Gardenscapes

I love it when I feel game makers working hard to engage my interest. That’s exactly the way I felt while playing Gardenscapes, a new hidden object game from Playrix Entertainment that sports top notch presentation, great art, and game design that kept me perpetually wanting to play just one more puzzle.

The game begins with the player inheriting a mansion behind which sits a once resplendent garden. With the help of the butler, Austin, your job is to restore the garden to its former glory by purchasing a wide variety of ready-made elements, ranging from shrubs and gazebos to birdcages and mini-golf holes.

Problem is, you’re broke. To earn the cash necessary to renovate the backyard you decide to rummage through the mansion’s 15 rooms and sell off items in jumble sales. Each sale takes place in a single room and has the player meeting the demands of individual customers. Men and women will be wandering in and requesting things like coats, chess pieces, and kitchen ware, and it’s up to you to find these items as quickly as possible to keep customers from losing patience.

The genius here is that everything we do not only makes sense within the context of the narrative, but also moves us toward a grander goal. The faster we find objects for our customers, the happier they are and the more money they’ll pay. The more money we earn, the quicker we can afford new pieces for our garden, which in turn takes us closer to our ultimate goal of winning the city gardening club’s contest for most beautiful garden. It all fits together and moves things ahead like finely machined gears.

And there are loads of little extra challenges along the way. An actor might send you a letter asking for whatever photos you can find in the house, which will send you to a room loaded with pictures. Or someone might express an interest in buttons, giving you the added goal of looking for brown plastic fasteners in each of the next several rooms in which you hold sales.

With all of the sales plus the added challenges, you’ll end up visiting each of the game’s 15 rooms maybe ten times over the course of the four or five hour story. That does make things start to feel a bit repetitive. Still, it’s difficult to imagine many players growing bored with what they see.

That’s because the artwork is beautiful. Each room is drawn in bold colors, and each of the objects for which we hunt – from the familiar, such as football helmets and lawnmowers, to the exotic, including hookahs and rapa whelk shells – are at once recognizable and interesting. What’s more, the environments and many of the items we seek are highly dynamic: car lights switch on, candles burn, and binoculars and towels dangle. It makes for exciting hunting.

The garden, too, is a small delight. Austin roams around caring for it, and we can send him on little tasks to water the plants, play with the dog, or sit on a bench. He’s also an everlasting fountain of text-based information, some of which is useful (he always lets us know what we need to do to keep the story moving forward), and some of which is just funny (as when he chides us for clicking on him and suggests we simply sit back and enjoy the garden).

And as a little bonus, your custom gardenscape can also function as a screensaver, with birds, butterflies, your butler, and your self-named puppy wandering about in the rain and sun.

Aside from the relatively small number of rooms to search, the only other criticism to be leveled at Gardenscapes game is a lack of originality in terms of searching aids. As in some other HOGs, players can earn hints by finding question marks, click on concealed cameras to briefly reveal the locations of items currently sought, and find thermometers that offer hot/cold cues as you mouse around the screen. But at least they’ve been expertly implemented, helping players who are stuck without simply giving away the location of the objects they need to find.

I’ve been working through many hidden object games lately so I have plenty of recent titles with which to compare this one, and Gardenscapes is easily one of my current favorites. I just wish it lasted a little longer.

Review by Chad Sapieha

Gamezebo, Inc.

Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal

Up until the 1920’s, more Americans were living in rural areas than in cities – however near the end of the Jazz Age, between the Great War and World War II, all that changed. People flocked to cities and urbanization hit the United States like a steam-powered locomotive clobbering a cabbage truck.

In Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal, developed by GameBrains, you play the titular Valerie Porter, a slightly naïve but intelligent young woman searching for her big break in late 1920’s New York City. Though kleptomania won’t be a diagnosed illness for decades, your penchant for stealing bells has resulted in your relocation to the city, in hopes of becoming a star reporter for the Daily Informer. Your big break surfaces when you’re hired to replace Sharon T——-, former reporter at the Informer. The paper’s top reporter, Terry Morgan, takes you under her wing and offers some protection from your sexist editor-in-chief. However all is not as it seems, and your first exposé about the corrupt mayor seems to have resulted in the murder of an ex-cabaret dancer turned movie star named Scarlet Velour! Use the powers of journalism to get to the bottom of this tragedy.

Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal is a hidden object adventure game, and quite an active one at that. Like most hidden object games, gameplay primarily involves searching a scene strewn with all manner of knickknacks and junk. You have a list of specific objects to find; clicking on one of these items removes it from the scene and your list. After finding all the objects, you move to the next scene. And so on. Hidden object games are the most popular casual games.

When you’re stumped and can’t find an object, a hint is available in the form of a lightbulb. When charged, click on it for an inspiring clue to the location of one object on your list. Your eureka bulb recharges over time, but every scene contains two batteries that you can collect to recharge it instantly if needed.

Like many hidden object games, Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal often asks you to find multiples of the same kind of item. For example: seven trophies, five timepieces, ten hotdogs, etc. In a new mechanic, the game allows you to chain together these objects to collect more than one at a time, by holding down the mouse button and “connecting the dots” from one item to the next. This chain lightning effect charges your lightbulb. The longer the chain, the more powerful the charge.

The game is untimed, however once per chapter you must ride the subway to or from a location. This ride lasts a maximum of one minute, and offers a chance to recharge your lightbulb – if you can find a certain number of grouped objects in sixty seconds or less.

Every scene also contains five bells. Can Valerie pocket all one hundred bells across the twelve chapters that make up the game? Finding them awards you medals, so if you like in-game achievements, keep your eyes peeled.

Though technically Valerie Porter is a hidden object adventure game, it’s a limited one with an inventory/puzzle system confined to individual scenes. Among your list of items to find you’ll see tasks or items written in red script. These require some sort of interaction between an item in your inventory and a portion of the scene. Using a key to unlock a filing cabinet in order to deposit a file, for example.

At the end of each chapter your story hits the presses, the edition hits the streets, and the game gives you a numerical score based on the time it took you to complete the chapter, the longest chain of similar objects found, the batteries you didn’t use, and the minigames you didn’t skip.

The Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal game was most impressive with these rather clever minigames. As a journalist, you get to interview witnesses, write stories, and even compose headlines. All are portrayed in minigames. I liked that some sort of memory of objects found when snooping around various locations was required later to organize your thoughts (in the form of a word search puzzle). Perhaps the most fun minigame involved writing an article, madlib style. (Check out the screenshot to the left for an amusing example of one of my stories in progress.) None of the minigames felt superfluous or tacked on just to pad the game. I have to commend GameBrains for impressing a sense of fourth estate activity, albeit simplified, upon the player.

Equally impressive are the character voice overs; almost every line is spoken, which helps animate the slightly predictable plot. You know how there’s always that one voice actor whose lines makes you roll your eyes so hard that your eyeballs make a small sound and your cat (or dog) turns its head and looks at you? Well, thankfully they didn’t hire that actor for this game.

However, I can’t give out all gold stars… the game is displayed in the inexcusably low resolution of 800×600 pixels! Though there are few tiny objects to get muddled at that resolution, now and then I had to waste a hint on an object (some rosary beads resting on a plate of food) that I probably would have been able to spot at 1024×768 or higher. Probably. Maybe. It’s 2009, friends! We’ve all got newer computers that blur images when they’re upsampled to our monitors’ native screen depths!

Review by Uesugi

Women’s Murder Club: Twice in a Blue Moon

The ladies of the Women’s Murder Club are back for what may be their most challenging case yet. In Women’s Murder Club: Twice in a Blue Moon, someone is carefully copying famous serial killers like Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler, leaving plenty of evidence but few clues to his identity. Lindsay, Claire, and Cindy frantically try to unravel his riddles before another victim falls prey to his madness.

