SEASON OF MYSTERY: The Cherry Blossom Murders

The late 19th-century Japanese setting is beautifully styled, but the core gameplay is a pretty standard, paint-by-numbers hidden object experience. While the narrative keeps you somewhat engaged in the detective work, the puzzles and mini-games are incredibly easy and offer zero real challenge. You also end up backtracking through the exact same environments way too often, which artificially pads out the playtime. It’s a decent, cozy title to mindlessly click through while watching a show, but don't expect a deep or gripping mystery adventure.

My son has been in the ICU for the past week. This game has helped me re-focus and relax during one of the most stressful weeks I have ever experienced.

I'm quite patient when it comes to first impressions in a game. But I've only played for a few minutes and I already can't stand it, even as a hidden object enjoyer. The items are just too blurry, bizarrely sized and obscured and it becomes more of a game of randomly clicking every pixel on the screen as opposed to actually looking for them with your eyes. When you're looking for a harmonica, you don't expect to be finding a 5 foot tall one propped up against a hallway. When you're looking for a shrimp, you don't expect to be finding a monster shrimp the size of a cat superimposed upon a chair. Similarly, there were shrunk objects and ones essentially transparent for no discernable reason. I feel like there could have been a much more creative way of hiding an object in plain sight than either making it virtually invisible or like a completely different object entirely. No shade to those who enjoy it, I like a challenging H.O.G but this type of challenge in particular was only rage-inducing and not as calming and interesting as others in the genre have been.

Square Enix made a H.O.G. :D

Funny, decent hidden object game. It keeps minimising when you click away but the rest of the game functions well and the hidden object pages are varied without being repetitive or obvious. The story itself is terrible and far-fetched but playing on stream and laughing at Irene with the rest of chat and cheering on Fujikawa as he tackles a man is worth the entertainment value. Wish it has a history to read the messages I missed and the cutscenes go slightly too fast, but hey, for £3 - I had fun and cannot complain. A must for Big Fish Games enjoyers, very old school feel to it without the old school brokenness.

It’s hard to find anything positive about this game, it just keeps piling on the flaws. Between its endless length, mind-numbing repetitiveness, and glaring lack of inspiration, it quickly turns into more of a punishment than entertainment. The same rooms, the same objects to find, over and over again… Within minutes, the tedium sets in. The so-called mini-games meant to add variety are nothing but pointless, repetitive chores, and the Steam achievements? Just another reminder of the creative void behind this game. If the gameplay isn’t enough to drain your soul, the sloppy French translation (I've played it in French) will finish the job. Some objects are nearly impossible to find due to botched localization, turning this into a guessing game of bad translations rather than a real puzzle challenge. The game tries to embrace Japanese aesthetics but falls straight into lazy clichés: • A Japanese man whitewashed to look like Orlando Bloom (yes, really). • Another character who apparently never met proper grammar, speaking like "Me be your cook", before suddenly switching to perfectly structured sentences. The result? A clumsy blend of cultural stereotypes and careless writing that makes it impossible to take the story seriously. The plot tries to emulate the classics (Hercule Poirot, for example), but it ends up as a soulless, uninspired mess. The main character has zero personality, and within an hour, you’ll find yourself not caring at all about who murdered her husband. As for the ending? It makes no sense whatsoever and just seals the deal. The music isn’t horrible per se, but after hours of hearing the same two tracks on repeat, it becomes unbearable. On one side, you’ve got "dramatic violins", on the other, "generic zen ambiance", and in between? My patience crumbling into dust. This game is nothing but a frustrating trainwreck. It fails on every possible level : a dull plot, tedious gameplay, awful localization, and questionable cultural representation. If you’re looking for a good hidden object game, look elsewhere. This one only offers boredom and regret. And honestly, just for the absurdly long "hint bar" duration, this game should already be a lost media.

[u]Recommendation:[/u] Quite possibly the best hidden object game I've played. [u]Critique:[/u] This is a great hidden object game that manages to avoid most of the issues that other such games have, while being fundamentally the same kind of game as anything produced by the big HOG studios like Artifex Mundi. [u]Season of Mystery: the Cherry Blossom Murders[/u] is more of the same, but it's just slightly [i]better[/i]. Right at the start, I have to point out that there are no crows in this game at all. Well....I guess that's not entirely true, as there is one screen that has a crow in it that might be included in a list of objects to find. But the crow doesn't feature in the story, it doesn't appear in any cutscene, and it is in no way a harbinger of doom: all things that are constants in the hidden object genre. I should also point out that there's no supernatural element in this game at all. "Whaaat?" you say, "Can it even be considered a hidden object game if there isn't a vengeful ghost or a reincarnated villain??!?" Well, you might like that refrain in all the hidden object games, but I found this game - with its straightforward murder mystery and no magic or mysticism at all - very refreshing. I also appreciate that this game introduces some variety into the type of mini-game landscape. There are a couple of [u]logic puzzles[/u] in this game! Granted, they're not at all complex, but I have to laud any studio that adds something different to the HOG formula. There's also no creepy deepfake CGI in this game. Bravo! Bravissimo! All the cutscenes are static images with subtitled text, like comic strip panels, and there is no voice acting, good (the rarity) or bad (the norm). The game is fairly short, but each hidden object screen is filled with many, many objects so that, each time you come to a screen, you get very few repeats. I should also point out that there are instances of "what could this word 'fabric' mean?" where you don't actually know what you're trying to find because there are SO MANY POSSIBILITIES, but that problem is preventing from being frustrating by the fact that you can click on the word and the game shows you a silhouette of the particular item you are trying to find on that screen. So even though you have 20 different styles of wrenches in the game, you can always know which type you are trying to find...and you don't HAVE TO have that clue, either: it only appears if you click on the word. So you can play most of the game on your own, without any help. But if you do want that help, there's no penalty for that clue, either. That's good, because some of the objects are hidden in particularly diabolical ways. Objects will be nestled in a background of almost exactly the same color, and/or they will be placed on a part of the background that nearly exactly matches their shape. Sometimes multiple objects will overlap, too, so you can't assume that "I haven't found anything in this area yet - it's probably here!" It's a wonderful challenge without ever getting to the point of fury. The presentation of the characters is a bit odd. Everything about the protagonist and her husband read like they are British, but the protagonist is repeatedly referred to as "American." Playing the game, we would read the dialogue aloud, and we never had any idea what kind of accent/dialect to use. It's enigmatic. Overall, it's fun, has solid gameplay, plays quickly, and feels different enough to seem fresh. [u]Review:[/u] After her husband's death is ruled a suicide by the Japanese police, foreign national Mrs. Irene Pemberton nevertheless suspects foul play and conducts an investigation of her own.

Good game to play if you have trouble sleeping.

One of the worst Hidden Object Games out there. Number one complaint - HOG scenes are unforgivably blurry and it's difficult to recognize objects. Also object scaling is ridiculous; a 300 meter spear, a two meter comb as examples. Nice music doesn't make up for a frustrating experience with game-play, and most of this game is HOG scenes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sf-YUw_Bjo&list=RD6Sf-YUw_Bjo&start_radio=1