzles more often than not will make sense in retrospect but guessing them ahead of time without a guide can be a cruel exercise in testing your patience. Even with a guide handy the amount of clicking, hotspot interaction and guesswork can get a bit overwhelming. For example a simple sliding tiles puzzle had me fetch a book page for each puzzle piece, which described some vague arabian nights royal revenge plot, which the had to be re-ordered together to give the solution sequence, with no other way of solving. This alone could take well over an hour, some note taking and a meticulous pixelhunt for all appropriate parts. Not to mention that the sliding puzzle is but one puzzle in a series of nearly equally demanding and tedious puzzles, all for a little bit of new age writing and little dramatic payoff. The game does not cater to widescreen monitors and there are no proper save slots, instead having you rely on the "profiles" system to remember your progress. To make things more confusing some puzzles are optional and you may often complete an act leaving some loose ends behind leaving you a bit puzzled as to what you might had missed. Additionally some puzzles sometimes will not unlock until you activate a mechanic-related part of the puzzle elsewhere beforehand. The user interface sometimes lends itself to pointless trial and error and occasional misclicks but nothing gamebreaking. Altogether I think many artifex mundi titles have buried much of bigfish's catalogue and this is a pretty good example of that. Recommend you play just about any of the competition's offering rather than sit through an entire day trying to get through this or waste a whole evening with a guide.

nje

ok

This is a traditional hidden object/puzzle game with a variety of casual objectives for casual gamers. The premise of the game is not unusual and should have every hope for success, but the developers are deceptive and despite re-releasing the same game as a "HD" remaster, it's still locked to 4:3 fixed resolution with no way around this. It's unacceptable to be releasing 4:3 games (which are not by definition HD) in 2011, let alone 9 years later. This game should have been removed from Steam until the developers retracted their HD dishonesty, or actually modernised the game so it really is HD. Also, $10 to pay for their lies? I don't think so.