Sacra Terra: Angelic Night is not the worst hidden object game I have ever played, but I just don't feel like it's worth your time. Poor translations, a really dated and subpar navigation system, and a puzzling story really make this just kind of average.
The art, the atmosphere, and the puzzles for the most part are all serviceable. There are cutscenes in the game that are well animated. This takes place in a rundown asylum or hospital of some kind, and the setting and environments were interesting at least.
The music is mostly the same track that played throughout the whole game, but oddly it really grew on me. There is a kind of strange charm to it and it ended up being one of the aspects of the game that I like the most.
But between the puzzles and music were frustrations that just compounded for me over time. This is a really personal issue for me, but I play these games mostly on a tablet before bed as a way to unwind and the touch mechanics for the game just really don't work well. I know this is not a fair criticism since many of these games were programmed well before touchscreen interfaces were popular or common, but many other hidden object games I play don't seem to have an issue with this. In this game, touching the screen only seemed to hover the cursor, and in order to select something you had to "double-click" on the part of the screen you wanted to touch, and I found this annoying. I used the trackpad for most of the game instead, but even that had issues, as the game does have some sections where you need to click and drag things to reposition or rotate them in puzzles, and clicking and dragging on a trackpad is awkward and hard to do.
That aside though, the biggest issue I in the game was with the map. You can bring up a map, but there is no dedicated map button in the HUD while exploring, you have to open the notes and then click the map tab in the notebook. I rarely needed to consult the notes, but I frequently had to look at the map and the extra steps to view it become incredibly frustrating as the game wore on. Another issue with the map, while most games allow you to travel to a location by clicking it on the map, this game does not. You cannot just move to a location directly from the map (or if you can, i could never find a way to do it!) so this also meant a lot of lengthy backtracking. The individual locations are all fine, well detailed, finely illustrated, but the ways that locations connect is really hard to intuit. Many games have some kind of a tell on screens that help you understand which direction you're moving, like you may enter a basement and so the next screen may be you looking down the last couple of stairs into the basement. Or you might take a boat across a lake and then next screen has a dock in the background and you know that's the direction you just came from. A lot of this game is disjointed and doesn't do a good job of clarifying which direction you are coming from or going. Part of why I needed the map so much is because the layout of the map is very confusing to me. One part of the game has a generic house hallway, and the doors to either side will move you into yet another generic house hallway. There are all sorts of instances like that in the game where either locations look very similar, or they look so different that it's hard to remember where you just came from.
The hidden object puzzles were mostly fine, I kind of liked them. I didn't find any of them very egregiously hard, and usually they had one multi-step item that required another object to collect and the rest are all normal items in the scene. I had some gripes about these too though, often in games like these, searching the same location of the puzzle multiple times will remove items you already collected previously from the scene. This is a nice touch and makes the game feel more authentic and more professional. I just always thought it was a nice touch, but in this game objects you already collecting just come back the next time you play a hidden object puzzle at that location and I thought it was weird. The other issue was, there are a lot of misnamed items in the puzzles. Frequently as an example, the game would insist that a pistol is a "Musket." I am not a firearm expert by any means, but as an American I am familiar with the term and to me this is a long-barrel gun similar to a rifle (but muskets are smooth-bore barrels, which is why a musket is NOT a rifle, rifles have, you guessed it, riffles barrels.) But the point I am trying to make is, someone trying to find a musket in a hidden object scene is looking for a [i]long[/i] firearm, not a short one like a pistol. There might have been a pistol-sized musket, as I say I am not an expert, but I think it's fair to say most people will be looking for a firearm longer than a pistol when they are looking for a musket. There are other examples that I cannot recall off the top of my head of things just being named incorrectly in the puzzles and this always annoys me since usually the scenes are so specific about which object is the correct one, it's not uncommon for there to be red herrings in the scene to increase the difficulty, so it really is important to be as specific and accurate as possible.
Other than that, a few sections of the game also had the kinds of issues you'd expect; an object you think can be used in a certain situation is wrong and the correct one is unintuitive, or sometimes a part of a scene that looks really innocuous and unimportant will end up being an item you missed but that doesn't really call any attention to itself. These weren't that bad, but although I did not use hints, I was glad that I did play on a difficulty that allowed for me to use the map to see where I had actions available or I think this game would have taken me twice as long.
The story seemed interesting, but at the same time I always felt like I was missing something, like there was a cutscene that I missed maybe, or there was some kind of backstory that I didn't understand. The ending in particular just kind of.. happened and I wasn't sure what if anything it meant for my character. Nothing really seemed to resolve for the person I was playing as. But at the very least it seemed cool from all of the items and documents I found during the game.
The game does have collectibles, but no achievements for collecting them--there are no achievements at all actually, so feel free to use hints or any other tools you want like checking the map since there will be no penalty if you just want to get through the game in a reasonable amount of time. I did find myself wishing that the HUD or map did give you a clue about which locations still had collectibles though because it's easy to miss one and then spend a lot of time backtracking an examining every room to try and find which one you missed. Because I did that, that's exactly what happened to me. And although there are no achievements as I said, I will say that there is something you get for collecting all of the morphing objects but will not spoil what that is, so you may want to if you were planning to skip them for lack of an achievement.
And lastly, there is also a bonus story you can unlock after completing the main game, and it was fun enough, not super long, felt like just the right size.
I guess I would say, if you are just going to use hints to get around and are only playing for puzzles, you could choose a worse game, but the weak aspects of it make me hesitant to recommend it over other games that have better a better story, a better map and navigation, and other quality of life improvements.
I did not have any technical issues with this game. This game does have collectibles. This game does have a bonus adventure. This game has no achievements to earn.
