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Dracula's Legacy - Standard, better CGI cutscenes than most. Puzzles aren't bad, plot is vampire-hunting. Leaves off on a gigantic sequel hook.
Twilight City: Love as a Cure - This one isn’t actually a puzzle adventure game, though it uses the same interface. It’s more of a raising sim, as you play a vampire who comes to the titular “Twilight City” seeking to become mortal, and you need to train your magic and vampire skills (along with buying new clothes, furniture and pets) until you’re strong enough to complete the ritual that turns you human so you can reunite with your lover. While it seems like there should be a time limit (there’s emphasis on solving things faster), I couldn’t see any penalties for taking your time, resting often, and practicing lots of jobs. It’s still only three hours to finish the game, but a cute change of pace.
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe - Virtually no “use an item in an area” puzzles—it’s all item-finding and difference-spotting, with the occasional break for totally unfair memory puzzles. Moderately racist, in keeping with the source material. I wasn’t wild about it.
Mystery Castle: The Mirror's Secret - An evil warlock has kidnapped your daughter and keeps dragging her through various ghost-filled paintings. You need to assist the ghosts and maneuver through the paintings, with the usual selection of hidden-object, combination and brainteasers along the way. Perfectly pleasant, but totally forgettable.
Runaway Express Mystery - Credit for trying: When your kids are stolen by the ghost conductor of a haunted train, you need to solve various mysteries of the passengers to get them back. And those mysteries actually do involve finding clues that lead to a logical conclusion to each of the three cases. The hidden object puzzles are often “layered”, where you need to find some items to reach others, and the goal of the puzzle is at least sometimes the item you end up with. (Much better than finding 17 butterflies to get a screwdriver, as is often common.) Searching for blood and fingerprints with the special tools is less engaging, because you just randomly need to spray everything—there’s no skill to finding them.
Mystery of Unicorn Castle: The Beastmaster - This one has a neat twist—there are several puzzles that you have a choice of ways to solve (the “good” and “bad” ways). This is one of the less linear games from the outset—you can access a lot of areas and find a lot of puzzles, even if you can’t solve most of them. I found the “karmic choices” almost interesting enough to be worth replaying the game to try for the “bad” ending. Almost.
Lost Legends: The Weeping Woman Collector's Edition - It appears that the ghost of a spurned woman is kidnapping children...but is that really the case? Solid but standard, this takes place in a cinco de mayo-like festival and includes extra flowers and gold skulls to collect as you do all of the standard puzzles.
Frankenstein: Master of Death - Dr. Frankenstein has created a monster (yeah, I know) and he’s called you in for help. This apparently has a harder mode that, rather than just turning off alert sparkles or limiting hints, actually changes some of the puzzles. Also, there a mini-puzzles embedded into most of the item-finding games, so that’s fun. A bit on the short side, but decent.
Living Legends: The Frozen Fear Collection…froze on loading. So I didn’t play that.
Overall: Decent collection of puzzle adventure point-and-click games. Nothing stood out as amazing, but I appreciate that they tried for some variety between them.
Twilight City: Love as a Cure - This one isn’t actually a puzzle adventure game, though it uses the same interface. It’s more of a raising sim, as you play a vampire who comes to the titular “Twilight City” seeking to become mortal, and you need to train your magic and vampire skills (along with buying new clothes, furniture and pets) until you’re strong enough to complete the ritual that turns you human so you can reunite with your lover. While it seems like there should be a time limit (there’s emphasis on solving things faster), I couldn’t see any penalties for taking your time, resting often, and practicing lots of jobs. It’s still only three hours to finish the game, but a cute change of pace.
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe - Virtually no “use an item in an area” puzzles—it’s all item-finding and difference-spotting, with the occasional break for totally unfair memory puzzles. Moderately racist, in keeping with the source material. I wasn’t wild about it.
Mystery Castle: The Mirror's Secret - An evil warlock has kidnapped your daughter and keeps dragging her through various ghost-filled paintings. You need to assist the ghosts and maneuver through the paintings, with the usual selection of hidden-object, combination and brainteasers along the way. Perfectly pleasant, but totally forgettable.
Runaway Express Mystery - Credit for trying: When your kids are stolen by the ghost conductor of a haunted train, you need to solve various mysteries of the passengers to get them back. And those mysteries actually do involve finding clues that lead to a logical conclusion to each of the three cases. The hidden object puzzles are often “layered”, where you need to find some items to reach others, and the goal of the puzzle is at least sometimes the item you end up with. (Much better than finding 17 butterflies to get a screwdriver, as is often common.) Searching for blood and fingerprints with the special tools is less engaging, because you just randomly need to spray everything—there’s no skill to finding them.
Mystery of Unicorn Castle: The Beastmaster - This one has a neat twist—there are several puzzles that you have a choice of ways to solve (the “good” and “bad” ways). This is one of the less linear games from the outset—you can access a lot of areas and find a lot of puzzles, even if you can’t solve most of them. I found the “karmic choices” almost interesting enough to be worth replaying the game to try for the “bad” ending. Almost.
Lost Legends: The Weeping Woman Collector's Edition - It appears that the ghost of a spurned woman is kidnapping children...but is that really the case? Solid but standard, this takes place in a cinco de mayo-like festival and includes extra flowers and gold skulls to collect as you do all of the standard puzzles.
Frankenstein: Master of Death - Dr. Frankenstein has created a monster (yeah, I know) and he’s called you in for help. This apparently has a harder mode that, rather than just turning off alert sparkles or limiting hints, actually changes some of the puzzles. Also, there a mini-puzzles embedded into most of the item-finding games, so that’s fun. A bit on the short side, but decent.
Living Legends: The Frozen Fear Collection…froze on loading. So I didn’t play that.
Overall: Decent collection of puzzle adventure point-and-click games. Nothing stood out as amazing, but I appreciate that they tried for some variety between them.
