It's been a while since I made a review.
So, today I will be talking about another HO game. Unlike most HO's this applies parallax scrolling, which is actually something you can see in a game as old as 1982, but it was applied to a Hidden Object game, which is pretty neat.
Off to review: Mind's Eye: Secrets of the Forgotten
Story: You are Gabrielle Jennings, a journalist trying to find the next hit story. What started out as a suicide turned into a murder which lead to investigating the subconscious.
Now, while there seemed to be a lot of details left unexplained (The game didn't really flesh out most if not all of the characters. Hell, one character was just there for ONE scene and you never see her again.) the core story was pretty good. I liked the idea that it dealt with amnesia without using the usual cliche amnesia plot. They actually based it on Amnesia that ACTUALLY exists. Kudos to some research. I hope next time they make the game a little longer. Placing difficult mini-games is a nice way to take my time, but it doesn't always work that way.
I'm talking about YOU!
Art: The scenes were WONDERFULLY done. I think it can be a little too dark for most casual gamers to play, but for me it was great. I partly wished they made the scenes more disturbing, but I guess that would mean a rating or something.
What irked me was the big discrepancy between the character art used in the dialogs with the character art used in the cutscenes. I dunno, for me it was a BIG turn off. While I found the character art in the game was beautiful, the one in the cutscene seemed rushed and thus, quality was compromised.
Another...has anyone noticed the OTHER discrepancy?
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Dark tiles with green stuff on it.
Then it became brown....okay...
The actual game: Adding the parallax was a great innovation, so that's a big plus for me. In some ways it gave the player a slight difficulty to the game, since now you have a bigger scene to work with. The sad part was at most times I felt the parallax wasn't efficiently used. There are some scenes were you hardly have to use it. Why bother putting a feature like that if you won't maximize it?
Due to the parallax, it may have been a little harder to pick up items. I didn't have too much of a problem with most of it, but it's something a developer needs to consider in the future. My suggestion? Use bigger HO items.
Another thing I'd like to note is how the dialogue was written. The formatting at times was an eye-sore. There were times where the sentences weren't line-breaked too well.
So, what's the overall say?
Overall, it was a great idea and I think this will be in some ways a benchmark for HO games to go beyond what they are now.
That's all for now!
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