Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek

I haven't played hidden object games in a while, and this reminded me why. Some objects can be extremely hard to find depending on your screen brightness and how close your face is to the screen, though thankfully the hint system was generous, and finding objects becomes easier whenever you return to previous sections, as the objects you've found previously are removed from the pile. Story is alright, leaves me wondering if the answers to the questions left by the ending are explained in the sequel games. Overall, a short game that should be bought during a sale

I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did. Been sitting on the game for years due to backlogs and the like, but after finally playing it I've discovered that it didn't quite meet my expectations. They should have called it [i]Enigmatis: Endless Backtracking Through Maple Creek.[/i] Because that is what a lot of your time is going to be spent doing, there is no method of going all the way back across the map outside of doing it manually and the way the game is set up you [i]will[/i] be doing this constantly. Need something at the boat house? Pretty sure it was in the chapel. Need something at ritual site? Revisit five locations. I lost count of how many times I had to return to the detective's guest room. A part of this is likely because they needed to set up at least one jumpscare, which definitely didn't make it worth the tedium. Speaking of the map, it's really tiresome to have to open my journal, go into the map to see what I might have missed, have to exit the map and then exit the journal again. Unless there is a map/full exit button I didn't see anywhere it got very annoying going through that every time I wanted to check my map. Which I did a lot of because it was frequently not obvious where you needed to go for something. Another issue I ran into was sometimes I would do things the the game is expecting me to do.. and nothing happens. I click on what is clearly a shell, it doesn't get collected/checked off. I click it again, nothing. I come back to it a bit later.. finally it works. Same issue with evidence being placed on the wall; I'll place a piece where it seems like it should go a couple times and nothing happens. Later on I'm trying and again and now it magically works, as though I didn't try it on the [i]exact[/i] pixel it wanted or something. The final thing that got me is how the end ends, because I went through that cliffhanger nonsense with Time Mysteries and couldn't stand it but here we are all over again. And talk about a [b]downer[/b] story, I own Enigmatis 2 and I'm not entirely sure if I want to bother with it. [spoiler]There is so much death and the bad guy gets away,[/spoiler] it left me feel so unsatisfied when I finished, especially with that bonus case. Ultimately, if you love point & click games and don't mind some janky issues from age, I think you would probably enjoy Enigmatis. However, I would certainly not recommend it to myself. The hidden object scenes are pretty decent, even if a few words are [i]misleading[/i] such as cone = pinecone, and the puzzles weren't too tricky. Like I said, I wish I could say I liked it better than I did.