Haunted Hotel: The X

This is the tenth game in the series, and the second subject of a HOGuru video review!

Haunted Hotel: Eclipse

I'm not sure this review can be trusted. It's entirely possible that I love this game far too much for my opinions about its merits to be trusted. What explains this adoration? It revolves entirely around the game's premise, and its straightforward exploration thereof. That premise? What if a group of monsters were all staying at the same hotel, and one by one they began to get murdered - someone would have to investigate, right? Yes, this is the long-awaited game that puts the player in the role of a monster detective. The idea of it fills me with glee - and the game's execution, which has the player tracking down clues and unlocking deduction sequences in which a video plays laying out a theory of the crime. It's the most delightful genre mashup I've seen in ages, and the sheer lunacy of the premise kept a smile on my face for the entirety of the game.

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?

It's barely a problem here. This is the first game in the series developed by Elephant Games, and their expertise was already on display. The HOSs are universally well-drawn, and completely logical. The main character is arriving at the hotel in the midst of a multi-day battle between supernatural armies, so it's completely understandable that things would have gotten more than a little messy. Whether the player is searching a dryad's garden for clocks or a voodoo priest's room for dolls, the HOSs fit perfectly within the world the developers have created. They even use one of my favourite conceits - having the player smash a crate open and then have to search through its contents. Always a pleasure to see that one.

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

Eclipse focuses entirely on 12:1 screens, so it wasn't exactly pushing the genre forward any. They're well-drawn and fair screens, however, never resulting to size or colour cheating. There's a few questionable placements from a gravity point of view, but beyond that, these are top-notch scenes.

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

It's a fantastic job from beginning to end. The Final Journey hotel is a huge and layered location, with enormous variety in its rooms. There's a huge library, crumbling tunnels, well-appointed suites, and even a creepy graveyard, because of course there is. It's a monster hotel. The game's puzzles fit the location perfectly - there are dozens of doors to unlock and panels to open, but by far the most interesting element to the puzzle solving is the main character's sidekick, a tiny fire elemental who solves a surprisingly large number of her problems for her.

Perhaps the most amazing thing that Eclipse has going for it is how well it works as a mystery. Each one of the murders that the player can solve has a completely logical explanation, but within each is a piece of a larger story, one that gradually comes into focus over the length of the game. Even the bonus game in the collector's edition is worth the time and trouble to play it, as it offers a nice epilogue and hints at a larger mystery running through the entire series! While I may have gotten frustrated a few times with some of the game's puzzles, and had to hit the hint button more than once when it wasn't entirely clear what I was supposed to do next, I can't find it within myself to weigh Eclipse's minor problems too heavily.

To reiterate, this is a game about solving a murder mystery in which all of the victims and suspects are monsters. To me, and doubtless to others as well, it's a lunatic dream come true, and on some level I can't believe something so amazing actually exists.

Curious about the playthrough which led to this review? Check out the first video below!

The Most Hidden Object

I've played through some pretty terrible Hidden Object Games - the problem with being an arbiter of quality is that you don't get to only play the good things. In all of those terrible games, with objects so small as to be nearly invisible, or essentially transparent, there was never a hidden object as unfair as this one, from a little game called 'Haunted Hotel: Charles Dexter Ward'.

Please take a look at this screenshot and attempt to find the cigar.

No luck? Okay, I'll zoom in on the section of the screen where it's located. Try again.

Did you get it? Good - if not, I understand, as I had no idea where it was.

Here's the important thing to remember - the cigar is functionally the same colour as the wall. The only thing keeping it from looking exactly like part of the wall is the presence of a red cigar band. Or at least, that should have been keeping it from looking like the wall, except the developers went and pasted part of the UI over the cigar band.

Damn it, Charles Dexter Ward developers. Why would you do something like that?

