Hidden PoP Games

I’m usually wary of HOGs made by anyone but Artifex Mundi because I had a few bad experience with them (for example, "Angelica Weaver: Catch Me When You Can" was boring AF and “Black Swan” was a buggy mess near the end) but this one was a pleasant surprise to me.

While the plot is kinda cliche and can be summed up as "a murderer kidnapped the MC’s girl and he has no choice but to try to rescue her by himself" it does something no other HoGs do. In most games of this kind you have to suspend your disbelief when it comes to everything looking like a puzzle or things being conveniently placed, but here it’s completely justified because the villain lured the MC to his manor and he’s toying with him the entire time.

Talking about the villain, I think both the writers and the VA did a fantastic job. He’s completely nuts and the way he taunts the MC and toys with him reminds me of the Joker.

The art in this game is fantastic. The backgrounds and the characters are very detailed and they overall look great (including Oscar’s err… “works of art”).

The game has a few issues though. Sometimes the hints are a bit unreliable because they point you to a puzzle even though you’re clearly missing some necessary pieces to solve it.
Also it’d have been awesome if there was a way to fast-travel in the game. There’s so much backtracking it gets tiring after a while, and in the later stages it’s kinda easy to get lost.
Last but not least I found the ending of the extra chapter a bit anticlimactic.

In short, I really liked it.

This one was your usual supernatural HOG. There’s not much to say except I liked it. It was creepy to the point I think I’ll be wary of lakes next time I play another HOG and the art helped to make it look spookier.

I’m also glad they added the fast travel option because there’s a lot of backtracking here, but I wish the map was a bit more detailed. It tells you there’s something in X place but it doesn’t specify where. This is specially jarring when you reach the manors, which have quite a few rooms and you can’t tell which room you have to go to without either searching blindly or using the hint button.