Pahelika: Secret Legends

Sorry, but this game is really bad!

Tags: Adventure - WC - Walk Clicker Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library TLDR: Very dated. Some crashes. Many puzzles have incomplete instructions (missing words on purpose). Puzzles are more expedient than Revelations which is nice however the cryptic clues are even more unfair. This is basically the same as the sequel Pahelica: Revelations HD in that it recycles the plot structure as well as the locations, albeit at an earlier time. This game feels somehow fresher, locations are often vibrant and functional rather than ruins of old memories you see in the sequel. Many puzzles come across as simple and effective and it gets motivating to get a tempo going and solve a bunch of things in a row. However you often get stonewalled with ridiculous jigsaw puzzles, text instructions that are partially censored, as well as some puzzles just flat out requiring brute force to solve. The pseudo new age sorcery thematic is as amateur as the sequel, perhaps worse so since this has no existing lore to build upon. I would say to avoid both Pahelika games, they are a lot cleaner than the silly games in which a bunch of random objects are dumped on screen and you have to cross out a grocery list at the bottom, but they have a ton of flaws in their own right. While the puzzle structure is more manageable here the stonewalling and lack of refinement in puzzle design is even worse. In other words its more amateur but less over-engineered than the sequel, which makes them equally frustrating.

This is a cheap hidden object game. Nothing wrong with that per se. That being said, there's a lot of bad here: - the story beyond the intro is pretty much non-existent - the protagonist travels from puzzle room to puzzle room, but doesn't drive the story forward in any meaningful way, nor does he or the narrator have anything much of worth to say. - the puzzles are mind-numbingly easy, with some brute-force sequencing puzzles thrown in there as well as "guess the author's favourite philosophical answer to this question" guardian puzzles (that you can retry till you pick the right one). - difficulty aside, most of the puzzles don't break any kind of new ground in terms of clever design or inventive aesthetic. Some are averagely inspired, i.e. "not visually inventive enough" if that makes sense. - the bad-to-average environments don't really make up for the aforementioned lack of content. I bought this since I have some thematic interest in the sequel, but am not hopeful that it'll be all that fun after this one. Cannot recommend.

THE BEST GAME IN THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD

The game feels very barebones, and there’s a lot of pixel hunting — which is frustrating given the low-resolution graphics that are hard to see. The puzzles aren’t really puzzles; they’re mostly guessing, and there are no real consequences for a wrong answer since you can just try another option. The puzzles are also nonsensical and almost always revolve around some kind of magic scroll. The story isn’t engaging and left me confused several times.

Pahelika: Secret Legends is a 2D hidden object/puzzle game where you solve some kind of weird mystery. The graphics in Pahelika look like they're from 1998, but the game was released on Steam in 2015. The gameplay experience is on par with the graphics, terrible. The game doesn't display properly on a UHD monitor, so you have to run in windowed mode. The point and click puzzles aren't all that great either. These guys are up against publishers like Artifex Mundi in the hidden object genre and they're competing terribly. At least AM hidden object games display properly most of the time. Can't recommend this inferior competitor.