Portal of Evil: Stolen Runes Collector's Edition

I generally like these HOG/puzzle/adventure hybrid games, but this was one of the weaker entries I have played. The HOG scenes were about average or below average, compared to other games I have played in the genre. The main thing I disliked in this game was the puzzles: They are either so easy that they barely feel like puzzles at all, or they are the type of puzzle where trial and error is just as effective as (or more effective than) carefully planning out your solution. I don't like those types of puzzles because I find that approaching them as actual puzzles involves more frustration than they are worth. As for the adventure elements (inventory puzzles), I found them below average as well: The solutions were never illogical, but there were often too many plausible options to choose from. I lost count of the number of times I had to choose between multiple seemingly viable tools in my inventory to accomplish a task, only one of which the game accepts. Similarly, there were also times when the game refused perfectly reasonable solutions because I didn't yet have the specific tool it wanted me to use. If you can use a screwdriver to strip away loose bark, you should be able to use an axe as well. If you can break bricks with a spear, you ought to be able to break them with a hammer just as easily. And so on. As with the standalone puzzles I mentioned earlier, I don't find it satisfying to use trial and error to discover solutions. More skillfully designed adventure games avoid this problem by controlling the pacing more tightly, to limit the number of available tools in any given section. And more creatively designed adventure games sidestep the issue entirely by not including the same exact puzzle (break X with Y) dozens of times in a single game. Finally, the writing, dialogue, and acting are dreadful, and keep in mind that I am comparing them to the low standards set by other games in the same genre when I say that. That said, I don't dock the game's score for them, because I don't consider them essential for a game of this genre to succeed. What I do consider essential is for the game to reward cleverness and reasoning, and this game does not do that enough. 4.5/10

It's just normal HO games, like those Artifex Mundi game, this game's graphics are towards realistic style, however, for some odd reason, this game runs like trash on my site. My Frames are dropping, by moving the cursor, the frame is worst than bit rate... It's nothing too special in this one, you might as well skip this one. I am only saying this because it runs like cr@p for me.

ta wapo loko

The puzzles are interesting enough.

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Overall, this game is a quality Hidden Object game with very detailed art and lots of extras. The story of the game is straight forward enough and it wasn't hard to follow or anything. You get small updates as you finish major sections or key events, but luckily for the most part you are left to explore and do puzzles on your own. The art I found to be very high-quality, certainly newer looking than some other games with a more animated art style--which there is nothing wrong with the games, but if a game looks good like this I have to say it's still impressive. The cutscenes are also well animated and integrated into the static scenes very well. Music was background music, fine to listen to but not very memorable. The games I found to be mostly OK. There is a good amount of both Hidden Object puzzles and more traditional puzzles. I found some of these to be fairly difficult for different reasons. Not anything that kept me from finishing the game, but sometimes I would just call it a night and take a fresh look at the puzzle the next day. The Hidden Object games had a strange design I hadn't seen before where when you find an object, the name is the bottom can be replaced with a new name. So essentially if there are 8 spaces, you would find 16 total items because each item would have an additional item under that first text. I get that this allows the game to have large readable text while still having a high number of objects to find. But when I first started playing I was just confused because I hadn't seen this done before and I thought it was a bug and the items I found were getting unmarked and reset instead. Otherwise, the scenes I found more difficult than most games because the swapping names made it hard to scan for multiple things at once and because of confusing names for certain objects. This game also has "sub-scenes" where you can look inside a chest for example to see another scene inside the Hidden Object scene with additional items in them. I'm familiar enough with this from other games, but some of the sub-scenes were not intuitive to find at all and also delayed finishing those puzzles. Usually at least once in a playthrough in most Hidden Object games I could finish one Hidden Object puzzle in 60 seconds or less (a common achievement in Hidden Object games, which this one also has), but in this game across both the main game and bonus adventure, I was never able to complete a single Hidden Object puzzle in that time. It might just be me, but I had to go back and start another playthrough and practice to get that achievement in this game. So, something to be aware of if you're looking for something more casual or find standard Hidden Object puzzles just challenging enough already. The non-Hidden Object puzzles were fine and easy to understand with the exception of one that was so poorly designed I did have to look it up. Sadly the guide had no explanation for how it was solved, and it really bothers me when games have puzzles that cannot be solved with any kind of logic or intuition. It really didn't seem to have any clues or logic to it at all. SPOILER TO SEE WHICH PUZZLE IT WAS: [spoiler] The puzzle that is outside near a temple entrance and bridge with 3 stone statues. You have to rotate sections of the statue to line up the correct sequence of patterns for each one. I didn't ever see anything that would have given you a meaningful clue to how the pattern was supposed to go. I don't know if this was supposed to be brute-forced or not, because every statue used the same patterns once found, but if so that's really a confusing and poor way to implement a puzzle. I would recommend just looking this puzzle up but the rest you can absolutely solve with the clues they give you. [/spoiler] Most of the rest was fine, every so often you have the trope of an item seeming to have an illogical use that doesn't seem to make sense, and this game has at least one of those, but I didn't often get stuck for long unless it was on specific puzzles. Those gripes aside, the game I still found to have a lot of content and not only be a solid, well-rounded game with great art, but also was a great value for what it's listen considering the length of the game. It also includes collectibles and a bonus adventure which helps make this a really positive recommendation for me. This game does have a difficulty-related achievement so if you want to get all of the trophies in one playthrough then I would recommend you make sure to play on hard. (Although this game's hard mode still told you which locations had actions available so their hard is much more forgiving then most.) Another important note, the difficulty achievement includes the bonus adventure as part of the game, even though most Hidden Object games with a difficulty achievement do not. In order to get the achievement for beating the game on hard, you will need to compete both the main game and bonus adventure on the hard difficulty on one profile. This game has collectibles and a bonus adventure. I did not experience any technical issues while playing this game.