Haunted Hotel: Death Sentence

One of my favourite subgenres in HOGS I review are the stealth adaptations. Whether it's a popular video game franchise like Bioshock or a minor literary classic like The Shadow Over Innsmouth, I enjoy seeing how game developers who profoundly don't have the rights to a certain piece of media transform it into a hidden object game. How subtle will they be in their use of locations, character designs, entire plots? Haunted Hotel: Death Sentence is one of the least subtle adaptations I've come across - it's And Then There Were None: The Hidden Object Game, and it's actually fairly spectacular it hews to the book's storyline - actually making a little more sense here and there than the original did.

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?

Barely at all. This, like most of the Haunted Hotel titles, is an Elephant Games production, and as such it's made by people who care about the logic of their HOSs. The game's setting is a crumbling hotel on an isolated island, where the player has been called by frequent crime-solving partner James to help him determine the party responsible for a series of disappearances. The hotel has seen better days, so it's largely believable that there would be piles of sundry items scattered around all around the place. Especially since the maid is one of the killer's victims!

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

It's strictly 12:1 screens this time around. They're fairly designed, and frankly, pretty gorgeous, but story integration just wasn't a priority. The game features many examples of the signature Haunted Hotel design scheme - bouncing back and forth between a couple of screens as a series of locks open matryoshka-like. A few of the key items are found in the hidden object scenes, but by and large the game is more concerned with its puzzles and graphic adventure elements than the HOSs. Players generally search each screen just once, and there aren't any examples of the game livening things up or taking chances with the formula.

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

And Then There Were None is the original slasher mystery, and this game does the story justice. The timeline has been shifted so that the killer was able to go after their victims on a longer timeline, and the plot takes a few original turns towards the end, but overall it's a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the source material. Many of the puzzle locks are a little on the contrived side for the setting, but overall I found the execution convincing and eerie - there are even a few ghosts on hand, which is a surprisingly rare occurrence in the franchise, considering its title.

Haunted Hotel: Death Sentence is a solid capper to the second HH trilogy. Some of the text is a little sloppily translated, but beyond that it's an incredibly polished package, and one of the high points of the franchise. Even the bonus chapter available in the collector's edition is top-notch, providing another solid 40 minutes of content, an intriguing look at an even more dilapidated version of the hotel, and a satisfying wrap-up to the story. While this game never reaches the insanely masterful heights of HH: Eclipse, it's a solid effort, and fans of both the series and the original novel will both be entertained.

Curious about the playthrough that led to this review? Check out the video below!

Haunted Hotel: Phoenix

After the strange way Haunted Hotel: Eternity wrapped up, with its Mystery Trackers crossover ending and history-altering bonus episode, I had no idea what to expect from Phoenix. Would it follow the same character from the previous game, as the previous trilogy of games had? Or would it depart from the detective millieu entirely and go off in a new direction?

The former - this is the second game in the third Haunted Hotel miniseries, following up on the story of Eternity as the detective from that case goes to solve a seemingly unrelated mystery, only to have a couple of familiar faces pop up again. But to say any more would spoil the twists, so let's move on to the hidden object criteria!

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

Not at all. This is, once again, a title from Elephant Games, who make it their business to build great-looking HOSs. The game is set at a hotel built atop the ruins of a badly-damaged university which had been attacked by an arsonist some years prior - which creates ample opportunities to justify HOSs, be they in a messy hotel room or a literal pile of burned rubble. This is one of the series' better locations, and the artists have outdone themselves, creating an isolated and foreboding locale, one where the frequent appearances by a nefarious masked figure (who bares more than a passing resemblance to Arkham's Scarecrow) never fail to unsettle.