Twice in a Blue Moon combines hidden object sequences with puzzles to create an intriguing and at times quite difficult mystery for detective Lindsay, medical examiner Claire and reporter Cindy to solve. As in previous WMC games, you’ll switch between characters, using each one’s special talents to help solve the case. Lindsay confronts suspects and snoops around crime scenes, Claire tries to make sense of the forensic evidence, and Cindy digs deep to find hidden motivations and new leads of investigation. Of the three, Claire gets the shortest shrift. Her sections are largely limited to scanning an area with a UV light to find hidden items or clues, then returning to her lab for a brief logic puzzle involving the proper arrangement of bottles of solvent.

Lindsay and Cindy fare far better. Both will have to find a list of objects in a variety of hidden object levels. Sometimes the items make sense, such as when Cindy has to find a set of crime CDs, but much of the time the objects are fairly random. What I appreciated, though, was the game’s attempt to maintain a certain amount of realism in the hidden object sections. The items you have to find are appropriate to the locations you’re searching and placed in areas where they might – with a bit of imagination – actually end up. Rulers don’t magically adhere to the wall, hot air balloons aren’t hidden in potted plants. A lot of thought was clearly put into the assembly of the hidden object scenes, and it makes for a very satisfying hunting experience.

Once you’ve found everything you need to locate, you usually have to use at least some of those items to solve a puzzle. The puzzles include everything from hangman-style word games to the killer’s devious riddles, and solving them will take some creative thinking. You can skip any that prove too frustrating, which I’m not ashamed to say I did when it came to a jigsaw-style puzzle involving those crime CDs of Cindy’s.

Cindy’s database searches, a common activity in WMC games, have been made a bit easier; now, the correct words can be found on a sticky note just below her computer monitor. That’s sure to be a disappointment for anyone who enjoyed figuring them out on their own, but it’s extremely helpful for those of us who could never quite figure out the right set of keywords to enter into the computer.

The story of Twice in a Blue Moon, which is deliciously creepy, is told via comic book-style cutscenes between chapters. Previously, you had to either had to skip the scenes entirely or wait for what seemed like an eternity as they slowly revealed themselves, panel by panel, but now the entire scene is displayed at once, and you can advance it whenever you like. It’s a small change, but it makes a huge impact on the enjoyment and playability of the game. Being able to proceed at your own pace – whatever that may be – always makes a game experience better.

Women’s Murder Club: Twice in a Blue Moon is the best installment in the series yet, but it’s disappointing that Claire has yet to be expanded into a decent character. Her forensic sequences could make for great puzzle-solving, but instead they still feel like tacked-on afterthoughts. They don’t make the game any less fun, but they do feel like wasted opportunities.

Overall, Twice in a Blue Moon provides an  excellent assortment of hidden object searching and puzzle solving, while maintaining a realistic atmosphere and some genuine tension. Welcome to the Club!

Review by Vanessa Carter

City Sights: Hello, Seattle!

Glad to have you on staff here at City Sights Magazine, kid, you do us proud! You’re a great reporter, you know why? Because you’ve a keen eye for detail. You walk into a room and right away see everything there is to see – nothing gets past you. Your next assignment:  Seattle! Now, get out there and show us the sights!

In the new hidden object game City Sights: Hello, Seattle!, you’ll tour around the Emerald City, visiting various famous locations  and scouring them for items of interest. Each location is beautifully rendered, bright, colorful and even fairly faithful to their real-world counterparts; you definitely won’t mind staring at them as you hunt for the items on your list. And oh, what a list it is.

For most spots, your list is divided into three categories: Easy, Medium, and Hard. The harder the item is to find, the more points you get for spotting it. The difficulty rating is a bit dubious, though. I usually had much tougher time finding the Medium items than the Hard ones, and some supposedly Easy ones were real stumpers.

Track down everything before time runs out, and it’s on to the next location. Though you’ll start off only having to find a handful of items to find in each location, soon you’ll have dozens of objects on your list. Some items can be tricky – “cone” might be an ice cream cone, a traffic cone, or a pine cone – but you can use as many rechargeable hints as you like to get through the level.

