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Phantasmat
Game description:
Stranded in the middle of nowhere after crashing your car, you stumble upon The Drowned Dead Hotel, a lonely structure leaning perilously close to a cliff. Below it lies a dark and cold lake that submerged a once lively town. What tragedy befell this place? The strange inhabitants of the hotel know the answer and hide its secrets, but they aren't about to tell you, and worst of all, you are not allowed to leave. Discover the startling secrets buried at the bottom of the muddy waters and find a way out of this eerie nightmare. Search through dark yet beautiful hand-drawn scenes filled with a frightening atmosphere as you uncover the truth of this tragedy. Solve manic puzzles, use valuable tools, and change your Hidden Object gameplay experience to Match 3 puzzling when desired. Sheeparcade exclusive review:
When you think about it more closely then you will realize that the extent of the mansion spooky games have already pretty much been overloaded. The games that are made for the Hidden object genre generally have a place (a house) that is filled with large number of items (big house) and you must search through the rooms and secret passages of course (which includes castles or mansions). So putting it together you are always led to the same thing and therefore the importance of generating the following content for the game is crucial if you want to make a game succeed in the casual games market. This game not only fulfills that condition but it goes even further, however the story of the game first. The story starts as you enter a rainstorm that not only put the visibility to zero but the road is so slippery you are barely able to control the vehicle. As God knows what rescued you from a crash that meant your certain death you entirely couldn’t avoid, you search for shelter in the nearby of the crash site as it appears there was a town just nearby some time ago. As she was walking she found a building that is called Drowned Dead Hotel. Now for any normal human this would be more than enough to keep walking until you find something else, but in our case apparently not. When entering the hotel the first thing you would normally receive is a greeting, but here you are very likely suggested to get the hell out of there before something happens. Of course that doesn’t even matter as it is raining out there and a quick phone call is all that you need…
Gameplay:
So the game starts and you discover that you should have listened to the advice/warning from the receptionists, as you find out that the whole town was flooded and what was not lost in the flood is completely damaged or barely survived like the hotel in which you are located. This introduces the search for hidden items through the hotel (which is not what it seems) and all across the different parts of that region making the game quite different from the usual search and collect mansions games. But that is just the beginning of the game as the content and the modes that the game offers are something special and almost unique. When you start picking up items throughout the game, it will basically depend on you what you will pick up even though you have a list of what you ‘need’ currently. The items that you pick up will start to repeat itself when you advance through the game which kind of gets a bit disappointing, but a feature that will change all of that is another mode of gameplay. The game provides a hint, of course, to help you in your search, but if you get a bit bored by the hidden objects or simply can’t find them, the switch to match 3 mode is something that will surprise many. A concrete example would be that you don’t want to waste time not finding items and that is where the match 3 helps a lot, especially if you have some matching skills up your sleeve. Switching modes can be done at any time during the game, and the goal is like most of the match 3 games….to make 3 more matches. Here you have an item shaped as a golden eye, and the final goal is to make all of the golden eyes fall on the bottom of the grid. The hint in the hidden object searches represents a power-up in the match 3, and they are connected to each other. Using the hint drains the power-up and the same goes backwards. The power-up that is on your disposal destroys some of the tiles that are located in the vicinity of the golden eye. The game starts to reflect its charms with the introduction of the two modes and therefore provides an almost inexhaustible source of fun. Now the game offers three levels of difficulty which presents a good thing but a bad one two… There is a great number of players out there and this will probably attract a very nice number of them, however due to usual impatience that the players have they will probably choose the easiest way to finish up a game. This will provide probably a great feeling, but one that lasts too short and most of them if not all will regret for buying the game. The explanation lies in the fact that the easiest difficulty provides too much hint with 100% pathway to the items, which kind of gets you through the whole game in a yippy. Some of the players perhaps prefer playing games like this, but for me it wasn’t so… The standard level of difficulty represents a challenge that you would normally face playing a hidden object game, where you can get penalized for too much miss-clicks and the hints that are given can’t be used all the time. This will probably be the most used difficulty, but the one that interest me and probably veterans of the casual games world is the Extreme or Hard mode. Here there is no slacking and the penalties are very harsh. Besides that you are introduced with a timer which gives you additional feeling of challenge that probably everybody can’t handle… For me it was a great pleasure playing the game on the hardest mode as I’m good, but not that good like someone else and therefor I had to strain myself really hard at certain times.
Graphics and sound:
The game animations are very well done and the sound that backs it up is prepared well enough to give you a very distinguished feeling of the theme in the game, and the ‘darkness’ that lies behind it. The voice acting is not that ‘big’ due to the relatively small number of characters in the game, but the ones that are used are certainly very good. All in all a game worth very much of playing and the factor of regret is highly unlikely…Enjoy it like I did.
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