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

Almost every type of HOS is on display here. There are - in descending order of logic - construction, puzzle, valid list, 12:1, silhouette, and memory scenes. It really runs the gamut, throwing everything at the wall with mixed results. The valid lists - in which the player is given a list of twelve items to move, only to discover that each one has a relevant item hiding behind it - are a great way of making the default screen feel relevant within the game world. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the 'memory' scenes, which have replaced 'placement' as my least favourite type of HOS. For those who haven't suffered through these screens, imagine playing a game of memory - where two items must be matched - without having any idea where the items were located. Sound frustrating? It is - players are presented with a screen and asked to click randomly on items until they find one which slides aside, revealing one of the matching items behind. Then they have to remember which item was behind what random piece of scenery while they resume clicking all over the screen in the hopes of finding another random item. It's a capricious and annoying type of HOS, forcing players to do the very thing - clicking randomly around the screen until something happens - that is anathema to how HOGs are supposed to be played. These scenes inclusion is the worst thing about the game, but luckily there aren't too many of them.

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

Amazingly well. This is one of the strongest stories in the Haunted Hotel series - a tale of ghostly arsonists with secret agendas, of love and betrayal and surprising revelations. I won't  spoil any of the details, but suffice to say the developers have done a great job not only with the story, but with selecting puzzles and HOS types that fit the narrative perfectly. How well done was it? There are even a couple of reflex games/real-time puzzles that I didn't mind in the least, which is almost never my preference when it comes to HOGs. Here, though, they worked.

Which brings me to a final question before ending on a full-throated recommendation. What's going on with James? Playing these games vastly out of order (I started with 11 and then jumped back to 1) caused me to miss a pattern, so it wasn't until James showed up in this game that I realized that the detective who'd been nearly beheaded in Axiom was the same man who'd been calling the shots in the previous trilogy. But those games are set in the 20s, and this third miniseries is set in the 70s. Is it just a cute nod by the developers, or is this supposed to be the same man? I must know the answer, and would love to hear any theories or evidence that anyone may have come across.

Seriously, though, Phoenix is a top-notch HOG, so high-quality that even the appearance of a couple of my least-favourite types of HOSs couldn't sour me on the game. Amazing presentation, great story, wonderful puzzles, this is a great title through and through.

Curious about the playthrough that led to this review? It starts below!

Haunted Hotel: Ancient Bane

There's another mystery for James and his player-controlled sidekick to solve - this time it concerns missing intellectuals at a haunted hotel! The twist? This time the hotel is supposed to be haunted! That's right, in one of the series' more audacious premises, a man with the warning-bells name of 'Abraham Shadowy' has built a hotel designed to terrify its thrill-seeking guests. The various monsters and ghosts are all carefully crafted machines that couldn't possibly harm anyone. Unless, of course, Shadowy were to attempt to gild the lily and purchase a genuine Egyptian sarcophagus - complete with cursed mummy - and store it in a secret room in the basement. But what's the worst that could happen?

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

It's not too bad. This once again comes from Elephant Games, who, as always, do a stellar job of building plausible HOSs. The setting here - a dilapidated hotel under assault by paranormal forces - is a perfect setting for piles of detritus to naturally appear. There is a surprisingly large amount of clutter in the inventory bar, however. The developers have made the odd choice to load the player down with nearly a dozen items early in the game, then reliably give them new ones just as quickly as the old ones are used up. It's a little frustrating to have to scroll back and forth through the inventory every time I want to try a solution to an item-based puzzle, or dig out a particular amulet to open a lock. This kind of bloat doesn't add anything to the experience, merely stretches out the least interesting part of the game - inventory management.

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

The HOS are few and far between in this game. The developers were clearly more interested in having the player assemble machines, disarm traps, and run through a course of the standard puzzles. The HOSs which do show up are generally 12:1 affairs, which at least means a bare minimum of work was put in to explain their presence. That's not to say the lack of HOSs cripples this game - it's a strong narrative with well-integrated puzzles, it's just that it's weighed quite heavily towards the puzzle side of the 'Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure' genre.

