The Manhunt'n Project Part 4 - All In!

Continuing my journey through the game Manhunt, this time I'm joined by my oldest friend Natasha, who both doesn't play video games, and can't bring herself to watch horror movies because she finds them too scary!

No one could have predicted this would be the result of our session. Enjoy!

I encourage you to fullscreen this video, since it's running at the XBOX's original resolution.

An Actual Ad from BigFish Games

BigFish Games has a rotating banner of titles on their front page. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but the following two games wound up right next to each other.




If you want a quick comparison, click here.

More importantly - people have got to come up with some new broadly popular designs for mystery masks. The Phantom of the Opera was more than a hundred years ago, people.

Haunted Hotel: The Axiom Butcher

A haunted hotel with a murderous backstory? Could there be a better setting for a Hidden Object Game? Apparently the publishers at Big Fish don't think so, as they've put out eleven games in this particular franchise. The Axiom Butcher is the latest, and it concerns the aftermath of a slasher rampage that occurred at the titular hotel some years earlier. When the player, controlling a prominent detective, chances upon a stranded police officer during a blizzard, they discover that the murders may be starting up again - and it's up to them to put a stop to it before another hotel full of people are massacred!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

Quite a bit, but the game does a great job of justifying it. Set in a recently-renovated hotel, The Axiom Butcher makes it clear that there are still plenty of dilapidated and trash-strewn corners of the building, and these provide the setting for most of the game's hidden object screens. So the player will find numerous piles of garbage that need to be sifted through, but all of the items within manage to seem plausible within the locations they appear. There's almost no instances of size, colour, or gravity cheating - this leads to HOSs that are fundamentally fair to play, even tending a little towards the 'easy' end of the difficulty spectrum.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

A pretty huge mixed bag here, as there are absolutely no integrated hidden object screens. Whether the game is offering 12:1 lists or providing outlines of the items players need to find, there's never any reason given for most of the searching they're asked to do. Worse still, there are a number of 'object match' screens, where the player has to find six matched pairs of symbols hidden around the screen. Memory is a perfectly good type of minigame, but seeing it mixed with hidden object screens does not lead to interesting or worthwhile results.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

The Axiom Butcher feels a little stretched out at times - at four hours (including bonus chapter), it was one of the longest HOGs I've played. This extra length isn't because it's absolutely packed with puzzles, HOSs, or story, but rather a truly astonishing amount of busywork the player is tasked with. Nearly every door/cabinet/trunk in the hotel is secured with an impractically ornate lock which can only be opened by finding the correct symbol/key/rune. There are few locked panels that don't have another locked panel hidden behind them. There are large swaths of the game where I found myself unlocking an elaborate cubbyhole to find the key to open another door at the other end of the hotel, which hides inside it the key to the sub-cubbyhole inside the first location.

It's too bad the game felt the need to put in so much filler, since there's a lot of interesting story to tell, as well as a number of surprisingly well-designed puzzles. If anything, I would have liked to hear a little more of the story, since the details get a little convoluted and muddy towards the end. The Bonus Chapter doesn't offer any closure on the main story, but it does give players a look at the hotel's terrifying origins, while providing a solid standalone 1-hour adventure.

Haunted Hotel: The Axiom Butcher doesn't have enough plot and puzzles to balance out the sheer amount of backtracking and number of fetch quests the player is asked to do. Still, the plot is interesting and the puzzles are almost universally well-crafted and challenging. An fan of the hidden object genre who doesn't mind a little extra padding will certainly find this to be a worthwhile entry.

You can find the first part of my playthrough here-

Haunted Hotel: The Axiom Butcher

A haunted hotel with a murderous backstory? Could there be a better setting for a Hidden Object Game? Apparently the publishers at Big Fish don't think so, as they've put out eleven games in this particular franchise. The Axiom Butcher is the latest, and it concerns the aftermath of a slasher rampage that occurred at the titular hotel some years earlier. When the player, controlling a prominent detective, chances upon a stranded police officer during a blizzard, they discover that the murders may be starting up again - and it's up to them to put a stop to it before another hotel full of people are massacred!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

Quite a bit, but the game does a great job of justifying it. Set in a recently-renovated hotel, The Axiom Butcher makes it clear that there are still plenty of dilapidated and trash-strewn corners of the building, and these provide the setting for most of the game's hidden object screens. So the player will find numerous piles of garbage that need to be sifted through, but all of the items within manage to seem plausible within the locations they appear. There's almost no instances of size, colour, or gravity cheating - this leads to HOSs that are fundamentally fair to play, even tending a little towards the 'easy' end of the difficulty spectrum.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

A pretty huge mixed bag here, as there are absolutely no integrated hidden object screens. Whether the game is offering 12:1 lists or providing outlines of the items players need to find, there's never any reason given for most of the searching they're asked to do. Worse still, there are a number of 'object match' screens, where the player has to find six matched pairs of symbols hidden around the screen. Memory is a perfectly good type of minigame, but seeing it mixed with hidden object screens does not lead to interesting or worthwhile results.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

