Jane Angel: Templar Mystery

Das Spiel ist ganz okay, die Rätsel sind abwechslungsreich und die HO teilweise schwer zu finden. Man kann es Spielen ist allerdings nichts sollte man nicht zu viel erwarten, Das letzte hexagonal game war für mich nicht zu lösen.

A hidden little gem for [I]hardcore[/I] fans of hidden-object games! There's no point-and-click adventuring here, the story is thin, and the English translation is riddled with errors, but the hidden-object scenes are innovative and satisfying.

As something of a hidden object hater, I was surprised to find myself kind of enjoying this one. I couldn’t really say it’s a great game even when I was having fun, but it does things that other hidden object games just… well… don’t. I was so glad to have different kinds of object searches: a panorama search, spot the difference/match the photographs, and searching across three photographs. I also liked the placement for a lot of the objects. Some of them were slapdash, as expected, but several were very cleverly hidden in sight, like a smiley face that’s made to look like [spoiler]some guy’s facial hair[/spoiler]. The timed challenge also made searches refreshingly hectic, while the object detection in the panorama puzzles made the more sinister placements a bit easier to find. The story is garbage, but I don’t really expect much from these games, and I had a blast reading the intelligible but obvious mistranslations. That said, can I really recommend this? The timed puzzles, while fun initially, just require you to retry the chapter or bonus levels if you fail. There are only so many objects in each photograph, so you’ll locate half of the objects from memory if you retry any of the levels. Any puzzle I retried felt only a fraction as enjoyable as it did the first time. Add in the object detection, hints, zero penalties for fast clicking, and non-hidden-object puzzles even easier than the main game, and this game makes a cakewalk feel like hot coals. Once the puzzles are finished, there’s really nothing interesting underneath. As much as I want HOG stories to be breezier and wackier and hate the point and click travel mechanics in Artifex Mundi’s games, those give a much better sense of narrative progression. This game doesn’t even have an ending, just a cliffhanger that I guess leads into Jane Angel 2, which looks nothing like this game. I wanted to give this game a thumbs up, to point and say “hey, HOG fandom, look what your games could be doing,” but this game isn’t really doing a lot more and isn’t doing it particularly well, and there are so many other areas in which this game is sloppier than the games they like. It’s mercifully short and satisfying in the moment, but it leaves you with nothing. I can’t imagine anything else his developer has made is any better. They either rebranded or got incorporated into a studio that released [b]29[/b] games on Steam in 2023. My search for a recommendable hidden object game continues… ...also, there are still those annoying little idiosyncrasies that pop up in these HOGs about how objects are labeled or categorized. Why is a Playstation-looking controller called a “joystick?” Why wouldn’t they have BOOTS in ye olden days??