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

This really is a solid story from beginning to end. While it's the weakest of the '20s detective Haunted Hotel trilogy, that's only because Eclipse and Death Sentence are both such amazing games. The fundamentals are all here, however - jump scares, gorgeously drawn environments, puzzles that perfectly suit the plot and location. The game's fundamental problem is that the story is just too convoluted for its own good, without any of the fun which could have been brought to the premise. Just imagine - a man builds a fake haunted hotel and accidentally decorates it with a legitimately haunted artifact. That's a premise ripe for comedic exploitation. Yet the game has the same grave and serious tone that is the hallmark of the rest of the series - which doesn't suit it at all.

Oddly, it's only in the bonus chapter included with the Collector's Edition that things start to feel more on model. Apparently the hotel had, previous to its purchase by Mr. Shadowy, been the site of a tragic love affair that ended in madness and death. This is the kind of story that the art and storytelling style are best at telling, and this final 45-minute chunk of gameplay winds up being more satisfying than the entirety of the main game.

If Ancient Bane weren't part of Elephant Games' Haunted Hotel series I probably would have had lower expectations for it. I might have let the developers get away with a meandering plot and mediocre villain. Its pedigree, however, forces anyone familiar with the series to demand better. While a perfectly functional and eminently playable HOG in its own right, Ancient Bane just isn't up to the level of the rest of the series, and as such is the one inessential entry in it since Elephant Games started making them.

Curious about the playthrough that led to this review? It starts below!

Haunted Hotel: Eternity

I'm now six games - halfway through, as of the release of Silent Waters - into the Haunted Hotel franchise, and I still don't have a sense of exactly what the franchise is yet. Obviously the first trilogy tells a relatively coherent story, while Charles Dexter Ward is just the brand name being slapped on a Lovecraft adaptation for marketing purposes. From the modern version of the series, with its high production values and tight design, I'd just played games 8 and 12 - and other than both of them concerning villains attempting to attain revenge for dead family members, I don't see any theme developing. I remain resolute, however - this is a consistently interesting franchise, if nothing else, and I'll do my best to find some connective tissue linking them, beyond the cleverest naming scheme I've ever encountered.

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

Barely at all. The game is set mostly in an abandoned hotel/medical research facility, so some dilapidation is to be expected. The main character is a detective charged with protecting a millionaire philanthropist who has a shady connection to an aborted cancer vaccine - the 'eternity project' of the title. The protection detail involves a good amount of scrounging through the wrecked hotel looking for tools to help navigate a madman's maze. Between the logical location and the idea that many of the messes are specifically created by the villain to provide a challenge, the visuals of the HOSs are well up to snuff.

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

It's a very mixed bag here. There are a couple of integrated screens, in which the player is takes with picking up a set of items from a list, and behind each one is a piece of a puzzle that needs to be completed. Other times the player is just grabbing items from a list  either as key words in a story being told, which sort of works because it's using the puzzle to further narrative, albeit in an obvious way, or they're just looking to match silhouettes to items onscreen, which I'm on the record as saying is my least favourite type of HOS. Actually, the game manages to innovate a little in that regard, reintroducing me to another terrible type of HOS: the memory game. In this, pairs of items are hidden somewhere on a trash-filled screen, and it's up to the player to pick the two hiding places in sequence. Why is this so horrible? Imagine playing memory, not with a set of cards laid face down on a table, but with a room full of items, a few of which have matching pictures drawn on the bottom. I've accepted the 'match pairs' puzzle design before, when all of the pairs were onscreen and just had to be discovered. This 'hide them behind arbitrary objects that can only be found through random clicking' nonsense is just bad design.

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

It's one hell of a story, I'll give it that. The puzzles, searches, and environmental interaction puzzles all make a lot of sense given the setting - a madman has built a labyrinth of doom, so a good amount of preposterously contrived danger is to be expected, even encouraged. In addition to the game's top-flight production values, I was pleased by the pacing. The game races forward, asking the player to solve all the possible puzzles in a set 2-3 rooms, then quickly moves on to the next contained area. More than anything else, the design reminded me of the one Mystery Trackers game I've played - and there turned out to be a reason for that, which I won't reveal here for fear of spoiling the plot for anyone playing the game.

