History in Letters - The Eternal Alchemist Reviews

This worked well on Windows 10. This is a cute match 3 game with a bit of story and a few mini games mixed in. I played it with touch screen and mouse, both worked smoothly. Right clicking will release your selection. The music and game play was very relaxing. The artwork is beautiful.

I bought this game because I like classic point & click games and the graphics, atmosphere and theme reminded me of one of my all time favourite adventure game series "Broken Sword". I was stunned to see the character image and text box reload and thus flash with every new sentence. This flashing is incredibly annoying and perturbing in a game that lacks synchronisation but focuses heavily on dialogues. I have never, ever seen anything like that before, not even on the oldest or most simplistic or worst games I have ever played. To make matters worse I found the protaginst and his mannerism rather unlikeable and the dialogues themselves were boring and tedious and seemed to drag on and on. Usually I don't give up that quickly but I had to after 30 minutes because I could not stand anymore of that continuous text box flashing.

At first I tried to like this game because of the subject matter, then I tried turning a blind eye to what bothered me about it, and in the end I gave up and asked for a refund. The dialogue was not very inspiring. I would not characterize it as inane because it is one cut better than that, but just barely. It's hard to tell when you should click to advance the dialogue. If you do you might miss something, but that's probably not a bad thing. I wasn't expecting the game to be about finding hidden objects, but it is. I encountered three puzzles, none of them giving hints as to what I was supposed to do. That wasn't a problem on the first puzzle (an uninspired cypher solving puzzle), but the next two were hidden object finders, after which I threw in the towel in disgust. There are several YouTube walkthroughs that I should have looked at before buying the game, because I would have realized what I was getting myself into. A shame, because medieval alchemy is a great subject.

A relatively short point&click adventure game, in which you play as a young French philologist Remy Chaveau, whose current case leads him on a trail of the famous alchemist Nicholas Flammel and the mystery surrounding his legacy. About half of the game time consists of dialogues, the rest is split between interactive scenes typical for point&click genre and puzzles of medium complexity. On the technical side, the game is somewhat mediocre – graphics look a bit outdated, loading times between the locations are perhaps too long, and music, while not bad, is few and far in between. But that aside, you still get an engaging story, well worth getting if you like point&click adventures.

So I bought this game because I had a coupon and love point and click adventure games. Even with a coupon I don't think the price was worth it (EDIT: on sale for $10 from $15 USD). I got all the achievements (less 2) in 6 hours. Every dialogue advancement causes the character sprites to flicker. Most puzzles are skipable - which on the one had is nice so you don't get stuck, on the other makes the game a lot shorter. The incentive to complete the puzzles is to get the achievement and your money's worth - although most of them could be solved with random guesswork and button pushing. And others, when I eventually did figure out what you're supposed to do, there was no context clue that I could find to hint at that solution (I'm looking at you last puzzle of the game). Without seeing the achievement title I likely would have been stuck longer. To make matters worse, I tried to start a new game to see if I could clean up missing achievements - I found on a second playthrough you get glitched halfway through the game and cannot advance. On a second playthrough, the items in your inventory that you need to find are greyed out in the hidden object scenes. This is annoying but not game breaking. What does break the game is when you are in the library and need to solve a simple guess puzzle of putting books on the shelf based on the author's nationality, the books vanish from your inventory when you click on them. This puzzle cannot be skipped. Exiting the unbeatable puzzle causes all other inventory items to disappear. I only fixed this by deleting all my save data and starting again - not a huge loss since I completed the game a second time within an hour. All that said, I really did have some fun with this game, mostly because there was no guide and I had to figure everything out myself. But when I look at its faults and the total gameplay time, I'd strongly suggest only buying it when it's on sale, if at all.