[h1]The story is a bit cliche for the genre, but I found it enjoyable.[/h1]
Perhaps my judgement is skewed, playing this straight after some other broken gameplay, but I thoroughly enjoyed this game. A good variety of hidden object search scenes, puzzles and story kept this one from getting too boring.
Story involves yourself being called in as an inspector to investigate a castle where reports of fire and strange activity were taking place. Never mind the fact that the very first scene shows the castle surrounded by a rather expansive marsh, with no one around to witness said activity. You'll find with a lot of these types of games, if you start picking at the inconsistencies, you'll likely be there all day.
Locations vary considerably for one castle, but then castles are usually big. It is broken loosely into different sections, such as the castle interior, the gardens and the dungeons. There are morphing objects to collect, in addition to picture fragments, which when completed unlock the bonus chapter. Morphing objects don't seem to be trackable, as I couldn't find them in the menu anywhere except for the HUD tally in the lower right. As there are no steam achievements this doesn't really matter but as a general rule, I was finding one per screen. Once you finish the game there is no option for backtracking, as is common with hidden object games.
Some screens are quite beautiful, and it looks like some effort has gone into the artwork, as even the search scenes can be hard to distinguish objects from the background art. Some other games you can see the difference straight away, thankfully not here.
There are one or two issues though. Once or twice I had instances where I couldn't click on anything with a puzzle scene. Most notably when I was trying to weigh out some dynamite ingredients. Menu buttons worked - I could quit out of the game and load it up again, or back out of the scene and go back in, and weirdly, the scene was still frozen. The other instance I had of this did eventually fix itself, so maybe if I had've waited this one would have done the same. I ended up skipping it, as that button still worked and I didn't have to worry about a 'no skip' achievement.
The other point to note is I played on the hardest setting, but didn't really find it hard. I think the issue here was the map - even though I was on hard difficulty, the map still showed '!' spots on rooms that you could do something in. I didn't discover this till about halfway through the main story, but I just felt it shouldn't have been there.
Lastly for the bad points, the 'spooky' things every time you enter a new screen or after every third pickup. Flying black shadows, glass breaking, fires flaring. Just lay off already! Ugh. It's far from impressive, and mostly just comes across as childish. Laughably, even the protagonist agrees! I'm likely misquoting but she says things like "Is every door locked in this place?", and "I'm not even scared any more."
Hidden scenes aren't too bad. The only problem item I had was finding a 'labyrinth symbol'. I was thinking along the lines of an actual symbol, like a glyph or a swirly pattern depicting a maze, but it ended up being a stone head of a bull. It turns out I just wasn't paying attention as it was indeed a labyrinth symbol, a part that fitted onto a little labyrinth that could be found on a hallway wall, with the head going in the middle of it. It could have had a better name for it, but technically it was correct. My most favourite of the search scenes was the one where each item you had to find didn't have a name, but a small riddle associated with it. I kind of wished they did that for every search scene, for every game.
The bonus chapter is very short, even for bonus chapters, but I wasn't concerned as I felt the main game had a good size to it. I think for games like these, you want them bulky enough to be worth the purchase, but you still want to finish them quick. This game has that balance. I still recommend purchasing at a discount, but I say that all the time as a given.
It's not one of any series, like Dark Parables, or Grim Legends, or Enigmatis, and it doesn't have achievements as I mentioned before, but I'd still say play it. At its core, it's a fun game, and these days fun is what I'm all about.
