Them - The Summoning

Your friend Albea passed away recently and her husband, Grendel, asks you to come to him. He reveals that he's haunted by her ghost. However, Grendel is killed mysteriously while you were seeing Albea's ghost. You're arrested by the police and escaped custody. It's time to investigate the mystery around Grendel and Albea. I never completed the game before because of a big problem that I will explain later. However, I wanted to review it, so I replayed it and I can say that the plot is interesting. Them - The Summoning is the first chapter of a more complex story - I didn't check if it was the only game or if there are more. Anyway, there are several twists in the story. The gameplay is purely an hidden object game, with an inventory to complete items or to find others. In other words, you will be given a list of items to find. Some of them are hidden in drawers but they're not signaled. And if you want to unlock the extras, you have to find 10 bonus objects. You don't know what they are, in other words, click randomly to find them. And to top that, the items are very very small or sometimes, you're asking yourself if it was really visible. If you play in Standard, you don't have any chance to have an hint. In Easy, at least, after some minutes, it's blinking or being shown. And the HUD is also on hidden objects by moments. You're not really enjoying the hidden objects scenes. The puzzles are just anecdotic. The graphics are acceptable, however, the HUD isn't making justice to the them and is completely impersonal. The drawings in the custscenes are also very good. The soundtrack is also good. But it's not really enough. When you see the menu, the old school buttons don't give you any envy. In other words, Them - The Summoning isn't that bad. However, I didn't really enjoy the hidden objects scenes. I'm convinced by the story but as it's disserved by many problems... My conclusion is that Them - The Summoning cannot be recommended unless you're an hardcore hidden object gamer.

Avoid this one. Terrible graphics resolution makes it awful to play. The script is badly translated. There is no voice acting. The "extras" are just direct access to the same scenes you played in the game, for no particular reason. There is little story and the HOGs are cluttered and painful, requiring random clicking on non-specific areas and meticulous pixel hunting for objects that are indescernible or unrecognisable. It's about the worst HOG I've come across on Steam, and there are some pretty bad ones around. It's just as well the sequels didn't appear - 1/10.

Доиграть в нее так и не смогла - надоело насиловать свои глаза. Вот та белая линия у стены - гаечный ключ? Оригинально, конечно, но дизигнеру хочется пообрывать корявки, пардон, руки. Может, если бы создатели игры не халтурили, получилось бы вполне играбельно - детективные истории с мистическим уклоном часто бывают интересными. Но эта игра напоминает худший фильм класса Б - ни вразумительного сюжета, ни нормально прописанных диалогов, да и бюджета - два доллара, пять франков и юань. В утиль однозначно.

Wish I looked at the "Mostly Negative" reviews before I played this garbage. I love silly hidden image casual games, but this one was horrible. To start with, it's very short, and only part 1 of 3 so you don't even get a whole story - not that the story's any good to begin with. Then for the gameplay, you can either think of it as "very difficult" or "stupid and impossible" - some of the things are too generically named, or just a few pixels shown in the image. Definitely not something grandma would want to play. Every few stages there are ways you can interact with a stage, like opening a drawer, but there's no indication of that other than clicking around on things that "might open". And if you don't do that? Well you have no chance of finding the items behind it. Luckily there seems to be no penalty for clicking around a lot or using hints, other than it tells you to slow down. 3/10 don't play it.