You might not want to, though. City Sights: Hello, Seattle! has a rather ingenious set of trophies that you can earn in every level that provide an extra layer of challenge. At least three remain constant: Don’t use any hints,don’t suffer any penalties for incorrect  clicks, and finish in under five minutes. Finishing levels with those three achievements gradually levels up three large trophies, but there are plenty of individual awards to win, too. You might have to find 10 particular items – cats, apples, birds – in a particular scene, or you may have to find items in the specific order they appear on the list. You might have to find all of the Hard items first, or earn 10,000 points.

If you blow a particular achievement, you can replay the level and try again. You’ll have a different list of objects to find, but just about everything is in the same place, so you’ll have a distinct advantage when you play for the second time.

Trying to earn all of the achievements in a given area is an incredibly addictive way to play the game, but even if you can’t quite finish in five minutes or you have to use a hint, don’t worry – you’ll still have plenty of gold in your trophy case. You win one award simply for clicking on the screen fifteen times, and another for moving your cursor “3 feet” on the screen. The achievements are, for the most part, completely optional, so feel free to ignore them if you’d rather play completely stress-free.

Sprinkled among the hidden object levels are a few spot-the-difference sections, which are just as polished, though not always as challenging. There’s no Easy-Medium-Hard breakdown for these levels, but the same trophy standards (no hints, finish fast, etc.) apply.

Hello, Seattle! may seem like it’s a short game, but that’s only because you’ll find it so hard to stop playing it. It’s a wonderful take on the genre, and an enjoyable tour of a beautiful city, too. The achievements add an extra level of challenge for pros who want to test their hidden object might, but all hidden object game fans will enjoy this one.

Review by Vanessa Carter

Gamezebo Inc.

Kuros

As Katya, you’re in a bit of a high-pressure situation in Kuros. Someone has been tampering with the glyphstones that keep the world in balance, and you’re the only one who can restore them. Unfortunately, you’ve woken up with no idea of who you are, where you are, or what you’re supposed to be doing. Hope you’re a fast learner, or it’s the end of everything.

Kuros bills itself as a hidden object game, but that’s a bit misleading. You will have to scour locations for items, but they’re the tools you’ll need to solve the game’s many puzzles, so it’s more like a classic adventure game.

The most important items you need to find are map pieces; you can’t proceed to a new location until you track down all ten bits of the map that will lead you there. You can also find chromatic lenses that will reveal hidden items in a location, but even more valuably, they’ll tell you when you’ve found everything there is to find in a particular level. Several of Katya’s quests will have her searching multiple locations for a particular set of items, and knowing when to move on is extremely helpful. Scrying orbs will give you a pass on puzzles, but like the chromatic lenses, they’re quite rare – use them wisely.

In her travels to save Kuros, the world where the glyphs are kept, Katya will travel through five elemental lands: wood, fire, water, ice, and metal.  Given that the world’s in danger, you’d think that the guardians of those lands would be eager to help Katya on her quest, but they all want something in exchange for their assistance. You’ll have to find ten seeds scattered throughout the wood land, figure out how to forge an orichalcum rod, restore life to a field of wilted metal lilies, just to name a few.

Some of the tasks are simple fetch quests, but most require some amount of puzzle solving, and this is where Kuros really shines. The puzzles are varied, both in type and in difficulty, colorful and clever. Whether you’re reconnecting pipes, guiding a ball through a maze, or figuring out the correct pattern of crystals, the puzzles of Kuros are never boring or repetitious.

Your final task before leaving a land is restoring its glyphstone. After you clear away the detritus that surrounds it, you’ll have to complete the inscription carved into its face by figuring out the pattern of symbols. This is the one area of Kuros that may frustrate some players. The patterns are logical, but if you can’t tune into the particular sense that they make, this part of the game can be a bit of a roadblock. The glyph puzzles can be solved just with trial and error, but they reset after three wrong guesses, so it’s faster to try and figure it out the proper way.

