"Princess Isabella - Return of the Curse" is a Hidden Object puzzle game, the type you normally see on mobile app stores or even as browser apps. It's an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review.
There's literally hundreds of these on Steam, mostly published by Artifex Mundi, many of them free on mobile app stores, but this one will cost you money on Steam. There's a fairytale/fantasy theme to the game, but this is a just a veneer over a tired and overdone set of hidden object minigames and Adobe Flash tier puzzles, wrapped together with a bunch of static screens that you "move" through by tapping your finger on your iPhone screen.
While these kinds of games are popular amongst casual gamers, it's difficult to argue this is a great value proposition as a PC game, especially considering the price of this compared to the hundreds of free HOGs on the mobile app stores.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This is a really old game, and if they had made it today, it would be on the mobile app stores, but it predates those. It's not clear why they didn't try to dump this on the app stores (since it clearly seems to be here as some kind of nostalgia gouge). Maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Princess Isabella - Return of the Curse" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 11 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"Princess Isabella - Return of the Curse" has the almost comically optimistic (if it wasn't so sad) price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