The Axiom Butcher feels a little stretched out at times - at four hours (including bonus chapter), it was one of the longest HOGs I've played. This extra length isn't because it's absolutely packed with puzzles, HOSs, or story, but rather a truly astonishing amount of busywork the player is tasked with. Nearly every door/cabinet/trunk in the hotel is secured with an impractically ornate lock which can only be opened by finding the correct symbol/key/rune. There are few locked panels that don't have another locked panel hidden behind them. There are large swaths of the game where I found myself unlocking an elaborate cubbyhole to find the key to open another door at the other end of the hotel, which hides inside it the key to the sub-cubbyhole inside the first location.

It's too bad the game felt the need to put in so much filler, since there's a lot of interesting story to tell, as well as a number of surprisingly well-designed puzzles. If anything, I would have liked to hear a little more of the story, since the details get a little convoluted and muddy towards the end. The Bonus Chapter doesn't offer any closure on the main story, but it does give players a look at the hotel's terrifying origins, while providing a solid standalone 1-hour adventure.

Haunted Hotel: The Axiom Butcher doesn't have enough plot and puzzles to balance out the sheer amount of backtracking and number of fetch quests the player is asked to do. Still, the plot is interesting and the puzzles are almost universally well-crafted and challenging. An fan of the hidden object genre who doesn't mind a little extra padding will certainly find this to be a worthwhile entry.

You can find the first part of my playthrough here-

Grim Legends 3: The Dark City

With three games in a row managing to blow me away with their thrilling stories and stellar production values, the Grim Legends series is quickly making it to the top of the heap when it comes to solid HOG franchises. This one moves away from the more classical European mythology that influenced the first two, and sets its sights on rather more recent targets, specifically the games 'Assassin's Creed' and 'The Order'. Yes, like Abyss: Wraiths of Eden, this is another prime example of one of Artifex Mundi's developers lifting art design and aesthetic from a popular game and then building their own world out of the borrowed assets. Like Abyss, this results in an unmitigated success.

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

Not at all. The game is set almost entirely in a town besieged by mystical forces, and the developers cannily use this justification to explain why the HOSs are littered with random objects. Everything makes sense in its location and time period, with almost no cheating to be found. These are some of the best-rendered HOSs I've come across.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

Absolutely. The game doesn't have a lot of Hidden Object Screens, but the vast majority of them ask the player to only find specific items that they're actually going to need in their adventure. Whether they're looking for a dozen plants to complete a recipe or assembling a crossbow, nearly every item the player is asked to click on is story-related. There are a couple of 12:1 screens, but they're just a tiny minority of the game's HOSs.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

This is a fantastic production all around. The various puzzles all fit within the world, even the minigames are right on point. In addition to standard point-and-click adventure gaming, the player will occasionally have to battle an occult force - this is accomplished by playing a rune identification minigame that proves quite thrilling in each of its instances. The game also makes sure to include vast segments of backstory within the puzzles themselves, leaving the player to learn backstory and receive exposition through gameplay rather than dialogue or text documents. This has been a feature of the series all along, but here, in part three, the developers have really raised it to an art form.

The game's only drawbacks are so small that I almost hesitate to mention them. There's a fun sequence right at the start that asks the player to come up with a plan for defeating a monster using the environment it's standing in - it's a great exercise, but unfortunately it's just a one-off. There's also one minor problem with the bonus game - it's intended to provide closure for the main game's story, as bonus levels so often do, but it ends with questions still lingering. Not a great way to leave your players, developers.

With a great story, beautiful world, and challenging puzzles, Grim Legends 3 is as good as HOGs get. The beta for this game was my first experience with this franchise - and it inspired me to check out all of the other entries. Each one has been better than the last, and The Dark City, while a departure from the series' previous style, really is the best entry yet. I just hope the next game in the series can live up to the bar that's been set.ormula, with pale women endangered by terrible family secrets, gives the whole game a sheen of class and depth that set it apart from the crowd.

Curious about the playthrough that led to this review? Check out a video of it below! Or, you know, you can go to YouTube where it's big.

The Pitfalls of Truly High-End Videogame Graphics

So I'm playing Uncharted 4, and the developers put so much effort into making the graphics super-realistic that a weird problem was created. Check out this amazingly detailed door-


Gorgeous, right? Except for, you know...

The lock handle that's three inches away from the deadbolt. The other deadbolt that doesn't have a handle at all. The fact that they spent so much time working on the door that they neglected to put any effort into the jamb at all.

It doesn't end there, though - let's take a look a the great detailing on it-

The rust marks above the lock, the dirty footprint on the kickplate. They're both gorgeously drawn and add a lot of verisimilitude to the world. Then that verisimilitude is stripped back out when we get a look at the door on the other side of the room.