While this may not be up to the level of Axiom Butcher, Haunted Hotel: Eternity has a solid story, great graphics, and puzzles that skirt the challenge/frustration line beautifully. As is often the case with Big Fish's modern HOPA games, I can fault the small number and sometimes-awkward justification of their hidden object scenes, but I can't say that the game fails because it didn't get the HOSs right. As the Hidden Object Guru, I'll always advocate for more and better HOSs, but I won't deny that a game does a great job just because its hidden object elements are a little on the weak side. Eternity isn't the best Haunted Hotel game I've played, but it's close, and does the series credit.

Want to see the playthrough that led to this review? It starts in the video below!

Haunted Hotel 3: Lonely Dream

Within this single trilogy the evolution of hidden object games can be seen. The first offered screens full of clutter, punctuated by completely random puzzles which had nothing to do with the story. The second game still featured questionable HOSs, but clearly the developers were beginning to understand that 'story' wasn't just the pages of text that appeared between levels, but rather the most important element in tying the game's elements together into a coherent whole. They didn't do a great job of it, of course, but at least they understood that HOGs were capable of being something more than a casual timewaster. Now, with the third game in the series, how close have the developers come to the greatness that this series would eventually produce?

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

It's still pretty much a mess, but a considerably more attractive one than it used to be. The items are now drawn to look like they fit in a given screen's lighting and setting, rather than just being clip art which was dropped in any old place. Beyond that, however, things are still very rough. There's plenty of size and gravity cheating, but at least the items aren't wildly anachronistic and random any more. That's not to say there aren't flowers stuck in shoes for no logical reason, and a few silhouettes so faint as to be nearly impossible to find, but by and large, this game is a huge step in the direction of better HOS design.

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

Just 12:1 screens here. There are plenty of object-based puzzles for the player to solve on their way through this latest haunted hotel, which means plenty of HOSs in which to track those items down. While it would be nice if the developers had put a little more work into justifying the object hunting, just demonstrating the understanding that HOSs can be something other than filler shows how quickly this genre was growing from casual fluff into something more meaty and worthwhile.

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

The series is certainly getting there with this entry. The game tells a single, largely coherent story about a fake Mulder who teams up with an old-timey detective in a plan to shut down a time-traveling hotel powered by the ennuis of failed artists. It's more complicated than that, of course, and the game's greatest accomplishment is how straight it plays the storylines it inherited from the first game in the series. Sure, the hotel and its killer fog never really made much sense, but the developers barrel ahead anyway, assuming that by throwing in a few sinister characters and giving fans of the series a chance to revisit classic rooms from earlier in the series they would get away with their largely nonsensical story. The fact is, they come pretty close to getting away with it.

Haunted Hotel 3: Lonely Dream isn't a great game by any stretch, but it is an instructive one. Anyone interested in the development of the genre should give these three games a look - they'll see a new form of entertainment gradually finding its feet, and figuring out the ideal form of what it can be. Lonely Dream never reaches the heights that later games in this series would, but as a graphic adventure it's fundamentally solid, even if the story doesn't hold together as well as it could. The game's extras menu promises a second trilogy of games coming soon - and while I can find no solid evidence that those ever came to pass, I will continue working my way through this series, hoping to see what other insight it can provide into the ongoing evolution of hidden object games.

Curious to see how the adventure winds up? Check out the video below!

Haunted Hotel 2: Believe the Lies

No one can say that this isn't a huge improvement over the first Haunted Hotel. Likewise, it would be difficult to give it any compliments beyond 'it cleared an extremely low bar'. If I'm being honest, that bar was buried ten feet underground, so as long as HH2 could manage a crawl - mission accomplished. The game starts a year after the first adventure. The man who escaped the first game with a magical cat in tow apparently mailed the Detective's diary to the FBI, and now an agent has arrived at a related hotel to continue the investigation. Will he finally bring the conspirators to justice? Well, considering that this game is attempting to ape the X-Files in every way possible, I'm going to predict no.