Kuros has smart puzzles, gorgeous graphics, amusing characters and decent voice acting. It’s a wonderfully entertaining journey and it’s over far, far too quickly. If you’re a puzzle aficionado, or a hidden object pro, you’ll be done in just three hours.  Katya drops some heavy hints about a sequel, which I can only hope come to fruition; it feels like Kuros barely scratches the surface of its potential. You’re given a wand and a scepter, but hardly have to use them at all. There could have been more puzzles in each elemental land, too – it feels as though you’ve just gotten to later levels, like the library, when it’s time for you to go.

Hopefully we’ll have a chance to join forces with Katya again sometime. For now, this delicious appetizer of a game will just have to do.

Review by Vanessa Carter

Gamezebo Inc.

DinerTown Detective Agency

This week I take a more personal look at some of my favorite things in our forthcoming game, DinerTown Detective Agency, the fun spoof on the traditional hidden object genre that is being released this week!

One of the really cool things about DinerTown Detective Agency is the Wall of fame – this is basically a virtual trophy case for players holding a collection of uniquely styled magazine covers for each solved case. When you’ve made your way through each individual case you’re amply rewarded with a trumpet herald, a “case solved” screen takeover and then taken to the wall of fame screen where your new case cover is proudly displayed!

Wall of Fame

It always spurs me on when I see my wall filling up each time I complete a case – there are a total of 25 covers to collect and it’s rewarding to check back throughout the game and see the cases you’ve solved to date especially since they involve some great comic art work.

Magazine covers

Another cool aspect of the game is the assembly search screens that you’ll see as you tackle each mystery – these will include a couple of screens from each location.

You’ll often have to search for broken down components of the utensils and tools that the suspects have manipulated rather than the whole object. This makes the game more challenging as those pieces may often take a second or third look before you recognize them for what they are – items include things like scissors, watering cans, coins, creatures and much more.

Like any real world detective, you’ll also need modern tools to help reveal hidden clues that can’t be detected by the naked eye which is where our crafty little forensic tool kit becomes useful. Even when you’ve uncovered most of the hidden objects in a particular scene, you’ll also need to use your dusting brush, magnifying glass or eyedropper to uncover crucial clues like fingerprints, spilt juice etc and reveal even more hidden items.

Forensic tools: Eyedropper, Fingerprint brush, Magnifying glass

With these great features adding more variety to the traditional hidden object game, I hope they  will make your gaming experience much more enjoyable and remember you can play DinerTown Detective Agency this week so don your thinking cap and start solving those mysteries!

By Ryan Sindledecker

Gamezebo Inc.

Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch

Poor Samantha Swift. Once again hot on the trail of her missing father, she unwittingly gives a nefarious villain the means to rediscover the Midas Touch, the ability to turn objects into solid gold. Realizing her mistake, she ventures off to right the wrong and bury the secret of the golden touch once more. Finding dad will just have to wait.

Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch is a very likeable game, if frustrating at times. Samantha is sort of like Lara Croft’s kid sister – part archaeologist, part tomb raider, all spunky adventurer. She travels the world in search of artifacts to fill the halls of the Museum of the Lost, while her assistants back in the lab keep in touch via PDA, giving her clues about where to look next. They’re a charming little crew that wants to find Sam’s dad as much as they want to preserve antiquities for the sake of history. If you remember the Indiana Jones line “It belongs in a museum,” that’s pretty much how Samantha and her pals feel.

Golden Touch includes hidden object sequences and puzzle solving levels, with some sequences being a combination of the two. Samantha will first have to comb an area for specific items, then use some of what she finds to uncover other objects that are hidden in the scene. She might use a shovel, for instance, to dig up a statuette, or whisk away cobwebs with a broom to reveal a concealed crank. It’s a fun idea, but its implementation is a bit clunky. There are no obvious visual clues telling you what you have to do, so you’re left just moving your cursor around the screen until it changes into the gears that let you know something can be manipulated. Even when you find the appropriate hot spot, it’s not always immediately clear what you’re supposed to do; solving the puzzle frequently comes down to simply trying every item in your inventory until you find the right one.

