Dead Link: Pages Torn Reviews

Chill to just click around and find stuff, super easy puzzles.

Nice story, very easy puzzles and HO, straightforward. It could have been better but it is worth it :-)

The cursor hand is permanently splayed open - looks like rigormortis - very distracting when trying to pick up items.

Good graphics and more adult material.

I recommend this game. The scenes are painted well, and the atmosphere is great. There are all kinds of scenes, both indoor and outdoor, so the playing area is well "rounded". Soundtrack is good and although there aren't that much dialogues in the game, the voiceover serves the purpose well. The storyline and the puzzles are blended well, and very few puzzles are out of the context - everything you do serves the story. The game has realistic setup, and there are no elements of fantasy, but the puzzles still give great variety of challenges. The plot is good, and it keeps your attention well until the end, I won't tell much because of the spoilers, but the only thing I could wish is if the game was a bit longer. But at no moment you go on "autopilot" just doing stuff for the sake of it - the plot just keeps you occupied at all times. Videos are ok, nothing spectacular, but since this is the thriller, they also serve the purpose well. Pro: Great storyline, pleasing audio and solid visuals Con: Length - an extra chapter would be just fine

I'm a huge hidden object games fan and compared to the other titles I have in my library, this is not one of my favourites. The storyline is okayish - the developers went with a more realistic storyline than the normal fantasy storyline one would associate with this genre. The story however did not really grab my attention, which is possibly due to the voice acting of the characters. I found myself switching off the sound and reading the subtitles rather than playing with the sound on. The game is also fairly short and the puzzles are relatively easy for the genre. I did find myself stuck on one or two puzzles but this was more due to the instructions not being very clear rather than the difficulty of the puzzles. All in all it's definitely not one of the worst HOG out there - it just isn't one of the best either. It's average. If you are a hardcore HOG fan, this might not be the best fit for you but if you're new to HOG, it's a good introduction to the genre. (I'm only not recommending this game because there isn't an 'average' option on Steam and like I said at the beginning of this review, it's not one of my favourites in my library.)

[i][b]Dead Link: Pages Torn[/b][/i] is a fair casual HO Game. It has a decent storyline, set in the detective field (a young writer investigates her sister's vanishing). The plot is realistic (no zombies, no monsters, no vampires.. no fantastic or magical creatures) and the characters are plausible. Graphics and soundtrack are ok. Voice acting too. By the end the music started to feel a bit repetitive .. but it might be because I had to run through the whole game [u]5 times[/u], only to get the "Insanely Fast Thinker" achievement. That was somewhat tedious but aside from that I fully enjoyed my 1st playthrough. The gameplay is nice and the game has a good pace. There are many outdoor and indoor locations to visit, which lead to several back and forth, but the game provides a map allowing fast travel from a scene to another. This map also shows locations with available actions (that function is not available on Expert mode). No pixel hunting during HO Scenes.Those are relaxing. No hard puzzles / mini-games.They are rather easy. The whole game is quite short though. It can be completed in less than 2 hours. I'm glad I got it on sale. I spent 10 hours or so on it but only to do the same things 5 times (since I hate giving up on unlocking an achievement). I nevertheless do recommend this game, especially to beginners or to gamers who are not familar with this kind of games, it's a perfect and nice way to be introduced in the HOG genre. Confirmed HO gamers looking for challenges might be disappointed, but if looking for a casual game [i][b]Dead Link: Pages Torn[/b][/i] can be a good match. It's worth a try !!

I can't really recommend this game. There are several flaws: - The animations are not very good (although, to be honest, most of the HO-games have animations that look rather bad, imho). - The puzzles are laughably easy and pose no challenge at all. This isn't handholding players, it's pointing them almost directly to the solution. - A few times the item one needs is almost in the same location where they are needed. Again, far too easy to solve things. - The shortcuts via the overview-map don't always work very well. When one is in the wrong area (inside the house, for example), and the next action is needed somewhere outside, it seems that one has to walk outside first (to see the map belonging to it and the exclamation mark). - The story is horribly simple and doesn't make much sense. And the female protagonist must be the dumbest "detective" in the world. The story and the villains are recognizable from a mile away and her acting suprised about what happens is ridiculous. Plus, there's at least one occasion where you have to really question her sanity (opening a door when she knows there's a flooeded room on the other side). - The kind-of-philosophical ending with her gaining trust in herself doesn't make much sense. It looks as if it's being shoehorned onto the player without much reason. - Game is too short. All in all I didn't enjoy playing the game, mainly for the lack of any challenge and the (sorry to say that) dumb female protagonist.

