Small Town Terrors: Livingston Reviews

An interesting little puzzle game with a cool mechanic of having to build up your strength to progress. Hidden object scenes and puzzles are generally easy with two or three puzzles that take a bit of effort to solve. Music is nice and moody. Story is reasonably interesting. Visuals are nice. Expect around 3.5 hours of gameplay. UPDATE: As of July 2021 this game works fine on Linux with Steam Play / Proton.

A very good horror-themed casual point-and-click adventure. In spite of it being old and having low-resolution graphics, the gameplay is excellent, with many challenging puzzles and several good hidden-object scenes. The story is rather thin and well-worn (zombies!) but the game makes up for it with a rich atmosphere.

This is a unique HOG in the fact that you have a health bar. You have to restore your health to certain levels to proceed with certain actions. Other then that this is a general run of the mill Hog with some horror elements. Not bad, not great. Buy if you like this sort of thing.

What is the point of having a map in this game? In pretty much all HOG i've played--and I've played a lot of them--every single map had it where you can fast travel where you want to be and would also show where there are actions that need to be taken. This HOG for some reason decided not to do that, which makes the map utterly useless. I am now stuck and having a decent map set up would have been helpful to know where to go. Health system was interesting but not really something I want with a HOG. I also don't see much impact to the game play adding it. I do not recommend.

A fairly simple HOG, there are not really any moon-logic puzzles. The prerendered story videos feature atrocious 3D graphics looking like something out of the 1990s, but no one plays these for the graphics. That said, the 2D art is fine, no better or worse than fine. I enjoyed it for what it is. On a technical side, the thing ran at 1300+ FPS. Yes, one thousand three hundred. It didn't behave like a power virus, as my gpu clock never maxed out but you might want to run this with a frame limiter running. There was one puzzle I skipped because solving it was too tedious (the jukebox), but everything else felt quite reasonable.

Wow, this was really different for an Adventure HOP game. I played on easiest mode. There are a number of jump scares. The story begins with a bang & got my attention. The tasks you must do are logical. There are many puzzles & HOPs. Some puzzles were a bit complex for me, so I skipped them after awhile. This is a good, strong game. I didn't find any glitches. There is a map only shows you where you are, but you can't use it to jump. That isn't a problem because once you progress past a certain location, you can't go back, but you have a whole new cluster of areas to explore. Zombies aren't by thing, but I look forward to playing this again.

This point-and-click hidden object game is everything I look for in this genre of games (no pun intended)! It was smoothly paced with challenging but not impossible puzzles, great design, great music and sound effects, and an interesting story line! Would play again if I could. Wish it was longer, that's my only qualm. Content warning: -blood

After an accident, you wake up in a town where zombies seemed to have taken over. Your goal? Find your husband and your daughter and escape Livingston and its dark secrets! I loved the first Small Town Terrors, that's why I didn't hesitate to buy this one. I was expecting a story about an experiment gone wrong. Suddenly, I'm thrown into a story where you have NASA, aliens, zombies and an infected husband that managed to create an escape road for his daughter and wife. Also, I was expecting the ending, so, I wasn't really surprised. Still, it's not clear if it was aliens or an experiment having done that nightmare. However, if the story is kinda weird, it doesn't meant that the gameplay is boring: you have puzzles, lists of items and even medikits to find. Indeed, there is an health feature: some scenes or actions aren't possible unless you get the required health. Doing some movements are making you loose some HP but you're forced to do them: you don't really manage the health. The puzzles are interesting too. But you get lost a lot. The map is just there to show you where you are, you can't travel and you can't even see where you need to go. So, in another words, I've been feeling lost the majority of the time. I knew more or less what to do but I didn't always see where to do it or couldn't confirm that my intuition was right. The style is good as you're roaming into a lost town, with trucks blocking the way, without a soul apart a survivor that is convinced about aliens, with zombies being around. Also, you get also into a secret lab (.... well yeah, everything is suggesting an experiment gone wrong but given the ending, you may never know) and on your accident's site, with a car to repair. The soundtrack is correct too. However, this game disappointed me. I was expecting a good moment, like I had with Pilgrim's Hook - where I was less lost - but given the fact that I've often used the hint button to understand what to do, for me, when I need to resort to this, it means that the game fails to be clear. In other words, Small Town Terrors isn't a total failure but it's not a complete success. There are better HO on Steam than this, so, buy it only if you're used to the Hidden Object genre, otherwise, avoid it.

