“The Far Kingdoms: Elements” is actually the third installment in a 12-game franchise which includes solitaire titles, match-3 titles, mosaic titles, and HOPAs. Because Steam only has a few of them currently available to purchase, I have only played this, 4 (“The Far Kingdoms: Age of Solitaire”), and 10 (“The Far Kingdoms: Awakening Solitaire”).
For the most part, this game is a beautiful mess, which matches my experience of the other two games.
Pros: Good Graphics and Art Throughout
+ The backgrounds and character designs are vibrant and charming, especially the treehouse.
+ The hidden object screens are visually well composed, with objects that are clearly recognizable and discernible from one another.
+ Each area has its own thematic match-3 icons.
Cons: Bugs and Bad UI
- I encountered a game-crashing error message at the gearbox in the wind area.
- You must play in windowed widescreen to fully complete all HOGs because some items, like the skull in the 4th one, are located outside the boundaries of the fullscreen view. Your only other option is to toggle over to the optional match-3 mode whenever you encounter these off-screen objects, but then it becomes a game of “is it really not here or do I just not see it?”
- The widescreen window was actually wider than my monitor, and there is no in-game option to scale the resolution.
Cons: One-dimensional Puzzles
- Most of the random mini-games are boring or repetitive, involving multiple trial-and-error “guess the right order” puzzles, some pathfinding and jigsaw puzzles with questionable controls, two simple button-toggling locks, a matching game, and a “spot the difference” game.
- At least two of the mini-games were impossible for anyone with colorblindness.
- The hidden object screens only make up 20% of the puzzles in the game, and they are basic with no caches, 2-part objects, morphing objects, or zoomable areas. There are also no fractured object screens, find-and-use screens, silhouette clues, or other HOS modes.
- The match-3 puzzles are likewise very simplistic. There are no bonuses or powerups earned for making larger matches, and the only obstacles are varying board shapes, single-break immovable boxes, needing to remove background tile cells, and dropping special icons to the bottom of the board.
- The game does have two sprawling, scrollable match-3 boards where removing strategic background tile cells guides an auto-pathfinding token to an endpoint; however, while these are an innovative challenge, the scrolling feature often gets in the way of trying to make matches because the board is constantly recentering itself as you try to click.
- The match-3 boards don’t auto-shuffle when you have no possible moves left. Instead, you are given a partial-shuffle button with three uses maximum per puzzle. It is often exceedingly unhelpful, and takes eons to recharge between attempts, so most puzzles (especially the boss levels) just become a war of attrition as there are no time limits for any boards.
Cons: No Good Difficulty Mode
- I started on hardcore because I am a point & click veteran, but it doesn’t give the player quite enough information for success. It makes clear what can be picked up and zoomed in on, but there is no explanation of what the bottle and amulet are for without going through the full skippable tutorial, no feedback or flavor text from clicking around on any screen, and object-use puzzles aren’t indicated in any way by either a mouse icon or hover text labels. So you just muddle about and guess at what might be interactable in each background. Most of it (especially later in the game) is intuitive, but the fisherman’s hut area was particularly frustrating.
- Adding further to the confusion, at some points it will display the “pick up” and “move to new screen” mouse icons when those actions are still locked to the player by incomplete object-use puzzles.
- After beating the game, I checked out the other two modes and they both give too much information to the player, spoon-feeding each step, so there is no game mode where the player is allowed to solve puzzles on their own while still receiving useful, non-spoiling feedback from the game about their actions and environment.
Cons: Budget Production
- The music is directly recycled from other HH-Games titles.
- There is no voice acting, as well as no bonus missions, collectibles, behind-the-scenes extras, menu option to replay puzzles, music downloads, wallpapers, achievements, or any special features of any kind. This is truly as bare bones as HOPAs get, and the short runtime reflects that.