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

It's terrible. Exactly as bad as the previous game in the series. The only difference between this game and the last one is that the player isn't asked to go back to the same room over and over again, finding the same items. No, HH2's innovation is to have the player constantly move to new rooms, where they can find the same items over and over again. And by 'same items', I mean literally the exact same items that were used in the first Haunted Hotel. I recognized huge swaths of the previous game's library of images stacked randomly around this new hotel's common areas and private rooms. Thank god the backdrops are all new and never repeat within the game - otherwise this would hold the record for the least amount of new content put into a HOG ever.

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

It's generally 30:1 screens here. No, that wasn't a typo - players will commonly be asked to find 30 items on each HOS. On one level this is refreshing - there isn't much content in the game other than the searches, so at least there's a lot of searching to do. On another level, it's deeply frustrating, because the game's developers weren't up to building a library of objects more than about 120 items big, so players will find themselves searching for the same items over and over again. I would guess that I was asked to find a cork in most of the game's levels, and in one particularly egregious example, I was asked to find a set of binoculars four screens in a row.

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

The game doesn't have many puzzle screens, but the developers actually do a decent job of tying everything together. At the end of each HOS the player will have an item that either unlocks the next room or helps them find the next minigame to make the transition. This actually leads to a nice visual effect - a couple of the minigames are jigsaw puzzles that the player has to assemple, and when they've been completed, the player will suddenly notices that they've been building a picture of the next location they're headed towards. The moment the puzzle is finished the image fades from black and white to colour, and the player can immediately start finding objects there. Yes, it's not a brilliant innovation by any means, but in a game as frustratingly repetitive as Haunted Hotel 2, I was happy to find spots of inspiration wherever I could.

Haunted Hotel 2 certainly is less terrible than its predecessor, but that doesn't mean it's worth playing. Only completionists desperate to see every entry in the series should bother. Of course, since I'm one of those, we can all expect to see a review of the third game turn up here in short order. Hopefully the series will continue improve, and the third time will be the charm!

By which I mean, be the first game to actually be worth playing.

Haunted Hotel

With this game, I delve back into the history of HOGs, to a time when players were expected to just be happy that they were faced with a screen full of random garbage and a list of specific things to click on. A time before narrative coherence, integrated puzzles, or any conception of fairness in HOS design. I've been here before, when covering Civil War Mysteries, and while Haunted Hotel is nowhere near that dire, it's a little shocking to see a genre which would one day lead to such high points as The AXIom Butcher start out in such a rough state.

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

This may as well be the definition I use for 'worst possible example' of this problem. Every screen is cluttered with nonsense arrange with little to no care or logic. Items are presented with no thought given to their logical size or gravity's effect on them. Colours are changed for no logical reason - even transparency cheating is used, and that's essentially the lowest rung to which a developer can sink. Additionally, the game is wildly inconsistent about what items are called - I'd seen 'lighter' appear on the list of items a number of times, and had found both zippos and little plastic disposable items to check them off the list. Then, towards the end of the game, I spent three minutes searching for a lighter on a set of stairs, only to finally give up and hit the hint button - what had the game wanted me to click on that whole time? A flashlight.

Inexcusable.

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

Not in the least. As the player moves to each new floor of the titular Haunted Hotel, they're presented with anywhere from 1-6 rooms where they need to find items. Their reason for doing so is never hinted at or suggested even obliquely, and while the story segments do mention a few of the rooms they visit, collecting random junk doesn't feature in the narrative. At first the game seems to be going a little easy on the player - they'll have two rooms with 8 items to find in each, but the game will only actually require them to find 14 to move on to the next floor. This ceases feeling like a favour or help in the second half of the game, by which point the player is being asked to turn up 40-something items from five different rooms, and still they only have a one or two item margin for error.

