Click the Picture to Download the Free Demo

Ben: 8
Drawn has beautiful artwork, graphics, and animation, rivaling or surpassing many mainstream commercial titles. It’s classic point-and-click adventure format doesn’t have many surprises, but a lack of innovation is more than made up for with wonderfully creative worlds. There aren’t many challenging puzzles in the first hour of the game (dumbed down even more by a overly-generous and way-too-tempting hint system), which unfortunately waters down another triumph of the game; the narrative is expertly told, and really makes the player feel like the mysterious Princess Iris’s life is in there hands. It’s just a shame that there isn’t more challenge in the mission at hand.

Zak: 8
Drawn: The Painted Tower (available from Big Fish Games) is a good adventure game. The gameplay, like other casual adventure games, is pretty basic. The player has to collect, combine and use items to solve puzzles. The story involves rescuing a girl from the top of tower, by working through various puzzles and worlds within paintings. There are heaps of mini-puzzles that take the player through the dark world of the Painted Tower. The greatest feature of the game has to be the great artwork, voice over work and music. On all accounts, the game was a good time.

Peter: 6
Drawn: The Painted Tower is an uneven point-and-click adventure game buoyed by wonderful art direction and strong voice work. You enter a tower and are charged with finding a girl by her previous caretaker. The girl can turn her paintings into real worlds, so half the quests take place inside children’s paintings. This premise is cool, but the game doesn’t follow through; you’ll stumble over unclear objectives and an unwieldy inventory. The game gives out hints and lets you skip puzzles, but those challenges should be fun in and of themselves, not something to get through to see more of the game.

Andrew: 6
Drawn: The Painted Tower is the next in a long lineage of assembly line adventure games produced by Big Fish Games. This title is very similar to many of these other titles, and the gameplay mechanics haven’t changed a bit. You travel through a mysterious place trying to solve mysteries and unlock doors. It’s pretty standard stuff. The art style is pretty great though, and it’s definitely pleasing to the eyes. Give this a try if you like the adventure genre, but don’t expect to be surprised in the least.

ZaK: 5/10
My Adventures Through Heaven takes the player through the children’s heaven. Along the way you find out more about the place and complete objectives. Gameplay seems to be one part adventure game and one part hidden object game, which makes for an interesting mix. For example, the goal could be to find hidden gems, in plain view or hidden behind elements in the background. The music and sound effects can be a little humdrum at times, but fit the game. The graphics weren’t my style, but they were decent and I could tell someone spent a lot of time on them. At times, the game kinda felt like a playable children’s book. Not sure I’d buy the game though.

Mike: 2/10
This game is wierd. I guess it’s a point and click adventure game, but there’s certainly a biblical theme and some hidden object mixed in. The game says that is is about traveling through a Children’s Heaven, but this certainly isn’t the heaven I imagined when I was a kid. The still screens don’t do this game’s creep factor justice. Looking past the weirdness, the game isn’t much of a game. You just float around and click things in your crazy flying leaf. The production value just isn’t there and I personally don’t like playing a game full of dead kids in heaven.

click the screenshot to download the free pc game demo

Pahelika: Secret Legends is a first-person point-and-click puzzle adventure, much along the lines of the Myst series. You’re in the shoes of an unnamed character, seeking the truth behind the old tales passed down through the generations of his family: a demon king had been defeated using an ancient, magical tome, which had since fallen under the protection of Monks of the Old Order. One day the main character uncovers a strange book from his attic that acts as a teleportation device, delivering him to six separate and unique challenges where he must use his intellect to progress onwards to the next level, and ever towards discovering the location of Pahelika..

Gameplay: It should be noted that I am not, by any means, a fan of the puzzle/point-and-click adventure games. Usually, for me, the puzzles are either so difficult that I can sense the developers plotting against me or there’s so little variation to the game that it doesn’t hold my interest for long. Pahelika, however, is a different story.

Like most other puzzle games, Pahelika is very linear. You cannot, and will not, do anything out of order. Puzzles presented within the game were quite creative and it seemed fairly obvious that the creators spent a good deal of time on them. The difficulty of the puzzles, though, varied greatly–many were easy, a bit too much so, and as a result the first third of the game was completed in less than an hour. After that point, the answers to some puzzles became so inconspicuous that the game verged on being frustrating at points. More than once I was completely and utterly bewildered on how to progress, such as when I couldn’t figure out a code to open a puzzle box. Knowing full well that I must have missed something, I spent nearly twenty minutes retracing my steps in an attempt to discover what the code could be. Little did I know that the code was, seemingly, entirely random and without any clues, and there was no way I ever would have assumed it to have been the right answer. The graphics, too, played a part in the difficulty of some puzzles, but that will be mentioned later.

The creators put together a free walkthrough for the users to revert to if they found themselves dumbfounded, but even within the walkthrough there was little instruction at parts. For example, when I was presented with a puzzle of five levers that needed to be pulled in the correct sequence, the walkthrough just mentioned something about trial and error. Well, that’s dandy, but, last I checked, that’s 120 different possibilities. At least provide some clue within the game, please, about what the answer could be.

The overall interface of the game was quite smooth and very easy-to-use. There were ample instructions on how the game operated, and on some occasions, if I was unable to discover the correct answer to a puzzle, the game would grant me a hint as to what I should do next. If you needed to return to a previous location to complete the puzzle, you would know so by the arrow in the top right. When only needing objects within the room you were currently standing within, there would be no arrow to take you back, leaving you with the understanding that everything you needed was right in front of you.