Yup, it's the exact same door in every detail.

That's thing about spending dozens of hours building a fake door for a video game is that when you're done with it, you never want to spend another second building fake videogame doors.

Time Mysteries Inheritance

As the second game covered in my 'Hidden Object Drinking Game' series, my memories of this one are a little muddy, so please bear with me on some of the finer points. The game concerns a woman (a reporter, maybe?) whose father or grandfather (definitely one of those) has an unfortunate run-in with a time traveler! It's up to the player to visit various periods in history to rebuild the family time machine, save the relative, and unlock the mystery of stonehenge! So long as the game stops spinning, that is.

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

It's pretty bad. While the developers are good at filling the screens with items only from their specific time periods, the actual items are scattered around with no thought given to logic or gravity. There are so many cheap and borderline-unfair item placements that this game would have given me trouble even if I wasn't drinking heavily while playing it. Seriously, I'm sick of seeing the word 'bow' and then being expected to know whether I'm looking for 'violin bow', 'bow and arrow', or 'gift wrapping bow'. That's just infuriating. I will give the game credit on one front - there are plenty of HOSs to play. While each era may only be two screens wide, at least each one has a good amount to do in it.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

12:1 gameplay through and through. Player need one item, and are asked to find a passel. For no good reason. This is clearly a game made by people following a template for HOG construction, littering a HOS here and there, asking players to solve a couple of simple puzzles in each area and then quickly moving them on to the next. No real effort is made to have any of this feel particularly plausible or natural.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

It certainly functions as it's supposed to, setting up conflicts and then resolving with a HOS and a puzzle. While being bland isn't a crime, nothing about the game's situations, characters, or even puzzles really stood out. There's a bit of time travel humour right at the start, in which the main character finds herself in medieval times and is surrounded by people ready to comment on her bizarre style of dress, but even that only happens briefly - beyond the first chapter there aren't really any characters of note to add colour to utterly rote gameplay. Then the whole thing ends up with a sequel hook and no story resolution. It's a shame.

Has drinking made my memories of this game considerably less sharp than they ought to be, its shortcomings aren't merely a product of my imagination. The game simply isn't well-made or interesting enough to recommend. It's suitable only for those desperate to play a bunch of HOSs they've never seen before, and even then, make sure to get it on sale.

Want to see the playthrough that led to this review? Here's the first video in the playlist!

Robin's Quest

So, how does the most-adapted character in history/fiction work in the world of Hidden Object Games? Not too shabbily, as it turns out. Robin's Quest is a hybrid adventure/HOG, as it puts more focus on puzzle solving and world manipulation than simple object hunting gameplay. That, and it introduces a system where the player gains new powers not by training or learning spells, but by assembling Robin's famous band of Merry Men. Now, on to the Hidden Object Criteria!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

Too a modest degree. While there isn't much size or colour cheating, random objects will often be scattered all over the screen to make them a little more difficult to find, with no thought given to gravity or logic. At least there's no anachronism on display, so thank heavens for small favours. It's cleat that the game's HOSs weren't the highest priority - while they're well drawn, there aren't enough of them, and clearly more care was put into the puzzles and minigames.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

Standard 15:1 screens are the order of the day, with one unfortunate twist. While most games in that subgenre will just hand the player a long list of items let them get to it, Robin's Quest makes the odd choice to only show the player a few of the items at a time. This isn't completely unheard of, but normally a new item will swap into the list once an old one has been found. Robin's Quest goes another way with its lists, offering five stacks of words, each one three items deep. Find an item, and the next item in the stack appears. Find all the items in the stack, and it's gone, but the others remain. This can lead to a situation where the player has found twelve items, and has three left, but doesn't know what the last two are, because they're stumped by the top of the pile. It's not a great system, as I didn't enjoy the arbitrary and pointless increase in HOS difficulty.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

Darn well. While the HOSs come up short, the minigames and puzzles are all well-made and thematically perfect. Many involve archery, as one would expect, and all the merry men are always quick to jump in, moving heavy objects, sweet-talking guards, or pickpocketing, depending on what the situation requires. The story, which finds Robin attempting to battle corrupt taxmen while rescuing her imprisoned husband, is a fun take on the legend, and the steps that the story takes to get there - each area is built around Robin helping a different townsperson recover their gold - serves to make the world feel bigger and more real than is often the case.

The vast majority of the HOGs I cover here are gothic or horror-themed, so it's nice to see one that's all bright colours and smiling characters. Robin's Quest is a beautiful casual adventure. Sure, anyone looking for a large number of challenging HOSs should go elsewhere, but those interested in a couple of hours of solid puzzling can do a whole lot worse.

Care to watch the playthough that led to this review? Check out the first video here!