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

There is no whole. There are text-based story segments which have nothing to do with the gameplay. No matter how disconnected the HOSs may seem, the puzzles are considerably worse. After finding all the items on a level, the player is forced to 'power up' the elevator to the next floor. This is accomplished by completing puzzles wholly unrelated to anything else in the game. There's something called 'Energy', which is just clicking on sparks as they fly by - the rest are generic rejects from other titles - untangling cat's cradles, playing bejewelled, Simon Says... it's all random and somewhat annoying.

It's too bad the main game is such a mess since the story - which, as mentioned above, is told wholly through interstitial blocks of text (in a weirdly meta touch, the main character spends much of the adventure reading the diary entries of a detective who previously explored the hotel) which suggest an interesting adventure the game is incapable of showing. Time travel, weather machines, possibly magical totem cats - there's a lot of fun stuff in the story, but by no means is any of it entertaining enough to warrant the frustrating grind that is the game that surrounds it. It just goes to show how terrible most HOGs were at the birth of the genre that this was considered to be good enough to warrant a sequel, let alone a long-running franchise. Still, despite how much I disliked the game, I will be checking out the next one in the series, as it will be interesting to see how developers got from this low point here to something amazing like AXIom Butcher.

Haunted Hotel: Charles Dexter Ward

HP Lovecraft adaptations always interest me. As a fan of the author's work, I'm aware of how much material it offers for adaptation into other media. Videogames have proven especially fond of his material, recycling plots, themes, and especially monster designs since the days of text adventures. Yet Hidden Object adaptations have been oddly scarce on the ground. Despite a large number of stories which would be remarkably easy to adapt, I've only been able to find word of three titles. Mountains of madness, reviewed here, Cats of Ulthar, which I'm trying to find a copy of, and this game, Haunted Hotel: Charles Dexter Ward. Mountains of Madness was a stellar game - how does this one change the HPL adaptation average?

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

It's pretty bad. While the backgrounds of the screens are beautifully drawn, very little care was put into placing the hidden objects on them. There's size cheating, gravity cheating, even strange overlapping effects. There are decent amount of HOSs in the game, but none of them rise about a mediocre level of quality.

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

Strictly 12:1 screens here. Lots of lists of random items, with one that must be grabbed to continue the story. The environmental puzzles are actually something of a high point in the game. There are plenty of interesting nooks and crannies to be explored throughout the mansion in which the game is set (it couldn't be less of a hotel, despite the title). It's a naturally complex location, with countless locks to open and secrets to ferret out, most of which proceed in a logical fashion using the items that turn up in the HOSs. It's just too bad the developers didn't put a little more work into making the screens feel like part of the game world.

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

While many of the locks and puzzles are a little on the contrived side, the setting does a good job of excusing them. The nefarious Joseph Curwen, an ancestor of Charles as well as his twin sister (who serves as the game's protagonist), was a mad warlock, so filling his house with ornate obstacles seems like a natural fit. The game's story has a few problems, though, largely because it's built around a twist that's almost painfully obvious from the moment the first clues are dropped. I won't spoil all the details, but suffice it to say that the main character's quest to save her brother from a fate worse than death is characterized more by passion than intellect, and the player will find themselves controlling a character who varrels through a complex situation with confidence that borders on delusional.

While Haunted Hotel: Charles Dexter Ward may be a huge step down from Mountains of Madness, it's still a passable HOG, and it does a good job of adapting its source material. While it isn't the exact story, the central themes are well-presented, and the developers have the good sense not to tamper with the ending too much. Even the bonus chapter, which delves a little further into the Cthulhu Mythos for some fan-service, doesn't cop out and try to put too happy a spin on things.

My ruling? This puts the overall quality of Lovercraft HOGS at around a 6.5 - now to track down the Cats of Ulthar and see where that moves the needle!

Check out 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-

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-