The Esoterica: Hollow Earth Reviews

find the object, reasonably well done. 7/10 . nice imaginative art of agartha. took about 4 hours, but it crashed and my save file got corrupted. had to start again.

An interesting story, but few of the objects were not named properly, so you had to just click on everything to "find" them. The quality is a bit disappointing in that case.

A really cool game with a cool lore and a nice gameplay. The whole game is pretty easy even on expert, but its still fun to play. The collectibles are really nice due to containing more lore about the world. The story is pretty nice too, Its kinda typical but still not boring. The cutscenes´ style is pretty cool even though its pretty hard to read everything, even for me. All in onre a really nice game. I can highly recommend it.

The Esoterica: Hollow Earth is a good HOG. I don't understand the bad comments. Besides it's quite cheap so one shouldn't wait for a HOG such as Artifex's games, for instance. As far as my playthrough is concerned I did not encounter any bug. I was able to complete the game and get a 100% achievement during a unique playthrough, without using any cheat, any other gamer's saves or any other tricks of the sort. The Esoterica: Hollow Earth deserves to be known and played, for it has many positive aspects and some of these are quite rare in the whole game industry. Above all, the general idea is quite good : storyline and game ambiance are great. They are well rendered by beautiful graphics and nice musics. -The story is interesting and very catchy. I don't want to spoil it, I'll only say that it reminds me a bit of Syberia and Sokal's universe, to some extent. Thus it really should please Jules Verne's novels' fans as well. -The atmosphere is gigantic from a human point of view. It's somewhere between magical hopes and robotic performances and it's full of mysteries. The historic period looks like the Belle epoque and the art style of the game really reminded me of the Art Nouveau style. Many background drawings and decorations look like Alfons Muchas' paintings and posters. Architectural shapes are round, using metal and glass such as those during the Industrial Revolution. My guess is that Industrial Revolution, an important chapter in history, is the period that inspired the story. The plot might take place in the period just afterwards. Being a great period for scientific discoveries and creations, in those times when science was trying to meet most human dreams, when crazy and ambitious inventions where trying to reach the infinite human imagination, many things which until then were unconceavable became real and many other things seemed possible,even magic. One can sense this humankind greatness while playing The Esoterica: Hollow Earth. The art style of the game goes along with it, especially the graphics. Voice acting is fluctuating. Whereas the feminin main character voice is ok, others, such as NPC's voices, can be rather shoddy. Puzzles difficulty is from easy to medium. Some of them might be painstaking or tedious and hence require patience, but they're not hard to beat. HOS are beautiful and depict many objects accordingly to the whole art style of the game. I liked them, except for 2 points: - They are a bit repetitive since many scenes use the same place with only slight modifications. - There are several silhouette HOS, which I personnaly don't enjoy. I play HOG mainly to improve my English vocabulary the funny way, since English isn't my native language, so when it comes to finding objects from their silhouette i quickly get bored. Sadly the end comes a bit abruptly but I finished the game with a very positive memory for it was an enjoyable and beautiful experience I'm willing to share. I wish there were more games with such a great ambiance.

Imaginative plot based on the hollow earth legend. The game is casual in every way. No stress and mostly relaxing. I like hidden object games. What I don't like about hidden object games are the timed achievements. This game has only one, which is a positive for me. Overall it is entertaining.

Not a good HOG. While the Hidden Object puzzles are as fun as in almost any other game of the type, the mini-games are what lets the side down here. Some of them are unnecessarily time-consuming; it's clear what you have to do it just takes ages. Some are really unclear as to what the goal is and in what way you need to manipulate to the tools in order to succeed. And others just require a trial & error approach. If you're the type of person who refuses to use the skip or hint functions in these games then this one will drive you up the wall. Plus the storyline is really dull. It may be one of the cheaper games of the type, but there's a good reason for that: It's one of the worst.

This is a fun game for the sheer campiness of the time period sci-fi tropes, characters, and story. Kudos to the writers for pulling off the old style feel and art. Also, I enjoyed the HO scenes, and having to look for really old-fashioned stuff (telephones, for example). There are some definite cons, however. I was very disappointed not to be able to complete my 100% run through thanks to a couple of slightly buggy and/or oversensitive puzzles. It's not that I couldn't solve the puzzles - most are honestly too easy - but one puzzle refused to respond to the solution in my first run-through, and when I tried again, that puzzle worked but a different puzzle just would *not* "finish" and click into place. Speaking of the puzzles, I never want to connect the dots for that stupid helicopter blueprint ever again. Maybe it's straightforward with a different input method, but with a mouse it's tedious beyond words. Bottom line? I had fun, and then I got frustrated. I'm still recommending because there was a lot good about it. Fun (if campy) story, very nice art, good voices. It really felt like a period piece - and the movie clips were cute (though triggering the achievement is a problem). Don't buy it if you are set on your 100% unless you bring some patience - you might get lucky, you might not. Also, in one of the last HO scenes there is one bad translation and one bad "hit zone" for a required object: the "watering can" is actually a funnel; the hourglass CAN be collected, but you'll want to click several times to get it. I really truly wish the devs would just fix the last couple of things wrong with this game. Buy on a deep discount and play for the HO scenes and the story/animation.

Despite nice graphics and music, as well as flavorful cut-scenes, this casual point-and-click adventure is underwhelming. The story is poorly constructed and often silly, and many of the mini-game puzzles are just tedious rather than clever.

Wowza. Such potential for this game with a sorta Indiana Jones theme that does so well and then...stops. Actually, numerous things stop. For some reason halfway through the game the voice acting stopped (thank goodness the music worked and I had text on screen), the back half of the puzzles became excessively buggy to the point I could not complete a mosaic puzzle and had to click the damned 'skip' button thereby missing the achievement. Previously closing the game and reopening it fixed most issues but this one tested my patience big time. So, the final thing that stopped was the story because blink and you'd miss the sweeping resolution for everything in the space of 15 seconds and credits roll. Felt a bit of a cop out when you were just getting invested in the characters, and up until that point I was really enjoying the story (hindered by those bugs grr). Puzzle mix was good, hidden objects fine, music was terrific but overall the game ruined by bugs and a forgettable ending. Damn.

I just finished playing this game for the second time. This time for the cheevos. I was able to get all except for the video cards achievement. The last video card was there as you open the last puzzle. My problem was that the puzzle opened before I was able to take the card. It's a good game with challenging puzzles, except for this last bug. I am Very disappointed.