It’s a pleasantly refreshing vibe for a game which, at the outset, feels as though it’s going to be a pretty standard HOG experience. Consequently, players never know what they’ll be doing from one minute to the next. The game continues on like this from scene to scene, seamlessly blending bouts of hidden object hunting with a series of clever little logic puzzles. ![]() Once clean, it becomes clear that the window is actually a tile-based puzzles and that we need to rotate each piece to create an image. She shines light through the instrument onto a stained glass window, but notes that the window is dirty, so we have to look for something to clean it with. Then Francesca decides she should put the telescope back together again using some of the pieces we’ve found, which initiates a couple of mini-games, including one in which we experiment with different colored lenses to create various light wavelengths. We hunt for items appropriate to the scene, including a map describing a constellation, telescope lenses, and a microscope. It begins with players doing a bit of cursory exploring, looking for clues as to what Casanova might have been up to in the room long ago. One of the best examples of how the process works is a scene set in an antique observatory. No coming back later in the game just to find a few more random objects. It gives purpose to our actions in each scene we explore, and once we’re finished with a scene we really are finished. The design is such that one activity logically leads to the next. ![]() Rather, we go on to solve logic puzzles in the same room based on the objects we’ve found, using a key to unlock a journal, a light bulb to fix a lamp, and examining a clock to enter a code on a safe. However, once these items are found we don’t simply move on to another scene. Things begin simply enough in the professor’s study, where we search for a few random objects. We explore a quartet of European cities mentioned in Casanova’s journal in search of pieces of an ornate heart-shaped amulet. Players step into the shoes of Francesca Di Porta, a woman on vacation who is contacted by a professor friend in Italy who has stumbled across a relic once owned by the famous lover and adventurer Casanova. This is unfortunate because it need not be so, as proven by Insider Tales: The Secret of Casanova, a HOG that makes a point of ensuring that the player is constantly challenged with new and interesting environments and activities. We head into each new game knowing that we’ll likely be fed a handful of scenes filled with the same objects to find over and over again. Repetition has become so common in hidden object games that we’ve simply learned to accept it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |