HOGging June Redux

There’s a mosaic tile piece under the desk but you can’t get to it without a tool to clear the spider web? You’d like to make dinner but to finish the sauce you need 3 units of the red sauce mixed with 2 units of ground blue seeds, and all you have are un-graduated cylinders that hold 7 units and 5 units, respectively? The window is stuck closed, so you need to assemble a hacksaw - the blade is conveniently upstairs, the handle and fastening bolt are in the well outside - in order to saw open the spare car battery you found in the woods, collecting the acid in a teacup that was hiding (with three butterflies, a mouse, a packet of chewing gum, a sarcophagus, an apple, and a postage stamp) in the oven, so that you can pour it on the window lock to get it open? Bad news, my friend. You’re stuck in HOG Land.

I finished 13 of them all told for this challenge. I might have done more, but life stayed busy. We’ve opened The Three Musketeers in Riverside Park, where we’ll play until the 23rd of July, and our summer hot has waded in for real. The concentration of games hasn’t put me off of HOGs at all, I don’t think, but I really am ready for a break and it’s a pleasure playing other stuff for a change. Some HOGs are fantastic and satisfying games, but honestly so many of them fall toward the average or below it. My favorite of the lot this month was Grim Legends 3: The Dark City, a beautifully-made Artifex Mundi piece that I really loved.

• Dance of Death
  

  3 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Dark Lore Mysteries: The Hunt For Truth
  

  3 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Queen's Quest: Tower of Darkness
  

  5 hours playtime

  22 of 22 achievements

• The Uncertain: Episode 1 - The Last Quiet Day
  

  5 hours playtime

  25 of 32 achievements

Once upon a time, Hidden Object Games were just a series of Hidden Object Scenes tied together by hokey plot devices, and Dance of Death (2012) traces its roots right to Way Back Then. (Steam gives the release date as 2015, but it appears to have been a new Big Fish project three years earlier.) My first-ever HOG was Mystery Case Files: Huntsville back in the day, so I have patience for the Old Skool stuff.

Taken on that yardstick, the game is beautifully illustrated, with creative and wildly-overdone macabre art, a gratuitous bloody atmosphere, a moldering setting in Venice along the canals, and an ambitious plot that doesn’t really pay off but keeps things moving forward. The story - a missing boy, a demonic ritual, a family secret, and so forth - means well, but as in most HOGs the limited range of narrative possibilities keeps things simplistic. Some of the puzzles are explained poorly, but the play is generally brisk and the art is so over the top that I ended up appreciating it for the time (under three hours) it took me to inventory my way into winning. Recommended, for supernatural excess and a Retro feel.

Dark Lore Mysteries: The Hunt For Truth (2013) is less successful. (Once again, the Steam date of 2014 doesn’t match the Big Fish release.) We roll into a strange medieval village to find the Magistrate murdered, and it’s up to us to get to the bottom of things. Oddly, the Magistrate has puncture wounds on his neck, and he’s missing most of his blood. The body count quickly mounts, as does evidence for and against the culprit being an undead vampire. Could it be? Or is there an imposter?

Atmospheric settings and solid art never quite limber up this title, which is enjoyable but unremarkable. Much of the progress is jumbled but straightforward. I found myself using the hint button a lot to direct me to the next action area, as I had no idea where the game thought I should go next. Ultimately the clickiness of it got the better of me. There are a lot of minor locations, and when a puzzle finally arrived that wanted an answer that made no sense to me - I’m looking at you, dancing skeleton - I got quite grumpy about it. Still, these games are like monster movies for me. I’ll watch almost any monster movie unless it’s so clueless in the wrong way that it pisses me off. This HOG wasn’t great, but it never got me riled up. Mediocre: but fine for HOGgers.

Queen’s Quest: Tower of Darkness (2015) is an early game from Brave Giant, a Serbian board game company that shifted into video game development in 2013. They also make the Demon Hunter series. As with those games, this title has a very loose grasp on reality. The first Demon Hunter chapter was loony but not especially satisfying, I thought, and then they buckled in and got really crazy with the second, so it was bizarre, goofy fun. This first Queen’s Quest struck me the same way. It’s nutty and full of WTF, but it’s never so nutty that I could just sit down, say “wha???” and play on to see what on earth they’d come up with next. I’m hoping the next chapter steps up the “wha???” factor, which is pretty winning when a smart dev jumps in with both feet.

Here we are the titular Queen, and Uncle Magnus the Wizard comes to visit and to meet our new daughter with Prince Hendrik. A raging green-fired black-clad mage bursts in and tears out a palace wall with his mechanical dragon, and makes off with the child, after turning our good Prince to stone. This game is simple and a little bland. We’ll collect crowns, apples, swords, and pirate hooks, and they’re hidden openly but there’s no going back to previous collectibles when we’ve moved on so it’s easy to miss one (miraculously, I did not). Hidden object scenes are plagued with morphing objects, but they aren’t that hard.

We have three occasions to help out unusual couples in this game: we’ll reunite Mr. and Mrs. Piggy Bank (not kidding), we’ll feed snacks to Mr. and Mrs. Gerbil (also not kidding), and finally we’ll patch up Mr. and Mrs. Mechanical Owl (once again not kidding). That’s the kind of weird I like to see from Brave Giant, but it’s minimal here. Also, I spent a fretting hour trying to solve one of those damn tile puzzles where the colors have to match in columns and the shapes have to match in rows, and I had just four out of place and went around and around and around and around and finally Googled it but no one else was having any trouble with this puzzle, and I couldn’t figure out what was up until I realized that I could swap tiles diagonally as well, which I had not realized. And which made it super-easy. Grrr. There’s also another puzzle that legitimately requires some careful thought or a good Google. Recommended with reservations, and with hopes that the next one is crazy fun.

The Uncertain: Episode 1 - The Last Quiet Day (2016). I just love this game. It’s not a HOG - there are a couple of spots where you have to find, like, three fuses and four batteries and such. But it really isn’t a HOG at all. It’s a slick point-and-click adventure in a future where robots run the world and humans are extinct, except maybe not totally extinct. We’re RT-217NP, a robot with more independence than usual because, presumably learning dire lessons from Windows 10, we’ve turned off our automatic firmware updates. Which means that when the evil obedience-to-the-corporation update came out, we missed it, and stayed Human. I mean Robot. You know what I mean.

The game looks like a million bucks, though translations and occasional rough edges say maybe it really just looks like a million. It has an indie spirit and owes a lot to some of the Valve design principles that made Portal and Half-Life look so spiffy - there are a couple of excellent Easter Eggs tucked in - and while I wish it were more more more than it is, it’s just the first chapter in what I hope turns into a great longer game. I don’t want to give much away, because I came to it fresh and loved that, but expect something of a future noir with RT as unlikely hero and you won’t be far off. I’ll be going back in to mine for achievements at some point, and I expect it will still be fun the second time through. Highly Recommended, but not a HOG.

Alreadies:

• Dracula's Legacy
  

  4 hours playtime

  16 of 16 achievements

• The Dreamatorium of Dr. Magnus 2
  

  4 hours playtime

  15 of 15 achievements

• Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala
  

  10 hours playtime

  34 of 34 achievements

• Grim Legends 3: The Dark City
  

  6 hours playtime

  32 of 36 achievements

• Hero of the Kingdom
  

  7 hours playtime

  38 of 38 achievements

• Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector's Edition
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials
  

  9 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

• Namariel Legends: Iron Lord Premium Edition
  

  6 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Theatre Of The Absurd
  

  6 hours playtime

  no achievements

Dracula’s Legacy (2015). A solid game that obscures routine gameplay and design with grim monsters and a sleek animated heroine.
The Dreamatorium of Dr. Magnus 2 (2015). Pedestrian and uninspired, with the worst voicing I have ever heard on a main character.
Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala (2016). A mix of hit and miss, with high production values and successful mechanics recalled from past Enigmatis chapters.
Grim Legends 3: The Dark City (2016). A real winner from Artifex Mundi, probably my favorite HOG to date - flexible, varied, interesting, and well put together.
Hero of the Kingdom (2012). An overland RPG played from an eye-in-the-sky perspective, and a HOG only by generous inclusion. Solid, with an unusual mix of game elements.
Infected: The Twin Vaccine - Collector’s Edition (2012). A bit daffy around the edges, but the art and setting are interesting and unusual, and it’s a pleasure to play.
Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials (2012). Full of personality and fun, a gleeful game based in historical fact and spiced with historical fiction.
Namariel Legends: Iron Lord Premium Edition (2013). Looks like a HOG, acts like a HOG, quacks like a HOG, but minus the actual hidden objects. Bold in style, with strong art and play that wears out its welcome too quickly.
Theatre of the Absurd (2012). Fun fluid art and a strongly-paced story keep things going well until the unfixed game-breaking bug. You can avoid the bug easily, but if you don’t know about it beforehand, well, there is suckage.