Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek Reviews

Cuộc Hành Trình Tìm Kiếm Tên Sát Nhân Bóng Ma Bí Ẩn Ở Khu Vực Có Cây Phong Lá Đỏ

Good story, they need to space out the HOs, most were back to back.

[u]Recommendation[/u]: a quality entry in the hidden-object genre, which is the first part of a trilogy telling the overarching story of hunting down a serial killer. Critique: This is a pretty long hidden object game, and it's pretty well-executed in most regards. The voice acting isn't great, and the CGI cut scenes haven't aged particularly well (though this game does not employ the "horrible deep fakes" that are so prevalent in later games), but the story is perhaps the best/least nonsensical story in an Artifex Mundi game I've played so far. That isn't a terribly high bar, of course, but by contrast with many other games, this one's overall plot makes a fair amount of sense. How you advance the plot - wandering around town finding random objects and then discarding them before you can use them ten minutes later for a very similar task - is just as silly as in any other hidden object game, but the accumulation of clues, uncovering the secrets of the case...that all proceeds very well. There are often times where you have an object that you need to interact with, but the hit box is SO SMALL and so close to the edge of the screen that you can easily get stuck. Exacerbating this problem is the fact that the game is SO HUGE, with such as large number of locations, and you have to do a lot of backtracking in the game to find the next clue. Clues can be in places that you've already visited a dozen times, so when you can't find the single little item that you need to click to advance the story, it can lead to a lot of wandering in Expert Mode. This game has a lot of situations where you have a large inventory of useful items - a hacksaw, a knife, some scissors, say - but you can't use any of them for obvious tasks they could accomplish, like cutting some rope. This is almost always a problem in hidden-object games, and the larger adventure game category, but it's rare to play a game where you have [b]so many[/b] items that serve the same purpose at the same time. The hidden object screens in this hidden object game are particularly brutal. Not because the graphics are poor (sometimes a problem in HOGs) or the clues ambiguous (the times you need to find a "pipe," "cloth," or "bow" are mercifully few), but because they're just [i]really difficult[/i]. Completing all the screens without using a single Hint is very difficult on Expert Mode. [u]Review[/u]: You play the role of "the detective." The detective is running through the woods, and then wakes up on a road outside of the town of Maple Creek, where a storm seems to have wrecked much of the town. [spoiler]The detective realizes that all of her documents have been scattered around. She puts pieces together and slowly realizes that she was investigating the disappearance of a local girl, Kate, when she crashed her car. Through solving puzzles, she gathers up her missing belongings from various locations. Among her belongings is a hotel key, so she finds the hotel - which is both wrecked and abandoned - and then her hotel room. Her room has been ransacked, but she finds some of the evidence that she'd collected on the case, including an old ritual knife in a sealed evidence bag. Suddenly a mysterious figure outside reaches in the broken door, snatches the knife, and jumps off of the balcony to escape. Since she won't jump off the balcony, the detective races out front of the hotel. There, the detective finds a guy named "that man" (despite being a rather important character, "that man" is never once named, though eventually he gets called "Kate's Boyfriend") lying on the ground, badly wounded. She remembers "that man" from a flashback in which he tried to give her a leather satchel full of notes, which were gathered by a detective 30 years ago. The detective searches through the town to find first aid supplies to bind "that man's" wounds. She gets another key item from him, and then his eyes start to glow and he says "He is calling me!" over and over. At some point, a bell has started ringing in town. All of the townspeople go to the church, and the detective has to go there to stop the bell from ringing...but it has been ensorcelled and the detective must disrupt the magic. Once she succeeds, nearly all of the people clear out, and the detective fetches the ritual candles that open a trap door in the church below which she finds a bunch of evidence suggesting that the town's preacher is actually a cultist devoted to the demon Asmodai. It turns out that the mysterious figure has been Detective Hamilton all along - fellow shamus Hamilton investigated a series of disappearances in 1980, and he has obsessively remained in Maple Creek for decades, trying to stop the preacher. The preacher has been using the ritual knife to sacrifice people to Asmodai for a very long time (including Hamilton's girlfriend, who was killed 30 years ago). After a LOT of exploration and investigation, she finds Kate in a crypt and breaks her out. Then the detective helps Kate and her boyfriend, "that man," escape by repairing a truck for them to steal. Then the detective finds five demonic symbols which are the keys to an ancient burial mound; there she finds the preacher, being threatened by Hamilton (who still has the ritual knife). The detective follows Hamilton to a deeper chamber, where he is preparing to kill the preacher on a sacrificial altar (the game says "alter," but we know what they mean). Before he can do so, the detective topples a statue, destroying the altar before it can be used for more murder. There is a great flash of light, and when she comes to, we see that Kate and her boyfriend have been found by the police, but the cops tell you that the preacher and Hamilton both have vanished...[/spoiler]