Graphics: Overall, the graphics in Pahelika were exceptionally well done, but that doesn’t mean it’s without imperfections. As mentioned earlier, some puzzles were made difficult in a manner that never was intended—at some points it was quite difficult to tell a usable item apart from the background. I needed an arm for a robot, but was unable to find where it was because it blended in far too well with the machinery it was lying on. When playing through the first portion of the game, I thought the graphics were far too dark and made it hard to see some necessary items, but as I advanced to areas beyond I discovered areas brighter, more lively, and with more detail contrasted to the first. With this being said, though, the colors were still rather drab.

Pahelika’s story is defined through cut-scenes done in a fashion similar to a comic book, with a voiceover narrating the scenes as they pass. The art in each panel is well rendered, and manages to accomplish its goal of making the game appear realistic while still in the realm of fantasy. On the downside the cut-scenes are lengthy and without the ability to skip through them. Normally I wouldn’t mind this, but when the cut-scenes between each level are exactly the same, I became slightly aggravated…but only slightly.

Music/Sound: I was surprised by the quality of the sound and music within the game. The ambiance created by the sounds was realistic and appropriate for each situation. Personally, I thought the voiceover could have been more enthusiastic about his job, but I suppose it could have been intentional in order to maintain the realism that the creators wanted. The sounds changed with each area, ensuring that nothing became too monotonous as you played.

Lasting Appeal: Overall, Pahelika: Secret Legends was a fun adventure that provided some creative, fun challenges, but with little replay value. Pahelika’s linear gameplay means that there is no variation beyond what is presented the first time through. The ending left me feeling cheated: I made it through the six levels, only to be told that the remainder of the story is for another game? Seriously?

Despite its downfalls, Pahelika is still a solid puzzle adventure which many will be sure to buy and enjoy. $19.99 is too steep a price to pay for a 3-hour game in my opinion, so be sure to play the demo before deciding to buy it. Who knows? You may just get hooked yourself.

]]> http://www.indiegamemag.com/pahelika-secret-legends/feed/ 0 http://www.indiegamemag.com/on-trial-enlightenus-demo-review/ http://www.indiegamemag.com/on-trial-enlightenus-demo-review/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:03:24 +0000 Mike Gnade http://www.indiegamemag.com/?p=1063

Click on the Screenshot above to download the pc demo free

Colt: 3
Enlightenus is a game of compromise: at its heart an staggeringly facile I SPY, the graphics are wonderful, the dialogue snappy, and the puzzle environments initially varied and fresh (they’re recycled a few times). Your quest starts with a letter from your friend asking to help him sort out his disordered stories, promising a voyage of self-discovery. And what a voyage: straightforward memory games and condescending pixel-hunting await. Basically you pair up items in your inventory with items in the environment, each ones name frustratingly literal. Examples: carving knife, unfinished carving, wine for two, wine glass pair, hungry rabbit. Maybe this game is designed for kids? With likable animations and what I glimpsed of the clever writing, Enlightenus could make a great point-and-click. As is, Enlightenus successfully stomps out any flashes of inspiration.

Kayla: 8
Enlightenus is a stunning example of how to do hidden object games right. Between the slickly presented graphics and the many different environments available, I never once found myself growing bored with the game as I played it. In fact, once the one hour demo was complete, I found myself wanting buy the game for the small price of seven dollars. Before I’ve had the misfortune of wasting my spare time on hidden object games, but I didn’t feel the same way about Enlightenus. Enlightenus requires logical deduction; something that’s sorely missing from many games of the same type. Obscure objects aren’t just thrown into the game for you to randomly click around and, by chance, figure out where it goes. No, everything here has a proper home…the only trouble is finding it. Many objects are presented within a level, and the one you may be looking for could be hidden between several other objects, or you must first solve other puzzles within the level first. For example, I was given a bug jar, but couldn’t rightly use it, considering the fact that there were no bugs in sight. After several minutes of deep contemplation, I finally placed a fly in a web, and down came a spider…which just-so-happened to fit wonderfully within that aforementioned jar. One point for me! The graphics were wonderfully presented—some levels were bright and cheerful, like the toy shop; others were dark, dirty, and mysterious like the haunted mansion. The ambient music within the game was only slightly repetitive—in all honesty, I was so preoccupied scouring over the level to find objects that it didn’t agitate me in any way. My only complaint about the game was that it lagged a bit at parts, mainly the cut scenes. Otherwise, the game was wonderful, and I even recommended it to a few friends. You’d be foolish to pass this one over!

Andrew: 5
Enlightenus is a simple adventure game which tasks you with helping a famous author find all of his novels after a mystical force rearranges his stories. It’s a decent premise, and the gameplay and puzzles are decent with a good challenge curve. But the main gameplay unfolds as little more than a point-and-click objects search as you try to find things in a giant mess of objects. It’s decent enough to warrant playing the demo, but I don’t feel like many people will want to continue beyond that point.

Ben: 7
The hidden objects genre has long been a casual games favorite. Enlightenus takes the concept and applies it to a point-and-click adventure game. As a detective, you must track down your favorite author and his magical novels through the fantasy world of Elightenus, a parallel universe where the author goes for inspiration. The casual nature means that the game isn’t terribly challenging (and doles out hints left and right). On the plus side, the game is beautiful and has a fantastic, whimsical feel to it. It’d be great to praise the sound design, too, as the first few minutes of the game are genius. Footsteps and door creaks echo through the old mansion, inviting you to explore. Unfortunately, all of this stops when you enter Enlightenus. If you’re a fan of the hidden object genre, you’ll enjoy this twist on it.

Average: 5.75

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