I recommend this game. But, it's complicated, of course. I'm a Hidden Object Game (HOG) junkie, so I've played just about all I can lay my hands on. This game is published and developed by phime studio, LLC, which makes it a maverick and challenger to the dominant publisher in the field. I'm so grateful to have those, so I'm biases from the start. The plotline itself appears to have been truncated a bit -- they wanted to add more to the plot, but... time/budget pressures are always a thing. Still, its a decent plot. The 2D graphics are quite good and I enjoyed the scenery quite a bit. The "find the X key to open the door" puzzles were decently connected to the plot (in direct contrast to AM's recent release where it felt utterly random). The "current goal" and hint systems work well to keep you on task. For at least the first half of the game, it is very linear -- you can't pick up items that aren't directly related to your next task. No inventory full of 12 objects that have no current use. The 3D graphics and animations aren't (in most cases) up to the quality of the dominant publisher's quality, but they work just fine. There's a few exceptions where I thought the 3D/animation was really good (water effects). The music was pretty good, though a bit short, which can make it repetitive. The puzzles were good -- a few new things for the HOG junkie. Nothing terribly difficult. The game engine is similar to AM's engine, but not as polished, which is to be expected. But anyone who has played this type of game before will be instantly familiar with the interface. The Hidden Object scenes were good. I'm sick of AM playing with the format of them, so I'm quite happy that phime studio kept to the basics. It's a bit short, I completed it in 3.2 hrs. Still, refreshing to see a new HOG game from phime.

Except for the price, everything in [i]Dead Link: Pages Torn[/i] can be categorized as “average” and even that is in most cases an overstatement. For $8 you get a (barely) 2h game with a rather lame and cliche story, poorly explained puzzles, buggy achievements and few other elements that clearly don’t belong in a HOG. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1978727267 You play as Ellen, a book author who visits her sister Amanda, in hopes to find an adventure that could make a good story and overcome her writer's block. Upon arrival, she finds a dead body in front of the manor’s gates, and after a bit of investigation with a flashlight, she concludes it’s Amanda. We are led to believe this until the very end of the game, when (unsurprisingly) it is revealed that the person was not Amanda, which opens up the question: “how difficult is to recognize your own sister, especially since you can shed light on her face and see her features clearly?”. HOG players are certainly not that gullible, but this huge plot hole simply invalidates the whole story (at least it did for me). The second and maybe even a bigger disappointment related to the story was the fact that Ellen actually ends up killing one of the villains (this is done as a result of solving an innocent puzzle) and the game can’t progress without doing it; regardless of whether they deserved it or not, I highly doubt that conscious manslaughter as a revenge should ever be a part of any HOG adventure. As if the story was not bad enough as it is, the hidden object scenes have objects that stack in front of each other (covering the one in the back completely) and this is not at all highlighted in the item list. In other HOGs, when an object is contained in a non-visible location (a bag, a drawer), the name of the item is marked with a different color, but in [i]Dead Link: Pages Torn[/i] you can end up spending minutes trying to find that object only to see that it becomes visible only if you find something else first. With this huge design flaw, good luck getting the “Insanely quick eye” achievement (“Solve all HOs under two minutes”) on your first playthrough. And speaking of that together with the “Insanely fast thinker” achievement (“Solve all mini-games under two minutes”), why is it necessary to have such a hardcore time pressure in a casual game (even if it’s meant for achievement purposes only)? https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1978727432 The game offers 3 difficulty modes, however the “Normal” and “Expert” difficulties are quite similar (assuming that you play without skipping and using hints): you won’t have custom cursors when mouseovering an item you can interact with, you won’t have sparkles to indicate the HOG scenes. On “Normal” mode there is a map available at least, and that permits fast travel, while on “Expert” you’ll spend a considerable amount of time endlessly clicking a scene and going back and forth through several locations between the town and the manor. And to end this rant on a positive note: the art is pretty enjoyable, all the dialogues are voiced (which is a nice addition) and quite well done, with a (more or less fake-ish) English accent… but is this enough to warrant an $8 purchase? I’ll let you decide on that. [quote]More reviews on the [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/11354094]Lilly's Corner Curator page[/url][/quote]