The unintuitive nature of these portions of the game is completely at odds with the hidden object levels, which are so easy that they’re tailor-made for newbies. The list items aren’t really all that hidden, but if you’re having trouble tracking one down, the game does everything but move the cursor for you. Finding lightning bolts adds to your ample supply of hints, but you probably will never need to use them, as Golden Touch will point you at the object free-of-charge. Simply select the item on the list and its silhouette will appear in your scanner – very helpful for objects you might not immediately recognize. The outline will change color depending on how close your cursor is to the object, finally turning red when you’re right on top of it. You can choose to ignore the scanner completely, of course, if you prefer to do the legwork on your own.

The puzzles in between hidden object sequences are more straightforward and vary nicely, such as shuffling tiles to reveal hidden keys, or untying knots in the correct order to unlock a door. Puzzle veterans will breeze right through them, but newer players might find themselves stuck on some of the trickier ones. Unfortunately, while Golden Touch does everything it can to make the hidden object sections as easy as possible, the same does not hold true for the puzzles – and there’s no option to skip them.

Uneven though it may be, Golden Touch works hard to make it up to you. It has a pleasant hand-drawn art style, great music, and is quite lengthy, even for pros. You may scratch your head at some of its wacky leaps of logic, but still find yourself charmed, just the same.

Review by Vanessa Carter

Gamezebo Inc.

Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

A hidden object game inspired by Daniel Defoe’s classic 18th century, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe traces the remarkable story of the title character after he’s shipwrecked en route to Africa and must fend for himself on a tropical island, gathering resources to stay alive while trying to find a way home.

The gameplay of Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a typical blend of hidden object challenges, mini-games, and inventory puzzles where you must pick up an item then use it somewhere else in the scene to reveal the final items on your list. Sometimes the list of items to find are random, and other times the list is themed: for example, you might be asked to find “all the hand-held weapons.”

You’ll start by investigating the wrecked ship for provisions, and when Robinson stumbles onto the ship’s blueprints he hatches an ambitious plan to reconstruct the ship and sail home. As you complete each of the game’s six chapters you’ll get to return to the shipyard and see the ship’s progress based on the materials you’ve collected.

To find building materials for the ship (not to mention food and other essentials for Robinson), you’ll explore different scenes all over the island, including the beach, a lost temple, a forest, and a swamp. Eventually Robinson will even discover that he’s not alone on the island after all.

The game can be played in either Survivor or Relaxed mode. Relaxed offers no countdown timer, and more hints (10) per chapter.

The story is interesting enough whether you’ve read the novel or not, but the scenarios are occasionally a bit silly. For example, in one of Robinson’s narratives he says: “My village is located on this beautiful hillside… but before I can go there, I need to find 15 mushrooms!” which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The puzzles themselves were fun, and I appreciated unique touches like having to move an object out of the way with the mouse in order to reveal something hidden underneath. The very first puzzle is an example of the ingenuity you’ll encounter: in order to find the “black seagull” on my list, I had to pick up a “clean stick,” rub the stick inside a cannon to get it covered in coal dust, then rub the “dirty stick” onto the seagull to turn it black.

The mini-games are enjoyable as well. I especially liked the sound-based mini-game that involved matching two birds based on the different tweets they made (for hard of hearing gamers, there’s also an accompanying visual cue so you won’t get stuck). That said, another of the sound-based puzzles later on that involved playing back a melody on a flute went a little over the top in the difficulty department. The game, however, does allow you to skip mini-games occasionally if you don’t feel like doing a particular one.

The game’s classical soundtrack works well within the setting and theme.

I only wish that Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was a little longer, since it clocked in at around 3 hours for me. Overall, though, it’s a decent hidden object game with some clever and thoughtful twists.

Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child

The third instalment in the Dream Chronicles series, Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child is another visually stunning Myst-like adventure that transports players into a fantasy world of fairies. Like its predecessors, the excursion is immersive and fun but over all too quickly.

Taking place soon after the events of the second game, Dream Chronicles 2: The Eternal Maze, The Chosen Child begins with Faye waking up with no recollection of her past or who she really is, except that she keeps having dreams that she has a husband and a daughter who’s taken by the Fairy Queen of Dreams.

Guided by a good-looking man who communicates with her through a crystal ball (those who have played previous games will quickly figure out who it is), Faye sets out to save her child once more. She’s thwarted at every turn, though, by mischievous fairies who seem to be doing everything they can to impede her progress with their magic in the form of mini-games and brainteasers that must be solved to move on.

Like the second game, The Chosen Child consists of scenes that can be moved through freely in order to search for and pick up items that can be added to the inventory and used elsewhere in the location. One of the earliest puzzle, for example, involves repairing a torn carpet by first finding all of the pieces, then figuring out how to repair the sewing machine so that you can sew the mat back together.

The Chosen Child introduces the Nexus, a series of gateways that allow you to travel to different interconnected locations after you figure out how to unlock them. To unlock the Nexus Gateways you’ll need special devices forged from dream pieces and gold nuggets that are hidden throughout the game.

The Dream Chronicles series has earned a reputation for having beautiful visuals and music, and The Chosen Child is no exception. Each of the game’s environments has been lovingly crafted with a soft, distinctive art style bursting with detail, and the soundtrack is equally evocative. In short, The Chosen Child boasts production values that put many of the recent hidden object game releases to shame. It really does seem like there’s an aura of magic about the game with the way things can change on a whim and objects suddenly appear in different places.

That said, there are a few issues that I can nit-pick about. For one thing, the game could have used a better hint system. You’re completely on your own in the seek-and-find portions of the game (where you have to find, say, 14 planks to repair a ladder), so if you get stuck you simply have to keep looking until you find the item. I would have loved to have been able to spend some of the jewels or gold that I had found to make the game reveal the location of a particularly hard-to-find object.

The man in the crystal ball isn’t always much help either. One of the most frustrating parts of the game was when I found myself backtracking through a maze looking for the last item I needed to solve a puzzle – a small gold plate – and all the crystal ball said was something like, “Sorry, I wish I could help you but I can’t see very well.”

In terms of length, the game is on the short side (expect to finish it in 2-3 hours provided you don’t get stuck on a particular puzzle). When you finish, your score can be uploaded to a global leaderboard, and you can always replay the game to try to find more dream pieces and gold nuggets. What’s more, some of the key items themselves will be in different places the second time around.

The length is disappointing when compared to other adventure games, even while acknowledging the attention to detail that care that KatGames put into every scene and puzzle. I was also let down by the abrupt ending, which left me feeling that The Chosen Child was just a set-up for the inevitable fourth game.

The Chosen Child is well-designed and fun while it lasts (aside from the aforementioned maze, which I honestly could have done without), but its length comes up short.

Review by Erin Bell

Gamezebo Inc.

Annabel

Journey to the drifting sands of Ancient Egypt and help a young princess find true love in Annabel, a unique and stunning hidden object adventure. Annabel, deeply in love with the young prince, Akhenaten, has been captured and help prisoner by the evil high priest Amertekh. If Amertekh marries Annabel, he will be named Pharaoh. But, in order to do that, he’ll have to get rid of his rival. Use your keen eye for detail, and your mastery of brain-bending puzzles, to help Annabel escape and return to her one true love. Featuring incredible 3D graphics, a stirring storyline, and surprises at even turn, Annabel is more than just a hidden object game, it’s the adventure of a lifetime. Experience the magical romance of Annabel today!

Annabel features:

• Amazing 3D Characters and Graphics
• Unique Mix of Hidden Object and Puzzles
• Original Storyline Featuring Compelling Characters
• Journey through the Lands of Ancient Egypt
• Explore a Vast World Full of Intricate Details