Black Swan Reviews

I wanted to like it but the controls are clumsy and annoying and that keeps me from enjoying this game. This could be really good.

short version: don’t buy it at full price because there are bugs. But if you are lucky and manage to run it smoothly like me (by closing the game every half an hour and re-entering it immediately) then it’s quite good: hard enough, pretty graphics, excellent music and overall entertaining. The game has indeed some problems and bugs: first time I tried, the whole thing froze after the video at the lake and I had to restart the computer. The second time I managed to play it without any problems till almost the end, where the game stopped working two or three times. What I did that second time was exit the game every half an hour; I don’t know if that had any influence on the game, but I had almost no problems that time. The bugs aside, the game is pretty good, the graphics are very nice, the story ok for a hidden object game (HOG), longer than most HOG on steam and comes with a bonus chapter. The voice acting is pretty good, again, for a HOG, and the music is excellent. The hidden object scenes and the mini-games are mostly difficult enough, but sometimes they can be annoying. For those who hate them (like me): it has at least two sliding puzzles. The game is not too linear either, which I like but others might find too difficult. The ridiculousness and lack of logic, frequent in HOG, is not too dominant in this one. I had to play it on the medium-difficulty setting, because in the difficult one were no commentaries from the protagonist when you looked at things (don’t know if possibly a bug), which made it too hard to guess what the game wanted you to do. Oh, and there were some isolated translation errors, which made it hard to find the object in the scene. In conclusion: don’t buy it at full price because there are bugs, but if you are lucky and manage to run it smoothly like me (by closing it every half an hour or so and re-entering it immediately) then it’s quite good: hard enough, pretty graphics, excellent music and overall entertaining.

The game is full of bugs and glitches. Shut down in random moments making the game impossible to play because each shut down causes bugs like dissaperd equipment, non-working animations, black screens in place of puzzles and localisation which player is unable to go because of pointer failure. I lost six hours starting game from beginning each time to end with different glitches in middle of story.

On one hand, there are parts of this game that are clunky, and just straight up illogical. The graphics in some parts seem much older than stated, and sometimes even when you know the right answer, you're stuck clicking the hint button as it's hard to find the exact right place, That said, there are impressive parts too: visually it's very pretty, the soundtrack is superb and it even contains animated scenes. It's pretty long for a HOG (over five hours!) and it contained features that I've never seen before in this kind of game (the transitioning into the dark realm was really cool). If the dark theme and ballerinas interest you, then perhaps consider giving it a shot!

I had a lot of fun with this game until my saved games started corrupting. I had my starter game and in the middle of it, it kicked me out and didn't let me continue to play that game. I started a SECOND world from the very beginning and got way farther, but the same thing happened again! I don't want to play a game that makes me start over whenever I get somewhere.

This game had great potential with beautiful graphics and lovely music, but failed with the game execution. Game play was very clunky when selecting items. Several bugs. I encountered one with the music room where I had to unlock the sun with the sunkey to play a puzzle. Problem was that I had already done that previously. I was unable to enter the dark world. So, that was the end of the game for me! Can't recommend due to its bugginess and devs have showed no interest in rectifying any of the problems.