An uneven hidden object game that largely removes everything apart from the hidden object scenes (there are a handful of inventory items but they are picked up during the HOG scenes, and a couple of spot the difference puzzles). The story is okay with a few oddities such as in the policemans office, and when you start hammering walls when the police are searching the building for you, but the story is not really going to be why you would play this (especially as being part one of a planned three episodes of which the others don't seem to exist yet). The game also isn't very long (1-2 hours depending on how much you want to resort to the hint button probably) and like most HOGs isn't particularly replayable. Still it can be picked up pretty cheap, so that isn't necessarily So it all comes down to the hidden object scenes. Firstly the scenes are reasonably clear and the graphics are good enough, and most of the hidden items are decently placed, so the game is playable enough, but there are a fair amounts of weak links here - there aren't many misnamed objects (the bane of HOG games), but there seemed to be a few with dodgy hit boxes, a fair amount of silly places (pumpkin, stuff silhouetted in the sky, the letter E type stuff). A major negative for me was some of the openable objects, some of which were completely nonobvious that you could interact with them (the mirror for example), where others like pillows would "open" any time you moused over them (but in other scenes pillows were immobile). There are also quite a few places where you are searching for an item that has several matches ("plant" when in a garden setting!), but only one is correct, which isn't great. In terms of specific scenes the two screen pannable scene outside the church was an interesting idea, but I found it annoying once most of the items were found as you couldn't even be sure what you were searching for was on screen. Also it and the scene before had an annoying "wind" effect constantly obscuring the view. The UV filter bit was also an interesting variation, although all the animals looked about the same to me. Finally we have the bonus items - this seemed a bit tacked on and very variable in difficult (marbles, coins, mice were easy, whereas knives, snails and darts were very difficult to find the last few, etc. Overall then an okay HOG with a few flaws, with nothing exceptional about it good or bad. There are plenty of better options out there in the genre, but it is playable enough especially if you are paying less than a pound for it.

I like HOGs and don't mind if game is just one item find scene after other but this one have really bad graphics. Items was small and very hard to see and it was even more difficult when scene was not well lighted and I just have to click in random to hope and find something. Story would have interest me but it was left unfinished and looks like there will never be more to it so that is dissapointing.

It pains me to downvote any game that isn't broken, but considering the question is "Do you recommend this game?" Then I sadly have to say no. It has a lot of flaws that stop it from being satisfying to play. I could mention a few good things, I was surprised there were a few puzzles, some good ideas with the Hidden Object scenes like the UV and the camera. I thought they were fun. The narrative was so-so, none more cheesier than other HOs I've played. Unfortunately, it came with a lot of negative aspects. We can excuse outdated graphics had the HO scenes been done well. Initially, it was tolerable, the first HO scene was okay. By the second scene, it was horrendous. All the objects were made to be true to real-world proportions which is a really bad idea once you put it into gameplay. It made things difficult, by the last HO scene, it was maddening. SD cards being the size of an sd card? Camera batteries? Those tiny things into a small resolution game? Awful, just awful. The same goes for long thin objects like knives, arrows, and canes. Don't get me started on looking for Alphabet letters. There was also moment it asked me to look for pages, notes, and letters in a library covered in open books and papers. The mini hidden items search were a lot more fun to do. Each HO scene also contained drawers and places to open for more items, but pray you could even find them because they have zero prompts/symbols for what cupboards and doors you could open. You just have to click every corner of the game like a madman or use the hint button for everything. And finally, the church scenes. Why would anyone think people have enough ample knowledge of Catholic ideology to even begin looking for the objects it asked for? The Vatican? Emperor Constantine??? At that point, I stopped caring about finding objects carefully, I just clicked everywhere. I was done. I just dreaded every HO scene. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else. For its price, you can honestly find something better to spend your time and money on.

I hate to add to the negative reviews, but this game is just not worth it. The little story is ok, but not really resolved as this was supposed to be part 1 of 3. But the biggest issue is with the resolution - it can't be changed, so all the hidden object scenes are super frustrating as all the items are blurry and weird. There is also no direction in some scenes, which can lead to a lot of frustration unless you use the hint button. You'll also get angry when you are trying to find something generic like 'paper' and the room is filled with.....papers. All in all, pass this one up.

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Them - The Summoning is an old hidden object puzzle game from 2014. It's 9 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks proper widescreen aspect ratio support (it's locked at 4:3) or support for any modern gaming display resolutions (resolution is locked and can't be changed), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. There's a modern mystery/occult theme to the game, but it's mostly window dressing for a shallow/casual hunt and click game with a few mini-puzzles thrown in. This seems to predate the migration of this genre of games over to the mobile app platforms where their appropriate target audience resides, so I guess we can't blame them for this being on PC, but at the same time it might as well be a mobile app. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. 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. 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 6 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Them - The Summoning is relatively expensive for an abandonware hidden object game, at $3 USD, and it's not worth it. You can play vastly better hidden object games for free on mobile phones, so it's impossible to recommend anyone should buy this one.