A small town with a super secret government facility conducting top secrect unregulated experiments (the kind if they told you about they would have to kill you) -- What could possibly go wrong? Try containment breach - several in fact. Second game is a present 3 game series. (1st: Small Town Terrors: Pilgrim's Hook and 3rd: Small Town Terrors: Galdor's Bluff) Storyline - On the way to Livingston (home maybe) the Saunders family is in a car crash while trying to avoid a person in the middle of the road. Rebecca is a coma, while husband Stan and daughter Emily wait for her to get better. Two weeks later, Rebecca awakens alone in the deserted hospital, weak and confused by present events. She sets off to find Stan and Emily, to discover Livingston is abandoned, a disaster zone, and has "zombies"? Or at least contaminated humans. Find family and leave town as quick as possible is the objective. In the process, discover what happened in Livingston. Gameplay: Let start with the fact this HO game has a HEALTH BAR (adds to the creep factor right there, beyond the apocalyptic red and deserted brown color scheme). A health bar that needs filled before certain tasks can be performed, which is actually a clever idea used to bottle neck an otherwise open-world game. Hidden Object scenes: This is very much a Hidden Object game with more HO scenes then anything else. The HO scenes have 20 items to find. (Most games have 12). The scenes are fairly easy with nothing unfairly hidden. There is a bit of interaction (like opening a drawer) for some finds. And yes, the scenes are random piles of junk, but appropriate random piles of junk for their location and the fact the entire town is a disaster zone. Other elements/puzzles: There are some point and click elements but no serious obstacles to surmount. Finding enough life packets is harder and basically the reason for the point and click elements and puzzles. The puzzles in this game are wonderful. Old school logic puzzles with new twists and worth the time to figure out. (There is a skip button). Includes codes, mazes and sliders. There are four chapters, actually locations, the player goes through, but the Health Bar will bottle neck the game until the player finds enough health packs to move on. Once a location is complete (end of chapter) the player can not go back so the game progresses more than is linear movement. For those interested: There are no achievements (in-game or Steam). There is a map (not fast travel) but it does not really help beyond showing the location the player is in. Several big plusses (for me at least): no penalty for hints - game wise or in HO scenes, no timer on HO scenes (I really "hate" that find everything in less then 1 minute achievement), and the puzzles can be skipped (no penalty) after about a minute or so. There is no bonus chapter or extras. There is also a walkthrough guide that can be found through Big Fish Games on the web. Plays in about 4 hours, assuming the player does not skip everything they can, which for me is just about the correct play time. Not too long, not too short. Well worth the play, challenging enough, but not too hard, with some very fun puzzles to solve and creepy enough for horror fans.

I know zombies have been done and overdone... and then some. But I still love me a good zombie story. When I saw zombies combined with the hidden object genre, I had to play this now now now. For a game where you don't have to worry about running or fighting, (you can just point at the zombies and laugh incessantly), there's still a nicely tense mood. Here's the lowdown. You begin your story in the hospital. Waking from a coma and finding the place deserted. (*cough cough* Walking Dead *cough cough*). Your goal is to find your husband and daughter... and also uncover the deep dark secrets of an evil corporation. Mwahahaha. You do that by reading newspaper clippings and other notes lying around which unfold an interesting (albeit not very original) story. I actually enjoyed playing this quite a bit. Graphics: Decent. Not great, not horrible. They work just fine for this story and the hidden object scenes are well done. I never had to use the hint button to find any items. Music: Appropriately creepy. Voice Acting: None. At first I was disappointed but after playing awhile, I realized that voices would ruin the mood of the game. No talking means that the eerie music can fill up your brain as your eyes search the gloom for the undead. Puzzles: Most of them really made me think. And I have to admit that I skipped a few in my eagerness to hunt for more zombies... I mean items. Some of the harder puzzles I stuck with though and I really felt a sense of accomplishment when I figured them out. Map: Yes, there is one. No, it won't tell you where actions are available and you can't use it for fast travel. It's just a cool looking map of the city with a little arrow that lets the zombies know exactly where you are. :D Really though, I never had to use the hint button to figure out where to go next. And that's saying alot. New Feature: Health Packs. This is a really cool idea. You've just woken up from a coma so you're not in your best form. Low on energy, you can't be just busting down doors or whacking away at things with the axes and hammers you find from HO scenes. You need a health pack first! You have a bar at the bottom of the screen, right above your inventory panel. It tells you what percentage your health (ie energy) is at. So let's say you have 20% and you find something heavy that needs to be pushed. You place your cursor over the object and it might say you need 50% health before you can push away. So make sure you search your surroundings thoroughly and you'll find all the packs you need to keep you going. Whenever you perform a feat of strength, your health will go back down so you'll be looking around for "medikits" the whole game. I really like that feature. Instead of collectible items or morphing ones, you're looking for something that actually makes sense. (Though some of the places you find those health packs.... yuck). My Thoughts: Have you ever wondered why people are so darned messy in HOGs? Why is there stuff scattered all over everywhere? Well, it totally makes sense in a zombie apocalypse! Every place you visit is naturally in a chaotic state. I'm actually surprised that it took this long for a classic zombie hidden object game to appear. I want more! I can't say that this game is for every zombie fan. But it IS for every hidden object fan. No, there are no Steam achievements or cards, and that's a shame, but it's a very enjoyable HOG that I will definitely be playing again. (YAY for zombies!!!)